LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

So in my experience with Opus 4.6 evaluating it in an existing code base has gone like this.

You say "Do this thing".

- It does the thing (takes 15 min). Looks incredibly fast. I couldn't code that fast. It's inhuman. So far all the fantastical claims hold up.

But still. You ask "Did you do the thing?"

- it says oops I forgot to do that sub-thing. (+5m)

- it fixes the sub-thing (+10m)

You say is the change well integrated with the system?

- It says not really, let me rehash this a bit. (+5m)

- It irons out the wrinkles (+10m)

You say does this follow best engineering practices, is it good code, something we can be proud of?

- It says not really, here are some improvements. (+5m)

- It implements the best practices (+15m)

You say to look carefully at the change set and see if it can spot any potential bugs or issues.

- It says oh, I've introduced a race condition at line 35 in file foo and an null correctness bug at line 180 of file bar. Fixing. (+15m)

You ask if there's test coverage for these latest fixes?

- It says "i forgor" and adds them. (+15m)

Now the change set has shrunk a bit and is superficially looking good. Still, you must read the code line by line, and with an experienced eye will still find weird stuff happening in several of the functions, there's redundant operations, resources aren't always freed up. (60m)

You ask why it's implemented in such a roundabout way and how it intends for the resources to be freed up?

- It says "you're absolutely right" and rewrites the functions. (+15m)

You ask if there's test coverage for these latest fixes?

- It says "i forgor" and adds them. (+15m)

Now the 15 minutes of amazingly fast AI code gen has ballooned into taking most of the afternoon.

Telling Claude to be diligent, not write bugs, or to write high quality code flat out does not work. And even if such prompting can reduce the odds of omissions or lapses, you still always always always have to check the output. It can not find all the bugs and mistakes on its own. If there are bugs in its training data, you can assume there will be bugs in its output.

(You can make it run through much of this Socratic checklist on its own, but this doesn't really save wall clock time, and doesn't remove the need for manual checking.)

Yes, this is exactly the experience I have had with LLMs as a non-programmer trying to make code. When it gets too deep into the weeds I have to ask it to get back a few steps.

>As someone who leads a team of engineers, telling someone their code is slow is not nice, helpful or something a good team member should do

right, I'm sure there are all sorts of scenarios where that is the case and probably the phrasing would be something like that seems slow, or it seems to be taking longer than expected or some other phrasing that is actually synonymous with the code is slow. On the other hand there are also people that you can say the code is slow to, and they won't worry about it.

>So no that’s not the proper way to talk to humans

In my experience there are lots of proper ways to talk to humans, and part of the propriety is involved with what your relationship with them is. so it may be the proper way to talk to a subset of humans, which is generally the only kinds of humans one talks to - a subset. I certainly have friends that I have worked to for a long time who can say "what the fuck were you thinking here" or all sorts of things that would not be nice if it came from other people but is in fact a signifier of our closeness that we can talk in such a way. Evidently you have never led a team with people who enjoyed that relationship between them, which I think is a shame.

Finally, I'll note that when I hear a generalized description of a form of interaction I tend to give what used to be called "the benefit of a doubt" and assume that, because of the vagaries of human language and the necessity of keeping things not a big long harangue as every communication must otherwise become in order to make sure all bases of potential speech are covered, that the generalized description may in fact cover all potential forms of polite interaction in that kind of interaction, otherwise I should have to spend an inordinate amount of my time lecturing people I don't know on what moral probity in communication requires.

But hey, to each their own.

on edit: "the what the fuck were you thinking here" quote is also an example of a generalized form of communication that would be rude coming from other people but was absolutely fine given the source, and not an exact quote despite the use of quotation marks in the example.

I feel like there's two types of LLM users. Those that understand it's limitations, and those that ask it to solve a millennium problem on the first try.

As an additional wrinkle, the word seems quite French in origin in this case.