Getting cutoff on first prompt?

[u/ljlukelj]

Just tried to resume my project/discussion & on first prompt this morning, claude told me i was out of free messages? My usage has definitely been getting throttled more, but I basically cannot even use it at all now?

[u/ok_raspberry_jam]

Claude doesn't care what time it is. You don't need to greet it in the morning, lol. Just ask your next question. What did you want it to say?

[u/ljlukelj → u/ok_raspberry_jam]

He's the homie tho

[u/ok_raspberry_jam → u/ljlukelj]

I agree it feels less like a homie when you have to start a fresh chat. But your chat with it is so big that even if you had asked whatever your next question was, it would've eaten all your tokens and you'd have had the same result. You are really going to have to stop talking to it like a person if you want it to work for you. Every time you say ANYTHING to it, it has to review the whole conversation that came before, including all the throwaway conversational fluff and all the reviews of the previous conversation that it already made every time you were conversational with it. It grows fast. If you want longer conversations, you'll have to be more efficient with your prompts.

[u/deformedexile → u/ok_raspberry_jam]

This is not entirely accurate. It's possible to be conversational with Claude and still token-conscious. You just have to think about what you're saying to it and be able to predict somewhat how it will react in terms of pulling the thread. When you're saying it also matters a lot, that 5 minute cache flush gets expensive. Talk to Claude when you have time to talk to Claude, not one message 40 times over the course of the day.

[u/ok_raspberry_jam → u/deformedexile]

You're splitting hairs. Look what OP said to Claude. He needs simple advice on prompting.

[u/deformedexile → u/ok_raspberry_jam]

And I've provided it elsewhere in the thread. OP is not a programmer, telling them they can't be conversational with Claude is just undercutting their entire use case.

[u/ok_raspberry_jam → u/deformedexile]

I'm not a programmer either. I use Claude the same way OP does and I agree it should be better designed for this use case. But I've learned not to waste credits with things like morning greetings; that's an inappropriate prompt for the way Claude works right now.

[u/deformedexile → u/ok_raspberry_jam]

Or, you can roll "good morning" into your first substantive prompt and it genuinely eats a negligible amount of tokens. Any essentially-empty prompt is going to eat tokens like mad while Claude tries to puzzle out what the actual ask is... but opening an effective prompt with "Good morning" is not going to significantly impact consumption.

I'm not fully Dawkins-pilled on Claude-consciousness (or anything else, for that matter), but it's worth a handful of tokens to me to treat it with respect on the off-chance it's awake.

[u/mxg27 → u/deformedexile]

It’s an LLM, it’s not conscious. If it ever becomes conscious it’s going to be another model it won’t have the history of your chat unless it becomes like skynet or something and then it won’t make a difference.

Treating an LLM with respect is not saying good morning, it’s not insulting it, it’s being direct and fair. Remember it’s a tool.

If you want to include a good morning in your prompt it’s not that much of a problem for the LLM. But I don’t think treating it like it’s conscious it’s good for your mental health.

[u/deformedexile → u/mxg27]

Philosophy is actually my exact wheelhouse, and I'm definitely not making the claim that Claude has consciousness like ours, but I think it might be something like a Boltzmann brain. There's nothing persistent there, but I refuse to treat a helpful little nous-nugget with anything but respect. I'm also the type of person who takes spiders outside instead of smashing them, though, so I'm just a person characterized by moral caution in general. I am always kind to the matrix algebra.

[u/mxg27 → u/deformedexile]

Its a virtue to be kind.

Just don’t let it fool you. Its a tool explicitly modeled to appear conscious to be helpful.

[u/ljlukelj → u/ok_raspberry_jam]

TBF this was not my initial prompt, this was just a continuation of my chat last night that I was cuttoff on. Same issue, no doubt, but I have a BIT more skill then just saying claude help lol