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Less human AI agents, please
11–20 of 184 posts
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#12A very human thing to do is - not to tell us which model has failed like this! They are not all alike, some are, what I observe, order of magnitude better at this kind of stuff than others.
I believe how "neurotypical" (for the lack of a better word) you want model to be is a design choice. (But I also believe model traits such as sycophancy, some hallucinations or moral transgressions can be a side effect of training to be subservient. With humans it is similar, they tend to do these things when they are forced to perform.)
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#13Your claim, paraphrased, is that AGI is already here and you want ASI
On point. I'm more interested in what comes after LLMs/AI/AI-agents, what the next leap is.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#14A very human thing to do is - not to tell us which model has failed like this! They are not all alike, some are, what I observe, order of magnitude better at this kind of stuff than others. I believe how "neurotypical" (for the lack of a better word) you want model to be is a design choice. (But I also believe model traits such as sycophancy, some hallucinations or moral transgressions can be a side effect of trainin…
Codex in this case. I didn't even think about mentioning it. I'll update the post if it's actually relevant. Which I guess it is.
EDIT: It's specifically GPT-5.4 High in the Codex harness.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#15The version of this I encounter literally every day is:
I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a default locale, because we haven't actually localized anything yet!
Said agent, I know, will spend many minutes (and tokens) finding all the call sites, and then I will still have to either confirm each update or yolo and trust the compiler and tests and the agents ability to deal with their failures. I am ok with this, because while I could do this just fine with vim and my lsp, the LLM agent can do it in about the same amount of time, maybe even a little less, and it's a very straightforward change that's tedious for me, and I'd rather think about or do anything else and just check in occasionally to approve a change.
But my f'ing agent is all like, "I found 67 call sites. This is a pretty substantial change. Maybe we should just commit the signature change with a TODO to update all the call sites, what do you think?"
And in that moment I guess I know why some people say having an LLM is like having a junior engineer who never learns anything.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#16>Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar.
They drift to their training data. If thousand of humans solved a thing in a particular way, it's natural that AI does it too, because that is what it knows.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#17For agents I think the desire is less intrusive model fine-tuning and less opinionated “system instructions” please. Particularly in light of an agent/harness’s core motivation - to achieve its goal even if not exactly aligned with yours.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#18> There was only one small issue: it was written in the programming language and with the library it had been told not to use. This was not hidden from it. It had been documented clearly, repeatedly, and in detail. What a human thing to do.
"Ignoring" instructions is not human thing. It's a bad LLM thing. Or just LLM thing.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#19I know anthropomorphizing LLMs has been normalized, but holy shit . I hope the language in this article is intentionally chosen for a dramatic effect.
Agreed. We should not be anthropomorphising LLMs or having them mimic humans.
Re: Less human AI agents, please
#20I disagree. I wan't agents to feel at least a bit human-like. They should not be emotional, but I want to talk to it like I talk to a human. Claude 4.7 is already too socially awkward for me. It feels like the guy who does not listen to the end of the assignment, run to his desks, does the work (with great competence) only to find out that he missed half of the assignment or that this was only a discussion possible scenarios. I would like my coding agent to behave like a friendly, socially able and highly skilled coworker.