DEV Community

RES, my personal safeguard against AI

Thomas Bnt on July 16, 2026

The Problem The more I use AI in my daily life, the longer my conversations get. And the longer a conversation goes on, the greater the ...
Collapse
 
francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

Interesting..

Collapse
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

Thanks! What is your best approach for IA?

Collapse
 
francistrdev profile image
FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ (っ◔◡◔)っ

I brute force it. Sometimes when I want to get something done quickly, I would put it in bold "DO NOT CHANGE THE FUNCTIONALITY. KEEP AS IS" because sometimes it will achieve the result but will change other code that is no relevance to the task I give it.

Thread Thread
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

Ahahaah that a good solution!

Collapse
 
kai_seeha_4679478f311776e profile image
Kai Seeha

Hi, Thomas!
This is Kai and software engineer.
I am really happy to discuss anything with you.
Thank you.

Collapse
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

Hello Kai! Discuss about IA?

Collapse
 
kai_seeha_4679478f311776e profile image
Kai Seeha • Edited

AI is good now. Are you a software engineer?

Thread Thread
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

AI is not the best good tool. I'm a software engineer yes

Thread Thread
 
kai_seeha_4679478f311776e profile image
Kai Seeha

Good. I am a software engineer, too.
What is your current location?

Collapse
 
ldrscke profile image
Christian Ledermann

🐥 -would be my choice for a 'canary token' ;-)

Collapse
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

Ohh yess! 🐥🐥🐥

Collapse
 
keithatpda profile image
Keith

Thomas I must admit to waiting till gem pro UI starts to wobble a bit, do you think yr idea will be an indication prior to the UI starting to crash? I do get fantastic results on complex logic stuff. (A retired engineering tech, now able to produce controller code with AI as typist)

Collapse
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

Hello! I don't know, I'm only on Claude AI.

Collapse
 
mudassirworks profile image
Mudassir Khan

The canary comparison is exact and the mechanism is worth naming. What happens in long conversations is roughly the lost in the middle attention problem: models give less weight to instructions that drift into the middle of a long context window as new messages pile in from the end. Your RES token effectively measures that drift. In production agentic pipelines we handle it by periodically reinserting a compressed system prompt summary rather than trusting initial instructions to stay effective for the full conversation. The canary still matters alongside that because prompt reinsertion has token cost and you want to know when it was actually needed. Have you noticed the word disappearing more in code generation threads than in back and forth discussion?

Collapse
 
thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

No, my text almost never disappears, at least not recently.