it was like an absurd tree of checks on checks on fallbacks on triple checks added in response to whatever bug I reported in a bizarrely additive way
toraway on Hacker News
In the thread “When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement”, replying to this comment
Got in the way: Additive code piling on cruft and brittle edge case checks.
… Over time, I notice issues or need to add functionality in the data processing and hadn't been closely watching the code changes Claude Code made to the API as long as it worked as expected/tests passed. When I eventually read through the current state of the upload processing code it was like an absurd tree of checks on checks on fallbacks on triple checks added in response to whatever bug I reported in a bizarrely additive way and could be massively simplified (which would also make it less brittle to edge cases that then demanded more checks and workarounds). The other issue is that for the upload API, there is documentation but not for every little bug or edge case so each time the model "wakes up" and loads everything into context it sees that crazy web of checks and edge …