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Comment by zachthewf | Hacker News Reader

I’ve found Sol performance to be incredibly spiky. It has tremendous IQ and can fix very difficult bugs. But it is horrible at design (both visual and system design), anything that involves thinking about users or UX, and massively overcomplicates almost all work.

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I noticed the same. I wanted a simple crud webapp and suggested an insane techstack involving C#, Razor Pages, MSSQL and more. I went with my planned setup of python flask with an sqlite db which served me well for years.

It's still incredibly important to have a human in the loop correcting design decisions and having good taste.

> insane techstack involving C#, Razor Pages, MSSQL

Is a very sane tech stack, you're just biased against Microsoft.

Half the world's enterprise apps run on that combination, or a minor variation of it.

Like Java it is full featured ("batteries included") but unlike Java it is relatively terse and actually pleasant to work with.

Oh, and unlike Python, it is very fast, within spitting distance of compiled Rust and C++ web apps.

There are a million and one reasons to be biased against Microsoft, regardless of the fact that C# tech stack is decent

Correct I'm biased against technologies that only run on a single OS for no benefit to the user.

ASP.NET runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows.

Microsoft SQL Server now (also) ships as a Docker container that runs on Linux.

> Correct I'm biased against technologies that only run on a single OS for no benefit to the user.

Do you ever use software that only works on Linux?

Do you use an Android phone?

.NET has not been a particularly Windows specific framework for almost a decade now.

You could have just added “flask SQLite stack” to whatever prompt you added. Just those three words, randomly somewhere in your prompt.

Was your prompt just "I want a simple crud webapp" and that's the extent of it? There's absolutely no way you included the words "python", "flask", or "sqlite" and it still went with a Microsoft stack.

Dotnet minimal APIs plus mssql is fine for simple crud apps… I would do Postgres, but that’s me.

Swapping mssql to SQLite would also work perfectly

I vastly prefer Sol. It does what I tell it to almost exactly, pretty much every time.

I work on very low level stuff (think RTL/FPGA, firmware, software where optimising for nanoseconds is just normal).

For me Sol is the only cost effective model available. Fable 5.1 is indeed good and vastly better than original Fable (which refused to work on most of my stuff for 'safety' reasons).

It's very good at this sort of low level stuff to the point that I really can't understand/relate to people having a good time with Opus (which comparatively performs extremely poorly on my particular workload).

I also just don't like how lazy Anthropic models are. They will do 10% of what is asked and then summarily declare victory.

Sol on the other hand is more like "one of us", slight touch of the 'tism, extremely pedantic, will go to the edge of the known universe if that is what it takes to prove/fix/build what you asked for or run out out of credits trying.

It's a personal and workload dependent thing. For me right now Sol for 99% of stuff because Fable 5.1 still burns through $5k in credits a day.

Agree 100%. And I also work a lot on lower level / systems stuff (including RTL here and there, too). Opus is sloppy, and leaves negative cases all over. The GPT models in Codex have a more pedantic and detail oriented "personality." Often to a fault.

Sol will leave a mess of excessive redundant tests and isn't so great at abstraction ; but it produces more reliable working systems.

It's kind of nice to have access to both, but I don't have the $$ for that right now, so I just keep the Codex sub

Can confirm this as well, mostly VHDL and HLS. Sol and Fable can reason about performance and designs consistently. Whereas Opus and others seem to just throw generic optimisation techniques at the wall unprovoked (while hallucinating a justification + expected improvement) until the synth reports improve.

> massively overcomplicates almost all work

People with high IQ often do this IRL. There's training tension in this area. Intelligence and overcomplication correlate and are hard to extricate.

Intelligence is actually correlated with the ability to simplify complicated things. Occam's razor. Compression as comprehension.

We're not asking the model to simplify something, we're asking it to perform a task. Its subtle preferences show up as an overcomplicated path to the goal.

In some cases, there are also nuances that we don't pick up on. Here it's our preference for simplification that's showing up. We set the lossy compression factor higher than it does.

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