The User Is Visibly Frustrated

croes 24 points 4 comments May 26, 2026
pscanf.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (4 comments)

em-bee

behaving like a human is not the problem. behaving unpredictably is. not doing what i expect, or rather not being able to define what i can expect is what's bothering me. but the real kicker is: getting frustrated creates stress, that's unhealthy and makes for a hostile work environment. as much as i sympathize with the idea that AI tools can be more helpful than they cause pain, i am simply not interested in working in a hostile painful work environment. my health and my dignity are not up for negotiation. even if that costs me a lot of job opportunities. that's also why i am not working with windows. that too costs me a lot of job opportunities. but again, i'd rather keep my dignity and my sanity.

bad_username

> furiously hammering on my laptop “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO???”. The recipient of these tirades is, you might have guessed, a coding agent. It’s completely pointless, I know. I believe it's worth than pointless. IMO adding such things to the context "configures" the AI to reproduce the statistics of conversations where people swore, shouted, and were unprofessional (despite the alignment runing and all that), where quality content is rarer to find. So this is bound to decrease the quality of the LLM output.

wcoenen

The UX problem is elsewhere I think. Many users probably don't realize that the agent's context window is limited, and that clever compaction is happening regularly to make it seem infinite. But that necessarily means the agent has to forget stuff. As a result, users will keep reusing the same coding or chat session again and again. While it would be better to start fresh for unrelated tasks.

eahm

Oh now I get it, it's an Italian thing. "Why the fuck did you add shit I didn't ask for?" or lol "Do as I ask, nothing more.. machine." "Stop asking at the end, I'll ask what I need." "Stop talking like you're human." They can be very useful but it takes time to learn how to use them usefully. From what I learned it's all or mostly stuff you can already do but you can use an LLM to do it in 30 mins instead of 3 days. Fun times.

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