@glyph LLMs also break the standard 'interchangable parts' of programming... they often end up writing whole new bespoke subroutines, systems, libraries, rather than reuse existing ones...
Like - imagine you are automating building a car, but, every component of every car is being procedurally generated and manuactured for that speciffic car. It's the dumbest possible way to automate *building* things.
@glyph In the car example, it means you can't have, say, a mechanic come fix your engine - he's never seen any of the parts, he might be able to figure out what does what, with time, and maybe even fix it, but every single engine he tries to fix is restarting from 'figure it out from first principals',
there's no way to easily replace a part - it's the only one, and you'd need to try to remake a new one each time it needs replacing, etc.
@glyph And each one would have it's own failure profile - "common issues" concentrated at known weak-points are a problem of standardized designs, but also become heuristics for diagnosing and fixing problems - with bespoke parts per-car, every one has it's own distinct weak points, you don't have a checklist of common issues to run through.
@glyph (and on the computers side - a weakness in a shared library, or widely-reused function means you can potentially fix it all at once, for everything using it, while bespoke code means every break needs to be done at an individual level.)
@miss_rodent good news! just pour an UNLIMITED amount of money on the money fire, and you can "just" have your agents fix all the duplicated bugs!
@miss_rodent just, you know, make sure to say "make no mistakes" when you tell them to fix the bugs, otherwise, their might be bugs in the fixes. it's important to make sure there are no bugs in the fixes.
@glyph Yeah, the intended solution seems to just be "pour infinite money into it, and pray at the altar of the artificial god."
@miss_rodent @glyph that depends a lot on how clear the prompts given. If a naïve user doesn't give some initial prompting and ground rules about what language versions, environments and existing libraries are available for use, many coding LLMs will reinvent the wheel with brand new errors rather than using tried And tested library code honed over decades.
Don't outsource thinking to an infinite monkey machine, you still have to task it with clearly written and considered prompts.
@zymurgic @miss_rodent @glyph it can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong
