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> It was silly yet satisfying when Claude (the PR reviewer) agreed the change looked good and was ready to merge.

> "Approved - Ship It!” and ‘Great work on this!”

This pat on the head from an algorithm gives me the creeps, and I'm really struggling to put my finger on why.

Maybe it's because it's emulated approval, yet generating real feelings of pleasure in the author?



It's especially hilarious because ime, when it's drifting into this mode of constantly saying "production ready, ready to merge, ready to ship", the code it's producing is usually in a complete downward spiral - likely because it's no longer able to reason about the effect the "one little change" will have on the rest of the application.

Ive come to just terminate the session if a phrase like that turns up

Tbf to Nadia however, her comment supposedly came from the "code reviewer" agent? So the prompt might've explicitly asked it to make this statement and would (hopefully) not be reusing the context of the development (and neither the other way)


OP here (Nadia). Yes, in my case I was specifically asking for it to act as a code reviewer and make comments and a recommendation on whether to merge the PR with my changed into our main branch. This just happened to be the response.

I feel like Claude specifically uses language in what seems like a more playful way. I notice this also when instead of just a loader there are things like “Baking… Percolating…” etc.

I do get the ick if it feels like the agent is trying to be too “human” but in this case I just thought it was funny language for a response to my ask specifically to play a PR reviewer role.

Claude in reviewer mode also had a funny (at least to me) comment about it being interesting that Claude put itself as a PR contributor. I think in the screenshot in my blog post (if it got cutoff for others let me know and I can fix), but not called out in the text.


It should open a little door in the side of your computer and drop a little piece of kibble to you.

"Good boy! Good PR!"


Haha that’s too Pavlovian for me! I prefer to self-manage little treats once done with my Claude time :)




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