Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
brandensilva | on: Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation
Right more simply put it's great at being a copy cat, exploring similar data points that match your token needs.

It is not great at decision making or judgment calls that don't have a well defined spec or plan in place yet; like unofficial or unapproved tokens if you will. A lot of this stuff simply never has had specs as it has been internal to how companies work and their secret sauce.

The closest thing we have are governance and compliance policies due to legal/business needs requiring it so it's far more well documented than operational ones in how we work. It is more about the how versus the what here I guess is what I'm saying.

But yeah this is why it does great when there are tests, design systems, evals, and other artifacts to mirror. Far more reckless and unpredictable without these things, but still great for exploration and finding the data output you seek.

withinboredom | parent
Doesn't that make sense? Its text prediction. If you give it examples, it can predict. Synthesizing "put semi-colons on new lines" requires it to generate its own examples 'in its head' (so to speak) and remember that. It won't.

It's like when I see people feeding it a whole bunch of "best practices" and expect it to follow them. It won't. But you could ask it questions about the best practices all day long.

dnautics | root | parent | next
Supposing an unspecified or poorly specified function f(x), and example "f(A)=>B", "given C tell me what f(C) is" lies at the core of creativity.

Idk, calling it "just text prediction " seems unfairly dismissive of this capability

withinboredom | root | parent
Saying that it’s dismissive is like saying writing (insert language) is dismissive that you’re just writing assembly.

at the end of the day, it presents a vector field and predicts the next vector. That’s literally the heart of intelligence just like assembly is the heart of execution. When playing table tennis, your brain is literally predicting seconds into the future to get your body into the right position.

But we aren’t discussing intelligence here. We are discussing how best to utilize that intelligence.

brandensilva | root | parent
Yes, exactly. Any engineer deep on this stuff right now understands that grounded predictive engine sprinkled with RL training and are discovering what that means in terms of its strengths and weaknesses for company use.