alt Hacker News> I don't know why they think this, but no? Perhaps it's badly expressed, but LLMs cut corners all the time. It's sort of their core fault really.
I think this is a matter of perspective about what counts as "cutting corners".
I think they look like you describe only because they have limited competence; this is on the basis that when I asked one to make a fusion reactor simulator (to see if it could) by using open source plasma physics libraries which it had itself suggested at the start of this process (e.g. WarpX), it didn't take the "lazy" option of actually using those libraries, it tried to write its own plasma physics simulation from scratch "as a fallback if we can't install the libraries".
As it was not sufficiently competent, the resulting "simulator" was hilariously wildly unphysical.
Would have been much better if it had been lazy.
To your deeper point: I agree. In this case it made so much of a mess that there was no point trying to rescue it; as it was done from scratch, throwing it away and starting again was fine*, but if this had been pushing commits that got interleaved with real work on the main branch of an existing project it would have been a serious issue.
* or in my case, not even bothering to start again. Like I said, this was done to see if it could.
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> I think this is a matter of perspective about what counts as "cutting corners".
The nature of probabilistic sampling practically guarantees that corner cutting is always just a few samples away. Certain sampling strategies can mitigate this, but there's no way to fully eliminate it, without fully eliminating it from the training data and guarding against it during training. Model reasoning can help by giving the model space to draft and review its approach before it executes, but models still aren't guaranteed to follow their own thinking. A mistake or shortcut can always simply slip in during generation and it won't always be caught and corrected.
The diligence to the absurd that you describe is really just a consequence of cutting corners at planning stages. Consider an organization that relies heavily on formal proofs and specifications to one that uses what fits on the 3 bullets allowed in a PowerPoint slide. The first might do less work over all because the second is cutting corners in planning.