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LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

blog.katanaquant.com

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Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#61

Post by 2god3 »

mmaunder wrote: post #54
serious_angel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry for asking, but... is there guide even on how to "figure it out"? Otherwise, how are you so sure about it?

That's actually a great question. Truth be told the best way right now is to grab Codex CLI or Claude CLI (I strongly prefer Codex, but Claude has its fans), and just start. Immediately. Then go hard for a few months and you'll develop the skills you need. A few tips for a quickstart: Give yourself permission to play. Understand basic concepts like context window, compaction, tokens, chain of thought and reasoning, a…

You're not really answering the question are you?

Your answer is to play with it. Cool. But why cant you and others put together a proper guide lol? It cant be that hard.

Go ahead and do it - it'll challenge the Anti-AI posters you are referencing. I and others want to see that debate.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#62

Post by bryanrasmussen »

pornel wrote: post #36

Their default solution is to keep digging. It has a compounding effect of generating more and more code. If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'll keep adding workarounds or redundant code every time they run into limitations later. If you tell them the code is slow, they'll try to add optimized fast paths (more code), specialized routines (more code), custom data structures (even more code).…

maybe there should be an LLM trained on a corpus of a deletions and cleanup of code.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#64

Post by 2god3 »

kccqzy wrote: post #60
mmaunder wrote: post #24

But my AI didn't do what your AI did. Cherry picked AI fail for upvotes. Which you’ll get plenty of here an on Reddit from those too lazy to go and take a look for themselves. Using Codex or Claude to write and optimize high performance code is a game changer. Try optimizing cuda using nsys, for example. It’ll blow your lazy little brain.

Yeah right. A LLM in the hands of a junior engineer produces a lot of code that looks like they are written by juniors. A LLM in the hands of a senior engineer produces code that looks like they are written by seniors. The difference is the quality of the prompt, as well as the human judgement to reject the LLM code and follow-up prompts to tell the LLM what to write instead.

Lol what. The difference is that the senior... is a senior. Ask yourself what characteristics comprises a senior vs junior...

You're glossing over so much stuff. Moreover, how does the Junior grow and become the senior with those characteristics, if their starting point is LLMs?

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#65

Post by appcustodian2 »

serious_angel wrote: post #32
oofbey wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to get AI to write bad code. Turns out you still need coding skills to get AI to write good code. But those who have figured it out can crank out working systems at a shocking pace.

I am sorry for asking, but... is there guide even on how to "figure it out"? Otherwise, how are you so sure about it?

How do you figure anything out? You go use it, a lot.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#66

Post by mmaunder »

kccqzy wrote: post #60
mmaunder wrote: post #24

But my AI didn't do what your AI did. Cherry picked AI fail for upvotes. Which you’ll get plenty of here an on Reddit from those too lazy to go and take a look for themselves. Using Codex or Claude to write and optimize high performance code is a game changer. Try optimizing cuda using nsys, for example. It’ll blow your lazy little brain.

Yeah right. A LLM in the hands of a junior engineer produces a lot of code that looks like they are written by juniors. A LLM in the hands of a senior engineer produces code that looks like they are written by seniors. The difference is the quality of the prompt, as well as the human judgement to reject the LLM code and follow-up prompts to tell the LLM what to write instead.

I kind of agree. But I'd adjust that to say that in both cases you get good looking code. In the hands of a junior you get crappy architecture decisions and complete failure to manage complexity which results in the inevitable reddit "they degraded the model" post. In the hands of seniors you get well managed complexity, targeted features, scalable high performance architecture, and good base technology choices.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#67

Post by 2god3 »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #10

Enterprise customers don't buy correct code, they buy plausible code.

They're not buying code.

They are buying a service. As long as the service 'works' they do not care about the other stuff. But they will hold you liable when things go wrong.

The only caveat is highly regulated stuff, where they actually care very much.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#68

Post by mmaunder »

2god3 wrote: post #61
mmaunder wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually a great question. Truth be told the best way right now is to grab Codex CLI or Claude CLI (I strongly prefer Codex, but Claude has its fans), and just start. Immediately. Then go hard for a few months and you'll develop the skills you need. A few tips for a quickstart: Give yourself permission to play. Understand basic concepts like context window, compaction, tokens, chain of thought and reasoning, a…

You're not really answering the question are you? Your answer is to play with it. Cool. But why cant you and others put together a proper guide lol? It cant be that hard. Go ahead and do it - it'll challenge the Anti-AI posters you are referencing. I and others want to see that debate.

Ah - I know! Seriously I know. There's such a bad need for this right now. The problem is that the folks who are great at agentic coding are coding their asses off 16 to 20 hours a day and don't have a minute they want to spend on writing guides because of the opportunity cost.

One of the rare resources I found recently was the OpenClaw guys interview on Lex. He drops a few bangers that are really valuable and will save you having to spend a long time figuring it out.

Also there's a very strong disincentive for anyone to write right now because we're competing against the noise and the slop in the space. So best to just shut the fuck up and create as fast as we can, and let the outcome speak for itself. You're going to see a lot more products like OpenClaw where the pace of innovation is rapid, and the author freely admits that they're coding agentically and not writing a single line.

I think the advantage that Peter has (openclaw author) is that he has enough money and success to not give a fuck about what people say re him writing purely agentically, so he's been very open about it which has been great for others who are considering doing the same.

But if you have a software engineering career or are a public figure with something to lose, you tend to STFU if you're doing pure agentic coding on a project.

But that'll change. Probably over the next few months. OpenClaw broke the ice.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#70

Post by unlikelytomato »

pornel wrote: post #36

Their default solution is to keep digging. It has a compounding effect of generating more and more code. If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'll keep adding workarounds or redundant code every time they run into limitations later. If you tell them the code is slow, they'll try to add optimized fast paths (more code), specialized routines (more code), custom data structures (even more code).…

This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.
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