You can do a mental or physical search and replace all references to the LLM as "it" if you like, but that doesn't change the interaction.
Trying to limit / disallow something seems to be hurting the overall accuracy of models. And it makes sense if you think about it. Most of our long-horizon content is in the form of novels and above. If you're trying to clamp the machine to machine speak you'll lose all those learnings. Hero starts with a problem, hero works the problem, hero reaches an impasse, hero makes a choice, hero gets the princess. That can be (and probably is) useful.
"ChatGPT wrapper" is no longer a pejorative reference in my lexicon. How you expose the model to your specific problem space is everything. The code should look trivial because it is. That's what makes it so goddamn compelling.
Once again, one of the things I blame this moment for is people are essentially thinking they can stop thinking about code because the theft matrices seem magical. What we still need is better tools, not replacements for human junior engineers.
I believe how "neurotypical" (for the lack of a better word) you want model to be is a design choice. (But I also believe model traits such as sycophancy, some hallucinations or moral transgressions can be a side effect of training to be subservient. With humans it is similar, they tend to do these things when they are forced to perform.)
EDIT: It's specifically GPT-5.4 High in the Codex harness.
I ask my coding agent to do some tedious, extremely well-specified refactor, such as (to give a concrete real life example) changing a commonly used fn to take a locale parameter, because it will soon need to be locale-aware. I am very clear — we are not actually changing any behavior, just the fn signature. In fact, at all call sites, I want it to specify a default locale, because we haven't actually localized anything yet!
Said agent, I know, will spend many minutes (and tokens) finding all the call sites, and then I will still have to either confirm each update or yolo and trust the compiler and tests and the agents ability to deal with their failures. I am ok with this, because while I could do this just fine with vim and my lsp, the LLM agent can do it in about the same amount of time, maybe even a little less, and it's a very straightforward change that's tedious for me, and I'd rather think about or do anything else and just check in occasionally to approve a change.
But my f'ing agent is all like, "I found 67 call sites. This is a pretty substantial change. Maybe we should just commit the signature change with a TODO to update all the call sites, what do you think?"
And in that moment I guess I know why some people say having an LLM is like having a junior engineer who never learns anything.
You would think.
It would be one thing if it was like, ok, we'll temporarily commit the signature change, do some related thing, then come back and fix all the call sites, and squash before merging. But that is not the proposal. The plan it proposes is literally to make what it has identified as the minimal change, which obviously breaks the build, and call it a day, presuming that either I or a future session will do the obvious next step it is trying to beg off.
I have never seen those “minimal change” issues when using zed, but have seen them in claude code and aider. Been using sonnet/opus high thinking with the api in all the agents I have tested/used.
Reminds us of the most important button the "AI" has, over the similarly bad human employee.
'X'
Until, of course, we pass resposibility for that button to an "AI".
I'm fascinated that so many folks report this, I've literally never seen it in daily CC use. I can only guess that my habitually starting a new session and getting it to plan-document before action ("make a file listing all call sites"; "look at refactoring.md and implement") makes it clear when it's time for exploration vs when it's time for action (i.e. when exploring and not acting would be failing).
They drift to their training data. If thousand of humans solved a thing in a particular way, it's natural that AI does it too, because that is what it knows.
"Ignoring" instructions is not human thing. It's a bad LLM thing. Or just LLM thing.
Maybe this is more anthropomorphising but I think this pushing back is exactly the result that the LLMs are giving; but we're expecting a bit too much of them in terms of follow-up like: "ok I double checked and I really am being paid to do things the hard way".
It's the difference between "there's a lion hiding in those bushes" and the song of a mermaid.
In fairness to coding agents, most of coding is not exactly specified like this, and the right answer is very frequently to find the easiest path that the person asking might not have thought about; sometimes even in direct contradiction of specific points listed. Human requirements are usually much more fuzzy. It's unusual that the person asking would have such a clear/definite requirement that they've thought about very clearly.
Just as a human would use a task list app or a notepad to keep track of which tasks need to be done so can a model.
You can even have a mechanism for it to look at each task with a "clear head" (empty context) with the ability to "remember" previous task execution (via embedding the reasoning/output) in case parts were useful.
In long editing sessions with multiple iterations, the context can accumulate stale information, and that actively hurts model performance. Compaction is one way to deal with that. It strips out material that should be re-read from disk instead of being carried forward.
A concrete example is iterative file editing with Codex. I rewrite parts of a file so they actually work and match the project’s style. Then Codex changes the code back to the version still sitting in its context. It does not stop to consider that, if an external edit was made, that edit is probably important.
in any case, how is this specific to transformers?
More of that please. Perhaps on a check box, "[x] Less bullsh*t".
incognito124•1h ago
nialse•42m ago
zingar•7m ago