These LLM prompting tip articles write themselves if you just take the last decade of project management articles and replace “IC” with “agent”.
LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
391–400 of 460 posts
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is in the training data since they use commit data from repos, but I imagine code deletions are rarer than they should be in the real data as well.
deleting and code cleanup is perhaps more an expression of seniority, and personal preferences. Maybe there should be the same kind style transfer with code that you see with graphical generative AI, "rewrite this code path in the style of Donald Knuth"
I imagine there would be value in not just throwing all of GitHub commits in as training data, but also rating the quality.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs can easily output overwhelming quantities of code. Junior devs couldn't really do that, not consistently. Scale/quantity matter. This industry is not mature enough for 1000x the bad code we have now. It was barely hanging on with 1x bad code.
Yeah. Due diligence is exponentially more important with something like Claude because it is so fast. Get lazy for a few hours and you've easily added 20K LOC worth of technical debt to your code base, and short of reverting the commits and starting over, it'll not be easy to get it to fix the problems after the fact. It's still pretty fast even considering all the coaxing needed, but holy crap will it rapidly deteri…
The cost of reverting the commits and starting over is not so high though. I find it is really good for prototyping ideas that you might not have tried to do previously.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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." I admire your experience with people.
The point is, that's not the typical experience and people like that can be replaced. We don't willingly bring people like that on our teams, and we certainly don't aim to replace entire teams with clones of this terrible coworker prototype.
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Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Due diligence is exponentially more important with something like Claude because it is so fast. Get lazy for a few hours and you've easily added 20K LOC worth of technical debt to your code base, and short of reverting the commits and starting over, it'll not be easy to get it to fix the problems after the fact. It's still pretty fast even considering all the coaxing needed, but holy crap will it rapidly deteri…
The cost of reverting the commits and starting over is not so high though. I find it is really good for prototyping ideas that you might not have tried to do previously.
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Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Due diligence is exponentially more important with something like Claude because it is so fast. Get lazy for a few hours and you've easily added 20K LOC worth of technical debt to your code base, and short of reverting the commits and starting over, it'll not be easy to get it to fix the problems after the fact. It's still pretty fast even considering all the coaxing needed, but holy crap will it rapidly deteri…
The cost of reverting the commits and starting over is not so high though. I find it is really good for prototyping ideas that you might not have tried to do previously.
It's cheap only if this happens shortly after the bad design mistakes, and there aren't other changes on top of them. Bad design decisions ossify fairly quickly in larger projects with multiple contributors outputting large volumes of code. Claude Code's own "game engine" rendering pipeline[1] is a good example of an almost comically inappropriate design that's likely to be some work to undo now that it's set.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human behaviour is goal-directed because humans have executive function. When you turn off executive function by going to sleep, your brain will spit out dreams. Dream logic is famous for being plausible but unhinged. I have the feeling that LLMs are effectively running on dream logic, and everything we've done to make them reason properly is insufficient to bring them up to human level.
It’s amazing how much you get wrong here. As LLM attention layers are stacked goal functions. What they lack is multi turn long walk goal functions — which is being solved to some degree by agents.
I don't argue that thinking and attention are missing. I argue that they are trying to do the job of human executive function but aren't as good at it.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human behaviour is goal-directed because humans have executive function. When you turn off executive function by going to sleep, your brain will spit out dreams. Dream logic is famous for being plausible but unhinged. I have the feeling that LLMs are effectively running on dream logic, and everything we've done to make them reason properly is insufficient to bring them up to human level.
And yet LLM’s are incredibly useful as they are right now.
And yet they're going to be better in a decade, which will require understanding why they aren't perfect today.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs piggyback on human knowledge encoded in all the texts they were trained on without understanding what they're doing. Humans would execute that code and validate it. From plausible it'd becomes hey, it does this and this is what I want. LLMs skip that part, they really have no understanding other than the statistical patterns they infer from their training and they really don't need any for what they are.
Could we stop using vague terms like “understanding” when talking about LLMs and machine learning? You don't know what understanding is. You only know how it feels to understand something. It's better to describe what you can do that LLMs currently can't.
We can't use understanding but we can use learning, got it.
Re: LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, how is that different from humans? I’m not going around trying to prove my code correct when I write it manually.
I write code to solve a problem. Not code that looks like it solves the problem if a non-technical client squints at it. And if you don't prove your code, do you not design at all then? Do you never draw state diagrams? Every design is an informal proof of the solution. Rarely I write formal proofs. Most of the time I write down enough for myself to be convinced that the desing solves the problem.
You are correct. However, humans sometimes do write stuff that "looks like it solves the problem". A prime example of this is a student who doesn't know how to answer a question. So they make up a plausible sounding answer.
As a exam grader, you can easily tell when a student has the mindset of "solving a problem" but made a mistake, and when they had the mindset of "looks like it solves the problem" and just wrote some stuff.