alt Hacker News...by inferring both the imports and the script body from the same context? I think you're suggesting there's some kind of information flow from the anticipated body of the script back up to the imports, but I don't see why that would be necessary. Infer imports from context, infer body from context + imports. All strictly causal.
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That suggests a straightforward mapping between context -> program. Maybe for trivial programs but I don’t see how you can argue that for sufficiently complex programs.
Reasoning models perform better than non-reasoning models because they’re able to refine their code in multiple steps. That allows any part of the program to influence any other part of the program, not just from start -> end.
Human thinking serves a similar purpose. Basically intelligence needs to be able to backtrack if you want better performance.
Sure, try it. It's harder than you think. It's not just imports, it's the entire program.
> you're suggesting there's some kind of information flow from the anticipated body of the script back up to the imports
Yes, I am suggesting this. I don't think it is possible to write programs without either anticipating what you're going to write down below before you get there, or else being able to go back and edit what you already wrote.
Of course agent harnesses allow the latter, but raw models without a harness can still do an exceptionally, superhumanly, good job of straight-line programming with no editing.
> Infer imports from context, infer body from context + imports. All strictly causal.
Of course it's causal, that's kind of a reductive way to look at it.
Just infer the entire program from context and then type what you inferred.