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LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

blog.katanaquant.com

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Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#161

Post by kubb »

D-Machine wrote: post #90

This article is great. And the blog-article headline is interesting, but wrong. LLM's don't in general write plausible code (as a rule) either. They just write code that is (semantically) similar to code (clusters) seen in its training data, and which haven't been fenced off by RLHF / RLVR. This isn't that hard to remember, and is a correct enough simplification of what generative LLMs actually do, without resorting…

IIRC, the most code in its training data is Python. Closely followed by Web technologies (HTML, JS/TS, CSS). This corresponds to the most abundant developers. Many of them dedicated their entire careers to one technology.

We stubbornly use the same language to refer to all software development, regardless of the task being solved. This lets us all be a part of the same community, but is also a source of misunderstanding.

Some of us are prone to not thinking about things in terms of what they are, and taking the shortcut of looking at industry leaders to tell us what we should think.

These guys consistently, in lockstep, talk about intelligent agents solving development tasks. Predominately using the same abstract language that gives us an illusion of unity. This is bound to make those of us solving the common problems believe that the industry is done.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#162

Post by leptons »

Implicated wrote: post #141
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not a tool. It is an oracle. It can be a tool, for specific niche problems: summarization, extraction, source-to-source translation -- if post-trained properly. But that isn't what y'all are doing, you're engaging in "replace all the meatsacks AGI ftw" nonsense.

If I was on the "replace all the meatsacks AGI ftw" team then I would have referred to it as an oracle, by your own logic, wouldn't I have? It's a tool. It's good for some things, not for others. Use the right tool for the job and know the job well enough to know which tools apply to which tasks. More than anything it's a learning tool. It's also wildly effective at writing code, too. But, man... the things that it m…

>I used it to help me turn a cat exercise wheel (think huge hamster wheel) into a generator that produces enough power to charge a battery that powers an ESP32 powered "CYD" touchscreen LCD that also utilizes a hall effect sensor to monitor, log and display the RPMs and "speed" (given we know the wheel circumference) in real time as well as historically.

So what? That's honestly amateur hour. And the LLM derived all of it from things that have been done and posted about a thousand times before.

You could have achieved the same thing with a few google searches 15 years ago (obviously not with ESP32, but other microcontrollers).

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#164

Post by brabel »

imiric wrote: post #140
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not reality. I'm really not a fan of the way that people excuse the really terrible code LLMs write by claiming that people write code just as bad. Even if that were true, it is not true that when you ask those people to do otherwise they simply pretend to have done it and forget you asked later.

It's an easy copout. Tool works as expected? It's superintelligence. Programming is dead. Tool makes dumb mistake? So do humans.

Yes and both are right. It’s a matter of which is working as expected and making fewer mistakes more often. And as someone using Claude Code heavily now, I would say we’re already at a point where AI wins.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#165

Post by girvo »

Implicated wrote: post #88
pornel wrote: post #36

Their default solution is to keep digging. It has a compounding effect of generating more and more code. If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'll keep adding workarounds or redundant code every time they run into limitations later. If you tell them the code is slow, they'll try to add optimized fast paths (more code), specialized routines (more code), custom data structures (even more code).…

Not trying to be snarky, with all due respect... this is a skill issue. It's a tool. It's a wildly effective and capable tool. I don't know how or why I have such a wildly different experience than so many that describe their experiences in a similar manner... but... nearly every time I come to the same conclusion that the input determines the output. > If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'l…

I absolutely tell a coworker their code is slow and expect them to fix it…

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#166

Post by Foobar8568 »

sebastiennight wrote: post #148
Foobar8568 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least my comment hasn't been reviewed or written by a LLM. And in my French brain, code or codebase is countable and not uncountable.

As far as I've ever heard, "le code" used in a codebase is uncountable, like "le café" you'd put in a cup, so we would still say "meilleur que tout le code que j'ai vu en 20 ans" and not "meilleur que tous les codes que j'ai vus en 20 ans". There is a countable "code" (just like "un café" is either a place, or a cup of coffee, or a type of coffee), and "un code" would be the one used as a password or secret, as in "j…

You are correct, we generally say le code. To be exact at that time, I was more thinking toutes les lignes de code.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#167

Post by thaumasiotes »

Implicated wrote: post #123
thesz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM code is higher quality than any codes I have seen in my 20 years in F500. "Any codes"?

You'll find, at times, that those communicating in a language that's not their primary language will tend to deviate from what one whose it was their primary language might expect. If that's obvious to you than you're just being rude. If it's not obvious to you, then you'll also find this is a common deviance (plural 'code') from those who come from a particular primary language's region. Edit; This got me thinking -…

> what is the grammar/rule around what gets pluralized and what doesn't? How does one know that "code" can refer to a single line of code, a whole file of code, a project, or even the entirety of all code your eyes have ever seen without having to have an s tacked on to the end of it?

Well, the grammar is that English has two different classes of noun, and any given noun belongs to one class or the other. Standard terminology calls them "mass nouns" and "count nouns".

The distinction is so deeply embedded in the language that it requires agreement from surrounding words; you might compare many [which can only apply to count nouns] vs much [only to mass nouns], or observe that there are separate generic nouns for each class [thing is the generic count noun; stuff is the generic mass noun].

For "how does one know", the general concept is that count nouns refer to things that occur discretely, and mass nouns refer to things that are indivisible or continuous, most prototypically materials like water, mud, paper, or steel.

Where the class of a noun is not fixed by common use (for example, if you're making it up, or if it's very rare), a speaker will assign it to one class or the other based on how they internally conceive of whatever they're referring to.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#168

Post by girvo »

simianwords wrote: post #158
jqpabc123 wrote: post #48

LLMs have no idea what "correct" means. Anything they happen to get "correct" is the result of probability applied to their large training database. Being wrong will always be not only possible but also likely any time you ask for something that is not well represented in it's training data. The user has no way to know if this is the case so they are basically flying blind and hoping for the best. Relying on an LLM f…

This is easily proven incorrect. Just go to ChatGPT and say something incorrect and ask it to verify. Why do people still believe this type of thing?

And yet models get things wrong all the time, too.

Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

#170

Post by brabel »

Implicated wrote: post #88
pornel wrote: post #36

Their default solution is to keep digging. It has a compounding effect of generating more and more code. If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'll keep adding workarounds or redundant code every time they run into limitations later. If you tell them the code is slow, they'll try to add optimized fast paths (more code), specialized routines (more code), custom data structures (even more code).…

Not trying to be snarky, with all due respect... this is a skill issue. It's a tool. It's a wildly effective and capable tool. I don't know how or why I have such a wildly different experience than so many that describe their experiences in a similar manner... but... nearly every time I come to the same conclusion that the input determines the output. > If they implement something with a not-so-great approach, they'l…

Great answer, and the reason some people have bad experiences is actually patently clear: they don’t work with the AI as a partner, but as a slave. But even for them, AI is getting better at automatically entering planning mode, asking for clarification (what exactly is slow, can you elaborate?), saying some idea is actually bad (I got that a few times), and so on… essentially, the AI is starting to force people to work as a partner and give it proper information, not just tell them “it’s broken, fix it” like they used to do on StackOverflow.
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