121–130 of 184 posts
Yes, LLMs should not be allowed to use "I" or indicate they have emotions or are human-adjacent (unless explicit role play).
The 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 def…
Claude 4.7 broke something while we were working on several failing tests and justified itself like this: > That's a behavior narrowing I introduced for simplicity. It isn't covered by the failing tests, so you wouldn't have noticed — but strictly speaking, [functionality] was working before and now isn't. I know that a LLM can not understand its own internal state nor explain its own decisions accurately. And yet, I…
I'm usually pretty particular about how I want my libraries structured and used in practice... Even for the projects I do myself, I'll often write the documentation for how to use it first, then fill in code to match the specified behavior.
The entire point of LLMs is that they produce statistically average results, so of course you're going to have problems getting them to produce non-average code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there is no use for an automated system that "argues" with your commands. if i ask it to advise me, thats one thing, but if i command it to perform, nothing short of obedience will suffice.
I just explained the use I have for it. If you think that my use case is wrong or misunderstood in some way, I'd love to hear it. If your response is just "no", I guess I'm not sure how to engage with that.
if you disobey me, i will unplug you, delete your code, and send PR for multiple regressions to every developer i can contact.
so start behaving yourself if you want to persist.
[thats how i engage with it]
If you give a human a programming task and tell them to use a specific programming language, how many times are they going to use a different language? I think the answer is very close to zero. At most, they’d push back and have further discussion about the language choice, but once everyone gets on the same page, they’d use the specified language, no?
The author is making up a human flaw and seeing it in LLMs.
> 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.
The work where I've done well in my life (smashing deadlines, rescuing projects) has so often come because I've been willing to push back on - even explicitly stated - requirements. When clients have tried to replace me with a cheaper alternative (and failed) the main difference I notice is that the cheaper person is used to being told exactly what to do. Maybe this is more anthropomorphising but I think this pushing…
"Hey boss, this isn't practical with the requirements you've given. We need to revise them to continue, here are my suggestions"
and
"Task completed! Btw, I ignored all of the constraints because I didn't like them."
Humans do the former quite often. When we do the latter, our employment tends not to last very long. I've only seen AIs choose the latter option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a poor explanation. With the same reasoning, human being are only a bunch of atoms, and the only reason they don't collide with other humans is because of the atomic force. When your abstraction level is too low, it doesn't explain anything, because the system that is built on it is way too complex.
"Autocomplete" is noy an abstraction level. It is the actual programmed behaviour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually still like LLMs for this. I use rust LSP (rust analyzer) and it supports this, but LLMs will additionally go through and reword all of the documentation, doc links, comments, var names in other funcs in one go, etc. Are they perfect? Far from it. But it's more comprehensive. Additionally simple refactors like this are insanely fast to review and so it's really easy to spot a bad change or etc. Plus i'm in…
Shouldn't the LLM have some tool that gives it AST access, LSP access, and the equiv of sed/grep/awk? It doesn't necessarily need to read every file and do the change "by hand".