Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

I’d guess no. Past a certain point the model has all the capabilities it can possibly usefully offer and honestly we may already be past that. The next gen model just doesn’t seem like as clear a step up as it once was.

“I had Claude do this for me and it broke something.”

No. Just no.

You used Claude, a tool, and broke it, and you’re deflecting agency from yourself, possibly because you weren’t careful enough in reviewing the tool output. This is also why the co-authored by addition it wants to force into commits drives me nuts. Claude doesn’t co author shit, and if you think it does, you’re using it wrong because you need to do better review of what it’s done.

The LLM is a big probabilistic statistical trick. It picks the next token based on certain words are simply “the best” because they are specific and well connected to other tokens. The is gives them a great overall cost function. (Basically a good score on “will it make sense in context” while also having specific meaning that makes it better than other options, unambiguous in common use and being a single token rather than several).

You can trim those tokens, but then you just get other tokens that are “the best” tokens (and you’re worse off because the output became less clear).

The cool thing is this seems to get worse the more powerful and accurate your model is, because it is picking technically / statistically perfect tokens, not tasteful ones.

Basically the community is people checking it out, bots, and the terminally addicted multi boxing 30 accounts.

All witty stuff disappearing and turning into LLM mush is kind of the maximal expression of capitalism for capitalism’s sake. We don’t care if things are novel or interesting, we’re producing “content” to fulfill an imaginary content demand that we can feed to make money.

The best way to feed it is to create stuff that’s just barely enough degrees of quality from a viagra spam email that it can pass for original thought.

—- —- —- Em dashes for emotiveness.

These are not trivial things even though they are things that senior developers tend to trivialize.

If you’re describing the wrong problem, you’ll get a right answer that doesn’t fix it.

If you’re describing the right problem wrongly, you’ll get another wrong answer that talks past being right.

If you’re describing a difficult problem that maybe isn’t even solved in existing stuff, you can get help figuring out the necessary steps if you have an idea where to start.

If you don’t know where to start you can start by asking where to start.

Anyway, point is, I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you know (or think you know) and what you don’t know. I don’t have a magic wand, I have years of experience grinding down problems until they submit.

“Do they make money? I don’t know but I know they’re magnificent!”

Then we had computerized encyclopedias and search engines that searched the library.

I mean, you had to work for the knowledge. Sometimes you didn’t know something and no one else knew either, so you had to wait until you got a chance to find out, but you would think about it and sometimes you would be right when you found a reference source.

I’ll also note, Wikipedia is a secondary source. It is not a reliable source of truth. It is more like the ‘ask someone else’ alternative than anything else, it’s just ‘someone else’ is a person on the internet who writes Wikipedia articles.