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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

#61

Post by mattmanser »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #60
joshcsimmons wrote: post #57

IDK I've been using opus 4.5 to create a UI library and it's been doing pretty well: https://simsies.xyz/ (still early days) Granted it was building ontop of tailwind (shifting over to radix after the layoff news). Begs the question? What is a lego?

I don't know how someone can look at what you build and conclude LLMs are still google search. It boggles the mind how much hatred people have for AI to the point of self deception. The evidence is placed right in front of you and on your lap with that link and people still deny it.

How do you come to that conclusion?

There are absolutely tons of code pens of that style. And jsfiddles, zen gardens, etc.

I think the true mind boggle is you don't seem to realize just how much content the AI conpanies have stolen.

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

#62

Post by ekidd »

jerf wrote: post #29
alfalfasprout wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think we'll get to the point where all you have is a CEO and a massive Claude account but it's not completely science fiction the more I think about it. At that point, why do you even need the CEO?

You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI. That's probably the biggest threat to the long-term success of the AI industry; the inevitable pull towards encroaching more and more of their own interests into the AI themselves, driven by that Harvard Business School mentality we're all so familiar with, trying to…

> You will need the CEO to watch over the AI and ensure that the interests of the company are being pursued and not the interests of the owners of the AI.

In this scenario, why does the AI care what any of these humans think? The CEO, the board, the shareholders, the "AI company"—they're all just a bunch of dumb chimps providing zero value to the AI, and who have absolutely no clue what's going on.

If your scenario assumes that you have a highly capable AI that can fill every role in a large corporation, then you have one hell of a principal-agent problem.

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

#63

Post by dehugger »

joshcsimmons wrote: post #57

IDK I've been using opus 4.5 to create a UI library and it's been doing pretty well: https://simsies.xyz/ (still early days) Granted it was building ontop of tailwind (shifting over to radix after the layoff news). Begs the question? What is a lego?

your github repo was highly entertaining. thanks for make my day a bit brighter:)

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

#64

Post by lordnacho »

By and large, I agree with the article. Claude is great and fast at doing low level dev work. Getting the syntax right in some complicated mechanism, executing an edit-execute-readlog loop, making multi file edits.

This is exactly why I love it. It's smart enough to do my donkey work.

I've revisited the idea that typing speed doesn't matter for programmers. I think it's still an odd thing to judge a candidate on, but appreciate it in another way now. Being able to type quickly and accurately reduces frustration, and people who foresee less frustration are more likely to try the thing they are thinking about.

With LLMs, I have been able to try so many things that I never tried before. I feel that I'm learning faster because I'm not tripping over silly little things.

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

#65

Post by maxilevi »

ordinaryatom wrote: post #41
maxilevi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just said LLMs

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

#66

Post by onemoresoop »

fennecbutt wrote: post #52
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.

I agree somewhat, but more when it comes to its use of logic - it only gleans logic from human language which as we know is a fucking mess. I've commented before on my belief that the majority of human activity is derivative. If you ask someone to think of a new kind of animal, alien or random object they will always base it off things that they have seen before. Truly original thoughts and things in this world are a…

LLMs lack agency in the sense that they have no goals, preferences, or commitments. Humans do, even when our ideas are derivative. We can decide that this is the right choice and move forward, subjectively and imperfectly. That capacity to commit under uncertainty is part of what agency actually is.

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

#67

Post by pluralmonad »

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…

I wonder if this is specific to Python. I've had no trouble like that with Claude generating Elixir. Claude sticks to the existing styles and paradigms quite well. Can see in the thinking traces that Claude takes this into consideration.

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

#68

Post by adrian_b »

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?"

The difference is that when you do not know how a problem can be solved, but you know that this kind of problem has been solved countless times earlier by various programmers, you know that it is likely that if you ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, you will get an acceptable solution.

On the other hand, if the problem you have to solve has never been solved before at a quality satisfactory for your purpose, then it is futile to ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, because it is pretty certain that the proposed solution will be unacceptable (unless the AI succeeds to duplicate the performance of a monkey that would type a Shakespearean text by typing randomly).

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

#69

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

Definitely, The training parameters encourage this. The AI is actually deliberately also trying to trick you and we know for that for a fact.

Problems with solutions too complicated to explain or to output in one sitting are out of the question. The AI will still bias towards one shot solutions if given one of these problems because all the training is biased towards a short solution.

It's not really practical to give it training data with multi step ultra complicated solutions. Think about it. The thousands of questions given to it for reinforcement.... the trainer is going to be trying to knock those out as efficiently as possible so they have to be readable problems with shorter readable solutions. So we know AI biases towards shorter readable solutions.

Second, Any solution that tricks the reader will pass training. There is for sure a subset of questions/solution pairs that meet this criteria by definition because WE as trainers simply are unaware we are being tricked. So this data leaks into the training and as a result AI will bias towards deception as well.

So all in all it is trained to trick you and give you the best solution that can fit into a context that is readable in one sitting.

In theory we can get it to do what we want only if we had perfect reinforcement data. The reliability we're looking for seems to be just right over this hump.

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

#70

Post by ekidd »

ako wrote: post #51
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…

> I agree, but I think I'm less optimistic than you that Claude will be able to catch its own mistakes in the future. On the other hand, I can definitely see how a ~more intelligent model might be able to catch mistakes on a larger and larger scale. Claude already does this. Yesterday i asked it why some functionality was slow, it did some research, and then came back with all the right performance numbers, how often…

I have been reading through this thread, and my first reaction to many of the comments was "Skill issue."

Yes, it can build things that have never existed before. Yes, it can review its own code. Yes, it can do X, Y and Z.

Does it do all these things spontaneously with no structure? No, it doesn't. Are there tricks to getting it do some of these things? Yup. If you want code review, start by writing a code review "skill". Have that skill ask Opus to fork off several subagents to review different aspects, and then synthesize the reports, with issues broken down by Critical, Major and Minor. Have the skill describe all the things you want from a review.

There are, as the OP pointed out, a lot of reasons why you can't run it with no human at all. But with an experienced human nudging it? It can do a lot.

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