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The highest quality codebase

gricha.dev

11–20 of 409 posts

Re: The highest quality codebase

#11
post #4

This is a great example of there being no intelligence under the hood.

Would a human perform very differently? A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step.

I'm not sure there's much to learn here, besides it's kinda fun, since no real human was forced to suffer through this exercise on the implementor side.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#12
post #3

Yeah. I noticed Claud suffers when it reaches context overload - its too opinionated, so it shortens its own context with decisions I would not ever make, yet I see it telling itself that the shortcuts are a good idea because the project is complex...then it gets into a loop where it second guesses its own decisions and forgets the context and then continues to spiral uncontrollably into deeper and deeper failures -…

> Yeah. I noticed Claud suffers when it reaches context overload

All LLMs degrade in quality as soon as you go beyond one user message and one assistant response. If you're looking for accuracy and highest possible quality, you need to constantly redo the conversations from scratch, never go beyond one user message.

If the LLM gets it wrong in their first response, instead of saying "No, what I meant was...", you need to edit your first response, and re-generate, otherwise the conversation becomes "poisoned" almost immediately, and every token generated after that will suffer.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#13
post #3

Yeah. I noticed Claud suffers when it reaches context overload - its too opinionated, so it shortens its own context with decisions I would not ever make, yet I see it telling itself that the shortcuts are a good idea because the project is complex...then it gets into a loop where it second guesses its own decisions and forgets the context and then continues to spiral uncontrollably into deeper and deeper failures -…

There's no -c on the command line, so I'm guessing this is starting fresh every iteration, unless claude(1) has changed the default lately.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#14
lol 5000 tests. Agentic code tools have a significant bias to add versus remove/condense. This leads to a lot of bloat and orphaned code. Definitely something that still needs to be solved for by agentic tools.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#15
This strikes me as a very solid methodology for improving the results of all AI coding tools. I hope Anthropic, etc take this up.

Rather than converging on optimal code (Occam's Razor for both maintainability and performance) they are just spewing code all over the scene. I've noticed that myself, of course, but this technique helps to magnify and highlight the problem areas.

It makes you wonder how much training material was/is available for code optimization relative to training material for just coding to meet functional requirements. And therefore, what's the relative weight of optimizing code baked into the LLMs.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#17
post #3

Yeah. I noticed Claud suffers when it reaches context overload - its too opinionated, so it shortens its own context with decisions I would not ever make, yet I see it telling itself that the shortcuts are a good idea because the project is complex...then it gets into a loop where it second guesses its own decisions and forgets the context and then continues to spiral uncontrollably into deeper and deeper failures -…

That has been my greatest stumbling block with these AI agents: context. I was trying to have one help vibe code a puzzle game and most of the time I added a new rule it broke 5 existing rules. It also never approached the rules engine with a context of building a reusable abstraction, just Hammer meet Nail.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#18
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: ", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because , it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

Re: The highest quality codebase

#19
post #11
post #4

This is a great example of there being no intelligence under the hood.

Would a human perform very differently? A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step. I'm not sure there's much to learn here, besides it's kinda fun, since no real human was forced to suffer through this exercise on the implementor side.

> A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step

Which describes a lot of outsourced development. And we all know how well that works

Re: The highest quality codebase

#20
post #11
post #4

This is a great example of there being no intelligence under the hood.

Would a human perform very differently? A human who must obey orders (like maybe they are paid to follow the prompt). With some "magnitude of work" enforced at each step. I'm not sure there's much to learn here, besides it's kinda fun, since no real human was forced to suffer through this exercise on the implementor side.

> Would a human perform very differently?

Yes.

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