I didn’t claim that LLMs are people or that they reason.

If the behavior of the llm is the same as the behavior of reasonable people then the behavior of the llm is reasonable, regardless of how black of a box they generate tokens out of.

Reasonable people will generate divergent specs for the same prompt. Thus it is reasonable for an LLM to generate divergent specs out of the same prompt.

Edit: I use “reasonable” here in the legal sense of the “reasonable person” standard, not to imply any reasoning process.

Aren’t people pattern matching neural networks as well? Why does being a token generator mean something is unreliable?

Further, why does that mean “it doesn’t reason”. Logic can be encoded in language, symbols or code. If I say “all apples are red” -> “all fruit in the bowl are apples” -> “therefor all the fruit are red”. It doesn’t really matter if I understand the logic or what red is or fruit/apples are, the logic is contained in the structure of the syntax. If an LLM can output the conclusion reliably from predictive operations it is able to have the effect of reason and we don’t need to know or care about whether it “understands” the reasoning.

why do people insist on claiming that they don’t reason, when they clearly, for all intents and purposes, do. you can be vague; you can express your idea a thousand different ways, and you will get a unique blend of <your input bits> x <hidden reasoning layer> => semi-smoothed output. this is like some Searle Chinese Room bullshit that needs to just die. it is beyond clear that llms can interact with abstract concepts in an extremely meaningful way. this is like the “thought leader” version of the stupid-ass “it’s just smart autocomplete” argument. if you think that, it is user error— either a failure of creativity or a failure of perception or both. just because llms are not a panacea and are problematic for society and “overhyped” and whatever does not make it intellectually honest to claim that there is zero reasoning/creativity/cognition within the box.

it's an analogy, it didnt fall on its face at all. it's just a comparison to highlight the point being made was nonsensical. example: you're just a next action generator controlled by trillions of cells and subconscious dna-based behavior. a black box.

It appears they don't need to reason or be intelligent to be able to produce working solutions for code. But sure let wild and unmonitored? I wrangle my LLMs like the code monkeys they are. They help materialize code and then you need to sculpt it (and test harness of varying sorts)

It really can be useful. It's very different from old world programming.

LLMs do reason (they just sometimes don't reason well).

I assure you I've met many devs and "engineers" that reason less than LLMs, and are black boxes, especially in terms of the code they write.

Wow, there are still people trying to claim they don't reason. What will they have to do before you'll admit that they can?

They very obviously reason.