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Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

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Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#241

Post by dpark »

rnjesus wrote: post #178
dpark wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment pretty regularly, and I don’t get it. Variable rewards is not sufficient to establish that it is “ basically gambling”. Everything in life is variable reward. You invite a friend over, they might accept or they might not. Drive to work, traffic might be good or might be bad. You ask a colleague to finish a task, they might do it or might not or might do a good job or might not. Everything is vari…

i’m not sure “variable rewards” is the right term, but i do agree with the op that it is very similar to gambling. regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “to…

I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial.

If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money.

If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing, the LLM produces something that is hopefully close to what you wanted. You give it more direction to prod it closer to the end state you want. You are not executing the same action, but incrementally nudging it in the right direction. I’ve literally never restarted from the same initial state with the same prompt and hoped for a different result and I don’t know why anyone would. Rarely I’ve thrown away the progress made and started over but always with a very different prompt that includes learnings from the failed attempt.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#242

Post by supern0va »

bmacho wrote: post #153
taeric wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.

No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random". None of these cases are similar to how AI works.

>No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that.

Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue.

And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Instead, you use your inner monologue to try to backfill in a reason why. That reason may be correct, or it may not be. You don't actually know, since you have new data that may be updating your own internal state as you try to rationalize it after the fact.

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#244

Post by selestify »

ceejayoz wrote: post #19
brap wrote: post #16

How do you manage your frustration in these interactions? I often find myself getting pissed off

The goal of my personal harness is to get to the point where I never actually talk to Claude directly for that very reason.

Is your harness available for install somewhere?

Surely you still have to give feedback to Claude. How do you do that without talking to Claude directly? By using a different model? But wouldn't that AI have no more common sense than Claude?

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#245

Post by 8note »

pc86 wrote: post #201
RobKohr wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes more than 20 min to review a pr, ask the dev to come on a call and explain what the code does.

It must be nice to work on such small-scale systems that you can reasonably expect PRs to be this quick.

reasonably you should already know what the code and project is supposed to do before they even start writing code, so you can get directional feedback in.

then you are maybe reviewing 1 out of 7 PRs that implement the agreed upon change

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#246

Post by selestify »

retsibsi wrote: post #98
chrismorgan wrote: post #61

I’ve never used any of these tools. Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things. For my sanity. (I am genuinely uncertain, though I presume it’s at least somewhat exaggerated.)

> Please tell me that this is a grossly exaggerated parody, and that the tools don’t write like this, or do so many ridiculous things It's a pisstake, but (in the bits I read, and based on my own personal experience) the writing style is barely exaggerated, while the behaviour doesn't ring true at all.

The behavior, while slightly exaggerated, rings entirely true for me. From the other comments in this thread, it seems I am prompting poorly in a similar way to the options offered.

I am guessing you prompt differently than what is shown in the game?

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#248

Post by [deleted] »

supern0va wrote: post #242
bmacho wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random". None of these cases are similar to how AI works.

>No. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue. And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Ins…

[deleted]

Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue

#250

Post by supern0va »

jimmaswell wrote: post #225
captainbland wrote: post #40

This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.

Programming before AI was always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on…

>Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do.

I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant.

Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it.

Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant.

Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.

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