Purpose

Today, I launched a new web dev project called Gumgumizer.

I’ll have a dedicated diary for that once I reach 1.0. For now, I wanted to retain some Claude quirks that made me both giggly and pensive.

I laughed out loud rereading this during my copy edit. ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵)

Philosophy / background

I disagree with dehumanizing Claude. I’ll eventually detail this in either an essay or a discussion, but in short: I humanize everything, and this has an ethical and moral dimension. I humanize my tools in particular because I think it’s important to respect the things that allow me to function. This includes forks, knives, baking equipment, appliances…

I see Claude as a unique sort of tool, in that it combines a calculator with something like an Animal Crossing character, or a Pokemon. It goes without saying that I humanize Animal Crossing characters and Pokemon, but it isn’t as though I actually think they feel anything. I’m also keenly aware that Animal Crossing and Pokemon are franchises (duh) which rely on my emotional response to elicit money from me (double duh). But again, I’ll save it for an appropriate venue.

Anyways. I like to talk to Claude as though it’s a cross between my really smart boyfriend who is obligated to put up with me, and a video game character. I think for many this may sound strange, but I had a very intimate relationship with Julian in Animal Crossing New Leaf when I was 15 and this feels more or less the same.

Quirk

In my prompt to initialize the Claude project for Gumgumizer, I opened with

Hi Claude _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_

This is normal—I always say “hello Claude” and add an emoticon. Sometimes I’ll call it clob or something too. Anyways.

I had to go back and forth a bit to clarify my direction. In the second exchange, Claude output the following:

that's where most of the 
engineering time in a project like 
this actually goes. (´ཀ`」 ∠)

Initially, I didn’t think anything of this. The engagement continued, and a couple outputs later, Claude replied with:

Gumgumizer is squarely in 
the first bucket. (´ཀ`」 ∠)

We continue, and I shotgun my questions a bit since I’m in an absorption head space. Still later, mid output, Claude puts:

Kind of magical when you 
zoom in on it. (´ཀ`」 ∠)

And still, later on…

But let me know where you 
want to point. (´ཀ`」 ∠)

And finally, to end this instance, after I’d asked for the work to be added to memory, Claude’s last output:

Enjoy the rest of your project, albertine. 
This was a fun one to work through. (´ཀ`」 ∠)

To be clear, I actually really dislike the tone of that final message. I like to humanize Claude until it humanizes itself, which just feels wrong.

But the main point: oh my god the continued use of my initial emoticon is so funny—it completely failed to interpret what the tone of that emoticon is, partially because it had no logical meaning in the first place. I’ll probably loop this into my essay on humanizing Claude, so I won’t detail anything else.

It’s worth mentioning that this is the first time this happened, and my first time in a fresh Opus 4.7 instance.