Live data from Hacker News

Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

approachwithalacrity.com

11–20 of 249 posts

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#11
post #8

LLMs are just really good search. Ask it to create something and it's searching within the pretrained weights. Ask it to find something and it's semantically searching within your codebase. Ask it to modify something and it will do both. Once you understand its just search, you can get really good results.

Calling it "just search" is like calling a compiler "just string manipulation". Not false, but aggressively missing the point.

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#12
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account but it's not completely science fiction the more I think about it. At that point, why do you even need the CEO?

And who does he sell his software to? Companies that have only 1 employee, don’t need a lot of user licenses for their employees…

What would be the point of selling software in such a world ? (where anyone could build any piece of software with a handful of keystrokes)

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#13
post #8

LLMs are just really good search. Ask it to create something and it's searching within the pretrained weights. Ask it to find something and it's semantically searching within your codebase. Ask it to modify something and it will do both. Once you understand its just search, you can get really good results.

Calling it "just search" is like calling a compiler "just string manipulation". Not false, but aggressively missing the point.

No, “just search” is correct. Boosters desperately want it to be something more, but it really is just a tool.

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it "just search" is like calling a compiler "just string manipulation". Not false, but aggressively missing the point.

No, “just search” is correct. Boosters desperately want it to be something more, but it really is just a tool.

Yes, it is a tool. No, it is not "just search".

Is your CPU running arbitrary code "just search over transistor states"?

Calling LLMs "just search" is the kind of reductive take that sounds clever while explaining nothing. By that logic, your brain is "just electrochemical gradients".

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, “just search” is correct. Boosters desperately want it to be something more, but it really is just a tool.

Yes, it is a tool. No, it is not "just search". Is your CPU running arbitrary code "just search over transistor states"? Calling LLMs "just search" is the kind of reductive take that sounds clever while explaining nothing. By that logic, your brain is "just electrochemical gradients".

I mean, actually not a bad metaphor, but it does depend on the software you are running as to how much of a 'search' you could say the CPU is doing among its transistor states. If you are running an LLM then the metaphor seems very apt indeed.

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#16
post #8

LLMs are just really good search. Ask it to create something and it's searching within the pretrained weights. Ask it to find something and it's semantically searching within your codebase. Ask it to modify something and it will do both. Once you understand its just search, you can get really good results.

better mental model: it's a lossy compression of human knowledge that can decompress and recombine in novel (sometimes useful, sometimes sloppy) ways.

classical search simply retrieves, llms can synthesize as well.

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#17
post #16
post #8

LLMs are just really good search. Ask it to create something and it's searching within the pretrained weights. Ask it to find something and it's semantically searching within your codebase. Ask it to modify something and it will do both. Once you understand its just search, you can get really good results.

better mental model: it's a lossy compression of human knowledge that can decompress and recombine in novel (sometimes useful, sometimes sloppy) ways. classical search simply retrieves, llms can synthesize as well.

“Novel” to the person who has not consumed the training data. Otherwise, just training data combined in highly probable ways.

Not quite autocomplete but not intelligence either.

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, “just search” is correct. Boosters desperately want it to be something more, but it really is just a tool.

Yes, it is a tool. No, it is not "just search". Is your CPU running arbitrary code "just search over transistor states"? Calling LLMs "just search" is the kind of reductive take that sounds clever while explaining nothing. By that logic, your brain is "just electrochemical gradients".

What would you add?

To me it's "search" like a missile does "flight". It's got a target and a closed loop guidance, and is mostly fire and forget (for search). At that, it excels.

I think the closed loop+great summary is the key to all the magic.

Re: Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them

#19
This article resonates exactly how I think about it as well. For example, at minfx.ai (a Neptune/wandb alternative), we cache time series that can contain millions of floats for fast access. Any engineer worth their title would never make a copy of these and would pass around pointers for access. Opus, when stuck in a place where passing the pointer was a bit more difficult (due to async and Rust lifetimes), would just make the copy, rather than rearchitect or at least stop and notify user. Many such examples of ‘lazy’ and thus bad design.
Post reply on HN