News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates. Parent comment

Re:Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks wit... by thesz on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @02:20AM (#47686079) 

  > I think over-thinking is only solved by thinking more, not less.
Despite "thinking" tokens being determined by the preceding tokens, they still are taken from some probability distribution, just a complex one. This means that at each token selection step there is a probability P_e of an error, of selecting a wrong token.

These errors compound exponentially: the probability of not selecting wrong token for N steps is 1-(1-P_e)^N.

The shorter "thinking" is, the less is the probability of it going astray.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks wit... by richardjennings on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @07:02AM (#47688504)
> The shorter "thinking" is, the less is the probability of it going astray

As long as the error introduced by more steps is less than the compounding error of sub-optimal token sampling, I would expect a better result.

I think your choice of "wrong" is extreme, suggesting such a token can catastrophically spoil the result. The modern reality is more that the model is able to recover.

[ Parent | on HN ]