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Comment by kookamamie | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. In my view people over-think the use of Claude in many cases.

Because it's marketed as AI and it takes a while to figure out that it's really quite limited. In my opinion there's not a lot of intelligence going on, It's great at translating a requirement and giving you an approximation of what you asked for, but there isn't really any "thinking" going on.

I think when they advertise "thinking" it just does a few more iterations of giving you the closest "number in your head from the clues you've given it (requirements).

I saw someone once say that LLMs are a kind of "word calculator" and I feel that's quite a good description.

It is much better at making todo lists than it is at completing them successfully. But I appreciate having “someone to chat with” when I’m puzzling over codes or what to do next. Especially when I’m getting started on something new I don’t know a lot about.

To be fair, if you turn on thinking mode on Llms and see the output their is some thinking/reasoning.

A simple example:

Prompt:Make it yellow

Think: the user wants something yellow but hasn't said what it is. Previously the user talked about creating a Button, so it must be the button but I should clarify by asking

Response: is it the button that you want yellow?

I guess it becomes philosophical, what is thinking? What I’ve notice it does all that but misses the absolute most obvious things or gets incredibly basic things wrong.

this part of LLMs is the pre-programmed human logic. The LLMs arent actually thinking, they're just going through a defined IF THEN loop based on whatever weights, if there is some ambiguity in a prompt the LLM is just programmed to prompt for more info. Its not actually thinking it needs to ask anything, its just coming back with low precision probability.

All of the recent improvements in the LLM's "thinking" have just been layers of programming on top of its statistical models. Which is why its becoming clear LLMs are really not advancing that much.

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