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I like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.

r_lee 20d ago
I remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"
- NoDodgeQuestion 20d ago
  AI model does not know special insight into how model itself was trained. All it tells you is it's prediction of expected explanation.
  - r_lee 20d ago
    yeah but I didn't prompt it in a way where I tried to get such an answer, it gave an entire boilerplate rundown just from like me asking "what's up with the 'seams'?" I might be wrong, but usually it'd be a lot less deliberate, and at least in my mind it wouldn't be surprising if they were heaving training these on these specific "best practices" books/methodologies and thus picking up lingo from them
    - Maxion 20d ago
      Those books are definitely in the training set if the model can mention them, but why exactly these terms are so commonly used is not necessarily because the book is in the training material. The model does not itself know how its trained.
  - nl 20d ago
    I checked this, and Claude says "it's a real term of art from Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code (2004), where he defines it as a place you can alter a program's behavior without editing in that place." While I agree the model doesn't have insight into how it was trained I do think the history of the term itself is interesting.
- sethd 20d ago
  I've read that book and it's one of the very core concepts that relates to introducing tests in legacy code ("finding a seam").

r_lee 20d ago

I remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"

NoDodgeQuestion 20d ago
AI model does not know special insight into how model itself was trained. All it tells you is it's prediction of expected explanation.
- r_lee 20d ago
  yeah but I didn't prompt it in a way where I tried to get such an answer, it gave an entire boilerplate rundown just from like me asking "what's up with the 'seams'?" I might be wrong, but usually it'd be a lot less deliberate, and at least in my mind it wouldn't be surprising if they were heaving training these on these specific "best practices" books/methodologies and thus picking up lingo from them
  - Maxion 20d ago
    Those books are definitely in the training set if the model can mention them, but why exactly these terms are so commonly used is not necessarily because the book is in the training material. The model does not itself know how its trained.
- nl 20d ago
  I checked this, and Claude says "it's a real term of art from Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code (2004), where he defines it as a place you can alter a program's behavior without editing in that place." While I agree the model doesn't have insight into how it was trained I do think the history of the term itself is interesting.
sethd 20d ago
I've read that book and it's one of the very core concepts that relates to introducing tests in legacy code ("finding a seam").