More improvements to the mindspace UI styling, solving splitter constraints, and observations about LLM behavior patterns in engineering solutions.
Improving mindspace styling
A couple of weeks ago I redid all the Qt style sheet handling for the various tabs. I decided to do the same for the mindspace view as that helps keep things consistent.
Mostly this was pretty straightforward, apart from the collapsible header. For some reason this didn't auto-style and so was ignoring the style sheet. It required the call to setAttribute in this code fragment to resolve it.
super().__init__(parent)
self.setObjectName("MindspaceCollapsibleHeader")
self.setAttribute(Qt.WidgetAttribute.WA_StyledBackground, True)
self._style_manager = StyleManager()Once resolved, this was another 100 line net reduction in code, for improved functionality!
Splitter problems
One interesting problem I'd faced was having the splitter view for the mindspace follow some interesting constraints. The challenge was handling the headers associated with the conversations and files views. Left alone, Qt's layout engine doesn't let you collapse just one widget in a QVBoxLayout when you shrink the vbox smaller than the smaller of the two widgets (the header).
To solve this I had to make the minimum size for an expanded widget more than 2x the size of the header, but if the widget was unexpanded then use a fixed height of the header. This use of a fixed height was necessary to stop the splitter from expanding the size of the header widget - effectively it locks the splitter in place.
This was not something Claude was able to come up with. Claude had suggested 5 or 6 alternative approaches that were a lot more complex, and didn't actually work. Just before I came up with this approach it did suggest subclassing the QSplitter class, which would probably have worked but would have been a lot more code.
Changing mindspace click/double-click handling
The current model of single and double clicks doing different things is just deeply confusing. I've removed it. Single clicks now open a file in the default way but with an ephemeral tab. Double clicks now open the same view but with a non-ephemeral tab.
To replace the previous functionality there are now additional context menu items.
Claude "locally" engineering things again
One of the quirks I've seen with some LLMs is a tendency to "locally" engineer solutions to problems. As I used Claude Sonnet 4 the most, I see it most with Claude.
The problem is even if you give an LLM all the context it needs, it will often assume it's not seeing everything unless you're very clear that you've given it absolutely everything. This sometimes results in strange local optimizations, where the LLM builds new functions rather than modifying other ones that handle a capability already.
I saw another example today where it tried to make a local styling change to a widget even though that widget was clearly styled elsewhere. It then "fixed" this by moving the styling but creating a much more complex series of signals. Third time around (and with some nudging) it did a trivial property update that was a lot smaller than either of the other designs.
This tendency to "fix" problems via locally-optimized solutions eventually makes code unmaintainable, but I've not yet got an approach that stops this other than reviewing and critiquing fixes. I wonder if there's an LLM persona that could do this effectively?
Blog post on LLM security issues
This one caught my attention - an interesting read on threats posed by many LLM tools: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-coding-agents-security-nightmare