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MoreQARespecttoday at 10:37 AM2 repliesview on HN

Humans have the ability to retrospect, push back on a faulty spec, push back on an unclarified spec, do experiments, make judgement calls and build tools and processes to account for their own foibles.


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wizzwizz4today at 11:45 AM

Humans also have the ability to introspect. Ultimately, (nearly) every software project is intended to provide a service to humans, and most humans are similar in most ways: "what would I want it to do?" is a surprisingly-reliable heuristic for dealing with ambiguity, especially if you know where you should and shouldn't expect it to be valid.

The best LLMs can manage is "what's statistically-plausible behaviour for descriptions of humans in the corpus", which is not the same thing at all. Sometimes, I imagine, that might be more useful; but for programming (where, assuming you're not reinventing wheels or scrimping on your research, you're often encountering situations that nobody has encountered before), an alien mind's extrapolation of statistically-plausible human behaviour observations is not useful. (I'm using "alien mind" metaphorically, since LLMs do not appear particularly mind-like to me.)

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pablobaztoday at 11:32 AM

which bits of this do you think llm based agents can't do?

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