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

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

#181

Post by aeneas_ory »

Uehreka wrote: post #102
disconcision wrote: post #94

I've yet to be convinced by any article, including this one, that attempts to draw boxes around what coding agents are and aren't good at in a way that is robust on a 6 to 12 month horizon. I agree that the examples listed here are relatable, and I've seen similar in my uses of various coding harnesses, including, to some degree, ones driven by opus 4.5. But my general experience with using LLMs for development over…

It feels like a lot of people keep falling into the trap of thinking we’ve hit a plateau, and that they can shift from “aggressively explore and learn the thing” mode to “teach people solid facts” mode. A week ago Scott Hanselman went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about AI-assisted coding. I generally respect that guy a lot, so I tuned in and… well it was kind of jarring. The dude kept saying things in this r…

"Still on Claude Code" is a funny statement, given that the industry is agreeing that Anthropic has the lead in software generation while others (OpenAI) are lagging behind or have significant quality issues (Google) in their tooling (not the models). And Anthropic frontier models are generally "You're absolutely right - I apologize. I need to ..." everytime they fuck something up.

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

#182

Post by soulofmischief »

Uehreka wrote: post #102
disconcision wrote: post #94

I've yet to be convinced by any article, including this one, that attempts to draw boxes around what coding agents are and aren't good at in a way that is robust on a 6 to 12 month horizon. I agree that the examples listed here are relatable, and I've seen similar in my uses of various coding harnesses, including, to some degree, ones driven by opus 4.5. But my general experience with using LLMs for development over…

It feels like a lot of people keep falling into the trap of thinking we’ve hit a plateau, and that they can shift from “aggressively explore and learn the thing” mode to “teach people solid facts” mode. A week ago Scott Hanselman went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about AI-assisted coding. I generally respect that guy a lot, so I tuned in and… well it was kind of jarring. The dude kept saying things in this r…

Opus 4.5 seems to be better than GPT 5.2 or 5.2 Codex at using tools and working for long stretches on complex tasks.

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

#183

Post by conradfr »

danpalmer wrote: post #127
disconcision wrote: post #94

I've yet to be convinced by any article, including this one, that attempts to draw boxes around what coding agents are and aren't good at in a way that is robust on a 6 to 12 month horizon. I agree that the examples listed here are relatable, and I've seen similar in my uses of various coding harnesses, including, to some degree, ones driven by opus 4.5. But my general experience with using LLMs for development over…

I used to get made up APIs in functions, now I get them in modules. I used to get confidently incorrect assertions in files now I get them across codebases. Hell, I get poorly defined APIs across files and still get them between functions. LLMs aren't good at writing well defined APIs at any level of the stack. They can attempt it at levels of the stack they couldn't a year ago, but they're still terrible at it unles…

Yeah I've been trying Claude Code for a week (mostly Opus) and in a C++ Juce project it kept hallucinating functions for a simple task ("retrieve DAW track name if available") and actually never got it right.

It also failed a lot to modify a simple Caddyfile.

On the other hand it sometimes blows me away and offers to correct mistakes I coded myself. It's really good on web code I guess as that must be the most public code available (Vue3 and elixir in my case).

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

#184

Post by computerex »

utopiah wrote: post #177
woeirua wrote: post #133

It's just amazing to me how fast the goal posts are moving. Four years ago, if you had told someone that a LLM would be able to one-shot either of those first two tasks they would've said you're crazy. The tech is moving so fast . I slept on Opus 4.5 because GPT 5 was kind of an air ball, and just started using it in the past few weeks. It's so good. Way better than almost anything that's come before it. It can one-s…

> The tech is moving so fast. Well that's exactly the problem : how can one say that? The entire process of evaluating what "it" actually does has been a problem from the start. Input text, output text ... OK but what if the training data includes the evaluation? This was ridiculous few years ago but then the scale went from some curated text datasets to... most of the Web as text, to most of the Web as text includin…

You know LLM's have been used to solve very hard previously unsolved math problems like some of the Erdos problems?

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

#185

Post by troupo »

fragmede wrote: post #146
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it every time anyone has a critique someone has to say “oh but you aren’t using model X, which clearly never has this problem and is far better”? Yet the data doesn’t show all that much difference between SOTA models. So I have a hard time believing it.

Because they are getting better. They're still far from perfect/AGI/ASI, but when was the last time you saw the word "delve"? So the models are clearly changing, the question is why doesn't the data show That they're actually better? Thing is, everyone knows the benchmarks are being gamed. Exactly how is besides the point. In practice, anecdotally, Opus 4.5 is noticably better than 4, and GPT 5.2 has also noticably i…

"They don't use delve anymore" is not really a testament that they became better.

Most of what I can do now with them I could do half a year to a year ago. And all the mistakes and fail loops are still there, across all models.

What changed is the number of magical incantations we throw at these models in the form of "skills" and "plugins" and "tools" hoping that this will solve the issue at hand before the context window overflows.

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

#186

Post by TeMPOraL »

Jensson wrote: post #170
TeMPOraL wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that: 1) LLMs cannot do everything humans can, but 2) There's no fundamental reason preventing some future technology to do everything humans can, and 3) LLMs are explicitly designed and trained to mimic human capabilities in fully general sense . Point 2) is the "or else magic exists" bit; point 3) says you need a more specific reason to justify assertion that LLMs can't create new concepts/abstractions,…

> 3) LLMs are explicitly designed and trained to mimic human capabilities in fully general sense. This is wrong, LLM are trained to mimic human writing not to mimic human capabilities. Writing is just the end result not the inner workings of a human, most of what we do happens before we write it down. You could argue you think that writing captures everything about humans, but that is another belief you have to add t…

It's more than that. The overall goal function in LLM training is judging predicted text continuation by whether it looks ok to humans, in fully general sense of that statement. This naturally captures all human capabilities that are observable through textual (and now multimodal) communication, including creating new abstractions and concepts, as well as thinking, reasoning, even feeling.

Whether or not they're good at it or have anything comparable to our internal cognitive processes is a different, broader topic - but the goal function on the outside, applying tremendous optimization pressure to a big bag of floats, is both beautifully simple and unexpectedly powerful.

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

#187

Post by nosianu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #136
atty wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both your statement and their statement are too strong. There is no reason to think LLMs can do everything a human can do, which seems to be your implication. On the other hand, the technology is still improving, so maybe it’ll get there.

My take is that: 1) LLMs cannot do everything humans can, but 2) There's no fundamental reason preventing some future technology to do everything humans can, and 3) LLMs are explicitly designed and trained to mimic human capabilities in fully general sense . Point 2) is the "or else magic exists" bit; point 3) says you need a more specific reason to justify assertion that LLMs can't create new concepts/abstractions,…

Humans are trained on the real world. With real world sensors and the ability to act on their world. A baby starts with training hearing, touching (lots of that), smelling, tasting, etc. Abstract stuff comes waaayyyyy later.

LLMs are trained on our intercepted communication - and even then only the formal part that uses words.

When a human forms sentences it is from a deep model of the real world. Okay, people are also capable of talking about things they don't actually know, they have only read about, in which case they have a superficial understanding and unwarranted confidence similar to AI...

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

#188

Post by TeMPOraL »

nosianu wrote: post #187
TeMPOraL wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is that: 1) LLMs cannot do everything humans can, but 2) There's no fundamental reason preventing some future technology to do everything humans can, and 3) LLMs are explicitly designed and trained to mimic human capabilities in fully general sense . Point 2) is the "or else magic exists" bit; point 3) says you need a more specific reason to justify assertion that LLMs can't create new concepts/abstractions,…

Humans are trained on the real world. With real world sensors and the ability to act on their world. A baby starts with training hearing, touching (lots of that), smelling, tasting, etc. Abstract stuff comes waaayyyyy later. LLMs are trained on our intercepted communication - and even then only the formal part that uses words. When a human forms sentences it is from a deep model of the real world. Okay, people are al…

All true, but note I didn't make any claims on internal mechanics of LLMs here - only on the observable, external ones, and the nature of the training process.

Do consider however that even the "formal part that uses words" of human communication, i.e. language, is strongly correlated with our experience of the real world. Things people write aren't arbitrary. Languages aren't arbitrary. The words we use, their structure, similarities across languages and topics, turns of phrases, the things we say and the things we don't say, even the greatest lies, they all carry information about the world we live in. It's not unreasonable to expect the training process as broad and intense as with LLMs to pick up on that.

I said nothing about internals earlier, but I'll say now: LLMs do actually form a "deep mofel of the real world", at least in terms of concepts and abstractions. That has already been empirically demonstrated ~2 years ago, there's e.g. research done by Anthropic where they literally find distinct concepts within the neural network, observe their relationships, and even suppress and amplify them on demand. So that ship has already sailed, it's surprising to see people still think LLMs don't do concepts or don't have internal world models.

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

#189

Post by Nora23 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #109
Uehreka wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like a lot of people keep falling into the trap of thinking we’ve hit a plateau, and that they can shift from “aggressively explore and learn the thing” mode to “teach people solid facts” mode. A week ago Scott Hanselman went on the Stack Overflow podcast to talk about AI-assisted coding. I generally respect that guy a lot, so I tuned in and… well it was kind of jarring. The dude kept saying things in this r…

> in general I find GPT 5.x to actually be a huge breakthrough in terms of asserting itself when I’m wrong That's just a different bias purposefully baked into GPT-5's engineered personality on post-training. It always tries to contradict the user, including the cases where it's confidently wrong, and keeps justifying the wrong result in a funny manner if pressed or argued with (as in, it would have never made that o…

By the time GPT 5.5 landed we were already on 5.1, honestly they seem to converge on similar limitations around compositional reasoning.

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

#190

Post by [deleted] »

mikece wrote: post #2

In my experience Claude is like a "good junior developer" -- can do some things really well, FUBARS other things, but on the whole something to which tasks can be delegated if things are well explained. If/when it gets to the ability level of a mid-level engineer it will be revolutionary. Typically a mid-level engineer can be relied upon to do the right thing with no/minimal oversight, can figure out incomplete instr…

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