121–130 of 409 posts
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Not at all my experience. I’ve often tried things like telling Claude this SIMD code I wrote performed poorly and I needed some ideas to make it go faster. Claude usually does a good job rewriting the SIMD to use different and faster operations.
That sounds like a pretty "structured" problem to me.
It is not unlike people, the difference being that if you ask someone the same thing 200 times, he will probably going to tell you to go fuck yourself, or, if unable to, turn to malicious compliance. These AIs will always be diligent. Or, a human may use the opportunity to educate himself, but again, LLMs don't learn by doing, they have a distinct training phase that involves ingesting pretty much everything humanity has produced, your little conversation will not have a significant effect, if at all.
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…
That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…
However if I just say “I have this goal, implement a solution”, chances are that unless it is a very common task, it will come up with a subpar/incomplete implementation.
What’s funny to me is that complexity has inverted for some tasks: it can ace a 1000 lines ML model for a general task I give it, yet will completely fail to come up with a proper solution for a 2D geometric problem that mostly has high school level maths that can be solved in 100 lines
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That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code. I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the…
Cool cool cool. So if you use LLMs as junior devs, let me ask you how future awesome senior devs like you will come around? From WHAT job experience? From what coding struggle?
Also, I'm pretty sure junior devs can use directing a LLM to learn from mistakes faster. Let them play. Soon enough they're going to be better than all of us anyway. The same way widespread access to strong chess computers raised the bar at chess clubs.
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I think slash commands are great to help Claude with this. I have many like /code:dry /code:clean-code etc that has a semi long prompt and references to longer docs to review code from a specific perspective. I think it atleast improves Claude a bit in this area. Like processes or templates for thinking in broader ways. But yes I agree it struggles a lot in this area.
Somewhat tangential but interestingly I'd hate for Claude to make any changes with the intent of sticking to "DRY" or "Clean Code". Neither of those are things I follow, and either way design is better informed by the specific problems that need to be solved rather than by such general, prescriptive principles.
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Me writing code is me spending 3/4 of my time wading through documentation and google searches. It's absolutely hell on my ADD. My ability to memorize is absolutely garbage. Throughout my career I've worked in like 10 different languages, and in any given project I'm usually working in at least 3 or 4. There's a lot of "now what is a map operation in this stupid fucking language called again?!" Claude writing code ge…
How do you end up with 3 to 4 languages in one project?
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You making a couple of small GUIs that could have been made with a drag and drop editor 10 years ago doesn't work against his claim as much as you think. You're just telling on your self and your "20 years" of supposed dev experience.
Dragging UI components into a WYSIWYG editor is Else Visual Basic and Dreamweaver would have killed software engineering in the 90s. Also, I didn't make them. A clanker did. I can see this topic brings out the claws. Honestly I used to have the same reaction, and in a large way I still hate it.
One of my favorite personal evals for llms is testing its stability as a reviewer. The basic gist of it is to give the llm some code to review and have it assign a grade multiple times. How much variance is there in the grade? Then, prompt the same llm to be a "critical" reviewer with the same code multiple times. How much does that average critical grade change? A low variance of grades across many generations and a…
You mean literally assign a grade, like B+? This is unlikely to work based on how token prediction & temperature works. You're going to get a probability distribution in the end that is reflective of the model runtime parameters, not the intelligence of the model.