5 ms·

Care to share the problem?

by sumedh 13d ago

Paracompact 12d ago
Not OP but here's a problem just today: I was using an AI to help me set up a container to be used as the Nix build environment for another AI. This build environment would not have Internet access. I was having it base its approach off a previous container used for a Stack build environment. In its initial analysis of my proposed strategy, it insists as its premier point /against/ the strategy, "you will have to rebuild the container every time your flake.nix changes." Two head-slapping errors of judgement in saying something like that: (1) The Stack solution is identical. Change stack.yaml, the container must rebuild. (2) It is not physically possible to do better than this while insisting on an internet-free environment. So on this point, it was just parroting advice irrelevant to the context at hand. LLMs always have such a bizarre mix of technical knowledge and lack of good judgment.
- munksbeer 12d ago
  Not the person who asked, but yes, that sounds like a small lack of judgement, but hardly a huge problem. You just correct it and move on. I work on some reasonably sophisticated stuff (not inventing a new form of compression sophisticated, but still) and I just don't seem to encounter so many of the issues people talk about with these models. It's really hard to say why, everyone uses them differently. I generally start complex tasks with a "here is what I am trying to achieve as a high level, here is a file that lists the technical constraints, here are my initial thoughts, here is where I am uncertain, what am I missing, lets have a deep back and forth discussion about it with the aim of ...." Not always the same prompt, definitely not when the task is simpler, but this usually gets me to a good place before it I get it to write any code. And our repo has very strong opinions and guidelines for how testing is done - we're lucky enough that we write mostly single threaded low latency code, so testing it end to end is very easy.

Care to share the problem?

by sumedh 13d ago

Care to share the problem?

Not OP but here's a problem just today: I was using an AI to help me set up a container to be used as the Nix build environment for another AI. This build environment would not have Internet access. I was having it base its approach off a previous container used for a Stack build environment. In its initial analysis of my proposed strategy, it insists as its premier point /against/ the strategy, "you will have to rebuild the container every time your flake.nix changes." Two head-slapping errors of judgement in saying something like that: (1) The Stack solution is identical. Change stack.yaml, the container must rebuild. (2) It is not physically possible to do better than this while insisting on an internet-free environment. So on this point, it was just parroting advice irrelevant to the context at hand. LLMs always have such a bizarre mix of technical knowledge and lack of good judgment.

munksbeer 12d ago
Not the person who asked, but yes, that sounds like a small lack of judgement, but hardly a huge problem. You just correct it and move on. I work on some reasonably sophisticated stuff (not inventing a new form of compression sophisticated, but still) and I just don't seem to encounter so many of the issues people talk about with these models. It's really hard to say why, everyone uses them differently. I generally start complex tasks with a "here is what I am trying to achieve as a high level, here is a file that lists the technical constraints, here are my initial thoughts, here is where I am uncertain, what am I missing, lets have a deep back and forth discussion about it with the aim of ...." Not always the same prompt, definitely not when the task is simpler, but this usually gets me to a good place before it I get it to write any code. And our repo has very strong opinions and guidelines for how testing is done - we're lucky enough that we write mostly single threaded low latency code, so testing it end to end is very easy.