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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

#41

Post by ordinaryatom »

maxilevi wrote: post #31
johnisgood wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it "just search" is like calling a compiler "just string manipulation". Not false, but aggressively missing the point.

I don't mean search in the reductionist way but rather that its much better at translating, finding and mapping concepts if everything is provided vs creating from scratch. If it could truly think it would be able to bootstrap creations from basic principles like we do, but it really can't. Doesn't mean its not a great powerful tool.

> If it could truly think it would be able to bootstrap creations from basic principles like we do, but it really can't.

alphazero?

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

#43

Post by doug_durham »

bblcla wrote: post #33
simonw wrote: post #30

I'm not entirely convinced by the anecdote here where Claude wrote "bad" React code: > But in context, this was obviously insane. I knew that key and id came from the same upstream source. So the correct solution was to have the upstream source also pass id to the code that had key, to let it do a fast lookup. I've seen Claude make mistakes like that too, but then the moment you say "you can modify the calling code a…

(Author here) > I'm not entirely convinced by the anecdote here where Claude wrote "bad" React code Yeah, that's fair - a friend of mine also called this out on Twitter ( https://x.com/konstiwohlwend/status/2010799158261936281 ) and I went into more technical detail about the specific problem there. > I've seen Claude make mistakes like that too, but then the moment you say "you can modify the calling code as well" o…

That's where you come in as an experienced developer. You point out the issues and iterate. That's the normal flow of working with these tools.

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

#44

Post by bblcla »

doug_durham wrote: post #42

Did the author ask it to make new abstractions? In my experience when I produces output that I don't like I ask it to refactor it. These models have and understanding of all modern design patterns. Just ask it to adopt one.

(Author here)

I have! I agree it's very good at applying abstractions, if you know exactly what you want. What I notice is that Claude has almost no ability to surface those abstractions on its own.

When I started having it write React, Claude produced incredibly buggy spaghetti code. I had to spend 3 weeks learning the fundamentals of React (how to use hooks, providers, stores, etc.) before I knew how to prompt it to write better code. Now that I've done that, it's great. But it's meaningful that someone who doesn't know how to write well-abstracted React code can't get Claude to produce it on their own.

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

#45

Post by bblcla »

doug_durham wrote: post #43
bblcla wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here) > I'm not entirely convinced by the anecdote here where Claude wrote "bad" React code Yeah, that's fair - a friend of mine also called this out on Twitter ( https://x.com/konstiwohlwend/status/2010799158261936281 ) and I went into more technical detail about the specific problem there. > I've seen Claude make mistakes like that too, but then the moment you say "you can modify the calling code as well" o…

That's where you come in as an experienced developer. You point out the issues and iterate. That's the normal flow of working with these tools.

I agree! Like I said at the end of the tool, I think Claude is a great tool. In this piece, I'm arguing against the 'AGI' believers who think it's going to replace all developers.

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

#46

Post by szundi »

pc86 wrote: post #40
andrei_says_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Novel” to the person who has not consumed the training data. Otherwise, just training data combined in highly probable ways. Not quite autocomplete but not intelligence either.

What is the difference between "novel" and "novel to someone who hasn't consumed the entire corpus of training data, which is several orders of magnitude greater than any human being could consume?"

[dead]

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

#47

Post by DebtDeflation »

bhadass wrote: post #16
maxilevi wrote: post #8

LLMs are just really good search. Ask it to create something and it's searching within the pretrained weights. Ask it to find something and it's semantically searching within your codebase. Ask it to modify something and it will do both. Once you understand its just search, you can get really good results.

better mental model: it's a lossy compression of human knowledge that can decompress and recombine in novel (sometimes useful, sometimes sloppy) ways. classical search simply retrieves, llms can synthesize as well.

Information Retrieval followed by Summarization is how I view it.

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

#48

Post by andy99 »

bhadass wrote: post #16
maxilevi wrote: post #8

LLMs are just really good search. Ask it to create something and it's searching within the pretrained weights. Ask it to find something and it's semantically searching within your codebase. Ask it to modify something and it will do both. Once you understand its just search, you can get really good results.

better mental model: it's a lossy compression of human knowledge that can decompress and recombine in novel (sometimes useful, sometimes sloppy) ways. classical search simply retrieves, llms can synthesize as well.

No, this describes the common understanding of LLMs and adds little to just calling it AI. The search is the more accurate model when considering their actual capabilities and understanding weaknesses. “Lossy compression of human knowledge” is marketing.

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

#49

Post by Scrapemist »

Eventually you can show Claude how you solve problems, and explain the thought process behind it. It can apply these learnings but it will encounter new challenges in doing so. It would be nice if Claude could instigate a conversation to go over the issues in depth. Now it wants quick confirmation to plough ahead.

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

#50

Post by XenophileJKO »

RhythmFox wrote: post #21
bhadass wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

better mental model: it's a lossy compression of human knowledge that can decompress and recombine in novel (sometimes useful, sometimes sloppy) ways. classical search simply retrieves, llms can synthesize as well.

This isn't strictly better to me. It captures some intuitions about how a neural network ends up encoding its inputs over time in a 'lossy' way (doesn't store previous input states in an explicit form). Maybe saying 'probabilistic compression/decompression' makes it a bit more accurate? I do not really think it connects to your 'synthesize' claim at the very end to call it compression/decompression, but I am curious…

It's really way more interesting that that.

The act of compression builds up behaviors/concepts of greater and greater abstraction. Another way you could think about it is that the model learns to extract commonality, hence the compression. What this means is because it is learning higher level abstractions AND the relationships between these higher level abstractions, it can ABSOLUTELY learn to infer or apply things way outside their training distribution.

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