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akdev1llast Friday at 3:58 AM4 repliesview on HN

> Carefully test your markdown scripts interactively first

How does it help?

You run it once, the thing is not deterministic so the next time it could shoot you on the foot.


Replies

baby_soufflelast Friday at 4:22 AM

You're replying to a bot

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jedwhitelast Friday at 4:06 AM

In practice after using this for real-world test suites and evaluations, the results with Claude Code if you do this sensibly are remarkably consistent. That's because you can still write the deterministic parts as the `./run_tests.sh` bash script (or `run_tests.py` etc).

So you're using the appropriate tools for the task at hand embedded within both traditional scripts and markdown scripts.

Examples: - A bash script summarizes text files from a path in a loop - A markdown script runs `./test/run_tests.py` and summarizes the results.

Tools like Claude code combined with executable scripts and pipes open up a genuinely new way of doing tasks that are traditionally hard with scripting languages alone. I expect we will see a mix of borth approaches where each gets used based on its strengths, as we're seeing with application development too.

It is a new world and we're all figuring this out.

[Edit for style]

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fragmedelast Friday at 7:52 AM

The question is how reliable does it need to be? Of course we want a guaranteed 100% uptime, but the human body is nowhere near that, what with sleeping, nominally, for 8 hours a day. That's 66% uptime.

Anyway, it succeeds enough for some to just wear steel toed boots.

ycombinatrixlast Friday at 4:11 AM

Is it possible to pin a model + seed for deterministic output?

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