Mastodon Feed: Post

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@lina/116779058863273132

If anyone wants to prevent LLM contributions, it seems like symlinking CLAUDE.md to /dev/urandom might do the trick: by default, claude code unconditionally reads CLAUDE.md if it is present in the repository root. The reading function checks if the files to load are block devices among a few other things, but does not mind at all if they are symlinks in general, including directory traversal to anywhere.

There are ways to run claude without reading CLAUDE.md, but they require manual intervention, and startup stalls before any of the "try whatever" self healing attempts of the LLM kick in. indeed there is no indication why startup stalls in stdout or debug logs: nothing for an external "agent" harness to diagnose either.

I have not confirmed this part: but it looks like the file read tool checks if a path is a system path like /dev/urandom, but it only checks the string of the path without expanding symlinks. Many of the tool and agent prompt texts say to read CLAUDE.md first, bypassing any config settings that would prevent that since it happens in LLM modality not program modality. so even if you do get it booted up, you would likely get inexplicable stalls at any point those tools/agents are invoked.