Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?

Has always made sense to me, if you think how these models were trained.

My experience with great stackoverflow responses and detailed blog posts, they often contain "think through this step by step" or something very similar.

Intuitively adding that phrase should help the model narrow down the response content / formatting

There is a difference between being equivalent to a circuit and prediction of the output of the BVSP.

That is what I was suggesting learning descriptive complexity theory would help with.

The LLM kept going in circles between two incorrect solutions, then just repeating the same broken solution while describing it as different. I ended up manually writing the code, which was a nice brain-stretch given that I'm an absolute noob at OpenSCAD.

I then asked it to link a YouTube video for each recipe and it used the same video 10 times for all of the recipes. No amount of prompting was able to fix it unless I request one video at a time. It would just acknowledge the mistake, apologize and then repeat the same mistake again.

I told it let’s try something different and generate a shopping list of ingredients to cover all of the recipes, it recommended purchasing amounts that didn’t make sense and even added some random items that did not occur in any of the recipes

When I was making the dishes, I asked for the detailed recipes and it completely changed them, adding ingredients that were not on the shopping list. When I pointed it out it again, it acknowledged the mistake, apologized, and then “corrected it” by completely changing it again.

I would not conclude that I am a lazy or bad prompter, and I would not conclude that the LLMs exhibited any kind of remarkable reasoning ability. I even interrogated the AIs about why they were making the mistakes and they told me because “it just predicts the next word”.

Another example is, I asked the bots for tips on how to feel my pecs more on incline cable flies, it told me to start with the cables above shoulder height, which is not an incline fly, it is a decline fly. When I questioned it, it told me to start just below shoulder height, which again is not an incline fly.

My experience is that you have to write a draft of the note you were trying to create or leave so many details in the prompts that you are basically doing most of the work yourself. It’s great for things like give me a recipe that contains the following ingredients or clean up the following note to sound more professional. Anything more than that it tends to fail horribly for me. I have even had long conversations with the AIs asking them for tips on how to generate better prompts and it’s recommending things I’m already doing.

When people remark about the incredible reasoning ability, I wonder if they are just testing it on things that were already in the training data or they are failing to recognize how garbage the output can be. However, perhaps we can agree that the reasoning ability is incredible in the sense that it can do a lot of reasoning very quickly, but it completely lacks any kind of common sense and often does the wrong kind of reasoning.

For example, the prompt about tips to feel my pecs more on an incline cable fly could have just entailed “copy and pasting” a pre-written article from the training data; but instead in its own words, it “over analyzed bench angles and cable heights instead of addressing what you meant”. One of the bots did “copy paste” a generic article that included tips for decline flat and incline. None correctly gave tips for just incline on the first try, and some took several rounds of iteration basically spoon feeding the model the answer before it understood.