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The Motte is very very slow

Is it just me or lately The Motte has been getting very slow to load and occasionally timing out?

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I write lots of tests at work, and it's all incredibly domain-specific and trying to use LLMs for it just leads to laughably incorrect test expectations. Hence why I have trouble imagining it just working out of the box.

I don't know what you've tried, but:

  • Claude is probably the best-integrated system out there; use the commandline tool because it's able to go research your codebase on its own.
  • Make it a CLAUDE.md with general architecture. It can make a CLAUDE.md for you with the /init command, but read over it by hand to make sure it's right.
  • Make sure thinking is enabled (hit "tab"). If you're asking it to do a really hard thing, use the "ultrathink" keyword, which will give it more space to think.
  • If you have reference tests to use as a model, point it at those. Telling it something like "read existing tests and use the same general style" can help a lot; if you can be more specific, do so.
  • Ask it to run the tests and fix problems.
  • Expect the occasional mistake. Review its code.

Makes sense, I think it all comes down to the corpus of public information available. If similar work can be scraped from one of the half billion repos on github its probably great, otherwise it likely isn't. Most of my work is either web stuff, infra as code, or business logic governed by public policy (rather than internal rules) so it's pretty ideal.

I imagine it would be significantly worse if I were still in global finance, but we often had the same issue as the LLMs. Lack of information and often having to switch tasks while we wait a week for a request for some bespoke implementation details to go up the chain, over to IBM, and back.