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Less human AI agents, please

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Re: Less human AI agents, please

#171

Post by DangitBobby »

fenomas wrote: post #158
DangitBobby wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. People often incorrectly believe that less and fewer have distinct cases where only one word is correct. They are mistaken.

(The aside was for you - TFA's title is not a case where either word works.)

Oh I understood the aside was for me. Again, not a thing. This one in particular really bugs the shit out of me because it's brought up as utterly useless pedantry in 100% of cases.

> But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of personal preference. Somewhere along the way—it's not clear how—his preference was generalized and elevated to an absolute, inviolable rule. . . . A definitive rule covering all possibilities is maybe impossible. If you're a native speaker your best bet is to be guided by your ear, choosing the word that sounds more natural in a particular context. If you're not a native speaker, the simple rule is a good place to start, but be sure to consider the exceptions to it as well.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/fewer-vs-less

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#172

Post by dabbledash »

zingar wrote: post #167
dabbledash wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it has to do with how often TODOs appear in the existing code.

What's your hypothesis about the relationship between TODOs and action?

I have only seen "go do X" result in CC adding "TODO: X" to the working file on one occasion. When it happened, I noticed that the file contained a very similar todo for a similar action already. My guess is that because the agent had the whole file in context, that influenced it to produce output similar to what was already there.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#173

Post by fenomas »

DangitBobby wrote: post #171
fenomas wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(The aside was for you - TFA's title is not a case where either word works.)

Oh I understood the aside was for me. Again, not a thing. This one in particular really bugs the shit out of me because it's brought up as utterly useless pedantry in 100% of cases. > But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of perso…

I'm fond of linguistic bugbears, and have actually sent that same article to people before :D But what you're missing is that the less/fewer debate is over their use as adjectives, and TFA's title uses "less" as an adverb. It's asking for AI agents to be less human, not for them to be fewer in number. Swapping it to "fewer" would make the title's meaning no longer match the article.

Now please sit a moment and reflect on what you've done. :P

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#174

Post by suttontom »

happygoose wrote: post #121
mentalgear wrote: post #6

Yes, LLMs should not be allowed to use "I" or indicate they have emotions or are human-adjacent (unless explicit role play).

the whole reason chatgpt got so popular in the first place is because humans found it easier to intuitively interact with a system that acts and seems more like a human, though.

Was that a good thing though?

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#175

Post by eithed »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #9
mentalgear wrote: post #6

Yes, LLMs should not be allowed to use "I" or indicate they have emotions or are human-adjacent (unless explicit role play).

Why, though? Just because some people would find it odd? Who cares? Trying to limit / disallow something seems to be hurting the overall accuracy of models. And it makes sense if you think about it. Most of our long-horizon content is in the form of novels and above. If you're trying to clamp the machine to machine speak you'll lose all those learnings. Hero starts with a problem, hero works the problem, hero reaches…

Because LLM saying "I got confused, dropped the database and then got scared and hid this from you" hides the "why" LLMs do the things they do. I would also prefer if they were less sycophantic and argue with what I'm wanting to do rather than treating user as a god (ie - "the algorithm you're trying to use is less performant than an alternative")

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#176

Post by QuercusMax »

paradox460 wrote: post #162
QuercusMax wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the agent tell me "this looks like it's going to be a very big change. it could take weeks." - and then I tell it to go ahead and it finishes in 5 minutes because in reality it just needs grep and sed.

Sounds like that agent was trained on slack messages with some of my past coworkers

One of my favorite things to do with AI is when a slow teammates says something is far too difficult (without explaining why) is to just... try it.

Used to do it by hand, which usually didn't take nearly as long as they said, and now with AI I can often one-shot these type of things, at least as a proof of concept.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#177

Post by Cluelessidoit »

gregates wrote: post #15

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…

Hahahaha!!! Mine told me that the project we were working was and I quote, “good enough, it works” I laughed pretty hard but also couldn’t believe it got lazy and didn’t wanna work anymore

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#178

Post by llbbdd »

potsandpans wrote: post #104
felipeerias wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've been doing a lot of experimentation with "hands off coding", where a test suite the agents cannot see determines the success of the task. Essentially, it's a Ralph loop with an external specification that determines when the task is done. The way it works is simple: no tests that were previously passing are allowed to fail in subsequent turns. I achieve this by spawning an agent in a worktree, have them do some…

Are you using any tools specifically for controlling this behavior that you can recommend? I want to tear my hair out every time Claude cleanly 1-shots weeks of work to 99% accuracy, one or a couple of tests fail, and it calmly resolves it with a declaration that it was a "pre-existing failure" or "flaky". It can usually resolve it if I then explicitly tell it to stash the changes and compare against the test results from the prior state, but it happens constantly.

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#179

Post by [deleted] »

fenomas wrote: post #173
DangitBobby wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I understood the aside was for me. Again, not a thing. This one in particular really bugs the shit out of me because it's brought up as utterly useless pedantry in 100% of cases. > But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of perso…

I'm fond of linguistic bugbears, and have actually sent that same article to people before :D But what you're missing is that the less/fewer debate is over their use as adjectives, and TFA's title uses "less" as an adverb. It's asking for AI agents to be less human, not for them to be fewer in number. Swapping it to "fewer" would make the title's meaning no longer match the article. Now please sit a moment and reflec…

[deleted]

Re: Less human AI agents, please

#180

Post by fxtentacle »

gregates wrote: post #15

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…

"changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware"

JetBrains has a deterministic non-AI function for that refactoring. It'll usually finish before your AI has finished parsing your request and reading the files.

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