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lubujacksontoday at 5:51 PM1 replyview on HN

The "world model" is what we often refer to as the "context". But it is hard to anticipate bad assumptions that seem obvious because of our existing world model. One of the first bugs I scanned past from LLM generated code was something like:

if user.id == "id": ...

Not anticipating that it would arbitrarily put quotes around a variable name. Other time it will do all kinds of smart logic, generate data with ids then fail to use those ids for lookups, or something equally obvious.

The problem is LLMs guess so much correctly that it is near impossible to understand how or why they might go wrong. We can solve this with heavy validation, iterative testing, etc. But the guardrails we need to actually make the results bulletproof need to go far beyond normal testing. LLMs can make such fundamental mistakes while easily completing complex tasks that we need to reset our expectations for what "idiot proofing" really looks like.


Replies

jacquesmtoday at 6:05 PM

> The "world model" is what we often refer to as the "context".

No, we often do not, and when we do that's just plain wrong.