Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

LLMs are literal gambling - you get them to work right once and they are magical - then you end up chasing that high by tweaking the model and instructions the rest of the time.

View on HN

Or you put them to work with strong test suites and get stuff done. I am in bed. I have Claude fixing complex compiler bugs right now. It has "earned" that privilege by proving it can make good enough fixes, systematically removing actual, real bugs in reasonable ways by being given an immutable test suite and detailed instructions of the approach to follow.

There's no gambling involved. The results need to be checked, but the test suite is good enough it is hard for it to get away with something too stupid, and it's already demonstrated it knows x86 assembly much better than me.

If you were an x86 assembly expert would you still feel the same way? (assuming you aren't already)

Probably not. I have lots of experience with assembly in general, but not so much with x86. But the changes work and passes extensive tests, and some of them would be complex on any platform. I'm sure there will be cleanups and refinements needed, but I do know asm well enough to say that the fixes aren't horrific by any means - they're likely to be suboptimal, but supoptimal beats crashing or not compiling at all any day.

Just curious, how do you go about making the test suite immutable? Was just reading this earlier today...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45525085

Just don't give it write access, and rig it up so that you gate success on a file generated by running the test suite separate from the agent that it can't influence. It can tell me it has fixed things as much as it like, but until the tests actually passes it will just get told the problem still exists, to document the approach it tested and to document that it didn't work, and try again.

Appreciate the exposition, great ideas here. It's fascinating how the relationship between human and machine has become almost adversarial here!

The best way to get decent core I've found is test suites and a ton of linting rules.

Absolutely true re: ton of linting rules. In Ruby for example, Claude has a tendency to do horrific stuff like using instance_variable_get("@somevar") to avoid lack of accessors, instead of figuring out why there isn't an accessor, or adding one... A lot can even be achieved with pretty ad hoc hooks that don't do full linting but greps for things that are suspicious, and inject "questions" about whether X is really the appropriate way to do it, given rule Y in [some ruleset].

I actually found in my case that is just self inertia in not wanting to break through cognitive plateaus. The AI helped you with a breakthrough hence the magic, but you also did something right in your constructing of the context in the conversation with the AI; ie. you did thought and biomechanical[1] work. Now the dazzle of the AI's output makes you forget the work you still need to do, and the next time you prompt you get lazy, or you want much more, for much less.

[1] (moving your eyes, hands, hearing with your ears. etc)

LLMs are cargo cult generating machines. I’m not denying they can be useful for some tasks, but the amount of superstitions caused by these chaotic, random, black boxes is unreal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com