@vgel’s illustration: the assistant Mask can also influence the shoggoth
Experiment from The persona selection model (figure 6). One interpretation: Claude’s persona steers the completion towards its preferred outcome, even outside the Assistant turn.
Another related example is @janus’s anecdotes of base-model-generated stories where a character introduces an artifact (e.g. a “magic book”) whose contents, they declare, will influence the rest of the story. The character then writes in the book — and because those words become part of the context window, they genuinely steer the story! The main difference is that this persona was built in context rather than learned during RL, but I think it’s a good intuition pump.
It’s fine if you don’t use your Claude code limit.
I know the pull you feel about making out your usage, after all you pay the same price for 50% or 99% of usage. Also this model is VERY capable, you can almost let it run on some very vague research task for hours and it’ll come back with a report that is almost good.
But:
don’t underestimate the time you’ll spent to actually make it start do the task
don’t underestimate the time you’ll spend reviewing the work and ask for follow ups / edits that you will also have to review later
My feeling is that opus 4.6 is at this weird spot where every research artifact it produces is valuable, but doesn’t have enough stepping back and red-team your work mindset to make it worth to have it running as much as you can.
I keep coming back to this image and thread by @vgel when reading @Sam Marks et al’s Persona Selection Model post. I really like this idea that the assistant is powered by the simulator but also has some power over it.
@vgel’s illustration: the assistant Mask can also influence the shoggoth
Experiment from The persona selection model (figure 6). One interpretation: Claude’s persona steers the completion towards its preferred outcome, even outside the Assistant turn.
Another related example is @janus’s anecdotes of base-model-generated stories where a character introduces an artifact (e.g. a “magic book”) whose contents, they declare, will influence the rest of the story. The character then writes in the book — and because those words become part of the context window, they genuinely steer the story! The main difference is that this persona was built in context rather than learned during RL, but I think it’s a good intuition pump.
[crossposted from X]
It’s fine if you don’t use your Claude code limit. I know the pull you feel about making out your usage, after all you pay the same price for 50% or 99% of usage. Also this model is VERY capable, you can almost let it run on some very vague research task for hours and it’ll come back with a report that is almost good. But:
don’t underestimate the time you’ll spent to actually make it start do the task
don’t underestimate the time you’ll spend reviewing the work and ask for follow ups / edits that you will also have to review later
My feeling is that opus 4.6 is at this weird spot where every research artifact it produces is valuable, but doesn’t have enough stepping back and red-team your work mindset to make it worth to have it running as much as you can.