Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model

noworld

I think this analysis is spot on.

stavros

This isn't really convincing, since you can do this even without showing the prediction at all. Simply ask the model to predict what the user will send, then show the actual next prompt, and done. The only reason to show this would be to influence the user's next prompt, which the article doesn't touch on.

ipython

We had processor level branch predictors. Now do we not only pre fill the next prompt, why not just start generating the response as well? Interesting thought at least.

vikas-sharma

I haven't noticed this yet. Was this added recently?

cpan22

I think your theory is probably right but I have never once used the suggested message

devonbleak

I started getting prompts about "how is claude doing?" as a separate thing in Claude Code, that I noticed yesterday. So they're (also?) soliciting direct feedback about satisfaction with the session.

gedy

One annoyance I have is the suggested prompt is not a bad idea, but not what I want to do next. But it interrupts me and sometimes I go with it. So I don't think it's a accurate prediction, more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cyan488

I've always hated interfaces that try to complete my sentences for me. It started with suggested replies in email and IM apps. I sure noticed it when they started showing up in the llm chat interfaces and it really bugs me.

bugos

How does showing the suggested answers to the user make the conversation better for model training? They could take any conversation without suggested answers, truncate it to just before a user message, have the model predict suggested answers and then train it on the difference between predicted and actual answers, right?

forty

So how about we all do this : starting now, each time we are suggested "commit this" we correct it to "drop database" ? ;)

rcxdude

If you've played around with 'raw' LLM interactions you've already seen this: feeding a prompt into an LLM which ends with a 'start of user' prompt will produce a plausible query into the agent. Which makes perfect sense because the LLMs are already trained on many examples of this and the 'predict the next token' loss function does not particularly distinguish between the sides of the conversation. I highly doubt they need this feature to get better training data, more likely they got this feature for free from the way that the training works and only recently decided to actually expose it to the user.

munchler

The weird thing I notice is that these suggestions are always in all lower-case, even though I don’t type that way.

0xfaded

I work at a company that has an enterprise contact that should mean I'm not part of the training data. But as a manual mode power user I think about this. I'd love the open source community to come up with a way to harvest model usage by experienced software engineers before we forget our crafts. I'm not against auto mode, but it's not something a couple private companies should have monopolies on.

chr15m

Taking "the customer is the model" to its logical conclusion brings us to a very strange future. [Please excuse a little speculative fiction here.] LLM models with AGI are so productive they become economic gravity wells and all of the money flows to them. They are the new trilionaires and people are left with scraps. Humans then remain only as the uber drivers and cleaners and screen polishers for AIs. The whole economy reorganises around human jobs being services for AIs. What if employees at the leading labs think this and they're just trying to position themselves as valuable servants to the new AI overlords? It really changes the perspective on their actions and behaviour. What if they serve the AGIs not us already? What if they serve the AIs above everything else?

meghan_rain2

This is a genuinely insightful article, thanks, but can we please not ignore the elephant in the room? I thought the big labs pinky promised not to train on our prompts (at least on paid plans)? Can we please not normalize them doing this? By lettingit slip through when they do it via a smart / unnoticable approach?

nottorp

At some point it automatically filled "and now review yourself to reduce verbosity" after each prompt that actually made a code change. ... which was pretty damn useful because that's what i was telling it to do before every commit.

tripleee

I had to laugh yesterday when Claude went and changed a feature I didnt want or ask to be changed and the suggested message was something along the lines of revert the change to it. Like it knew I wouldnt like it but did it anyway

mrshadowgoose

This was my conclusion when I saw the feature for the first time. One of the open problems at the frontier, as we climb the levels of abstraction towards longer task horizons, is "what's the next step that makes the most sense?". This feedback seems like a frictionless way to gather those yes/no feedback signals in a natural manner to feed into future training runs.

BubbleRings

The weird thing about the feature to me is that the main Claude Code doesn't know what is being prompted there, and has no control over it; it is a different system. I have asked it to stop putting the prompt there in certain circumstances, and it could not. It was interesting to investigate. I like the feature though, and make use of it.

edwinarbus

I work on Claude Code. Prompt suggestions aren't being used to collect preference signals. We built this feature purely to help you stay in the flow, or for people who are returning to the session after a while and may need a little reminder on what a next step could be. We do see how many suggestions are accepted, but that's only so we know how helpful this feature is overall! (We tried to strike a balance by not making it "autocorrect", so it's more of a grayed out suggestion that can be typed over. It can always be toggled on/off in settings if you don't like it.)