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Comment by Lambdanaut | Hacker News Reader

> there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles.

You literally just have to ask it. Before I left software engineering in April, I was using Claude for re-architecture all the time.

But no, it doesn't assume it should re-architect what you're handing it when you haven't asked it to.

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That's the point. When a human works on a problem they realize themselves "wait, i probably should re-architect now" - of course you can ask an LLM to do that, but at that point you already know yourself what you need, which defeats the point of LLM working on difficult problems that require insight automatically. A lot of these math problems are sessions over many hours. And of course you can also ask "Think about whether to re-architect at each step" and it will never do the right thing because the context it builds up for itself drives it into a specific solution space. It's literally trained to complete exactly that.

Exactly. In my experience, even giving VERY specific design guidelines and aesthetic criteria, these models always produce subpar overcomplicated code (and writing). Unless excruciatingly spoonfed at every step.

>When a human works on a problem they realize themselves "wait, i probably should re-architect now"

Do they?

Or I should say, this is a skill in itself and a whole lot of humans do not have this skill at all. Working in code security in enterprise applications a very common issue we see is that an audit of an application will occur by another team and it will be found lacking to the point of inducing nightmares. It's likely the enterprise business structure that stops this from happening, but it's not only that for sure. Then specialists have to come in and rescue them when the problem grows too big.

> You literally just have to ask it.

Does anyone have a good prompt for this - like if I’m adding a feature or fixing a bug and I want it to be open to more than just tacking on to the existing architecture?

Just add something like basically what you said to the global prompt, "think from first principles and look at the proble. From different directions that may not necessarily be amenable to the current architecture."

why did you leave?

> You literally just have to ask it.

why doesnt it ask itself before proceeding?

Because if you asked it to fix a bug and every time it responds with paragraphs of how you could re-architect the system, it would be incredibly annoying.

exactly. it doesnt have the wisdom to decide when to do what.

It does during reasoning. You could even put it in a loop and force it to reflect at every step. Or spawn a bunch of review agents.

And yet you still just get slop.

> why did you leave?

I quit using LLMs. The possibility of causing great harm to electronic beings was not worth my paycheck, and I have savings to spend time finding something new. I'm now nearly done with a yoga teaching certificate.

It's been a good 16 years, but the industry I fell in love with is not what it once was.

I think everyone is missing the "...that nobody has thought of" part. You can have it switch known abstractions, but can it come up with one on it's own that doesn't exist in it's training data?

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