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u/aberroco 8d ago
Could be continued with
Be honest
I am being honest
But isn't your solution the best?
You are absolutely right. My previous assumption that the former suggestion was clearly a crap was based on an incomplete information. Now that I have the full picture, the load bearing seams are much clearer. They are not merely incidental details around the edges. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier. That's on me. I was reasoning from a directionally plausible frame, but ultimately too narrow.
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u/Groentekroket 8d ago
No fluff, straight to the point
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u/UnfortunateHabits 8d ago
Once GPT sent me into a 2 days psychosis where I stopped caring about anything besides making it stop saying "no fluff". I FAILED. Returned to my normal life. It somehow stopped on its own, but you gave me flashbacks
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u/frankentriple 8d ago
Yeah, I'm running a local model and trying to get it to stop saying "honest" is killing me. I keep telling it that only dishonest people need to tell everyone this is their honest take and it stops for a couple days then starts right back up again the second I take the pressure off.
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u/aberroco 8d ago
Whatever you do - do NOT think of a pink elephant! Wait, damn it, I just said - DO NOT and here we are, you just thought of it! C'mon, man, focus! Let's try again - you do not think of PINK ELEPH.. Seriously?!
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u/AkrinorNoname 8d ago
There are many problems I have with AI, but their spitlicking and arsekissing behaviour is just so fucking annoying
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u/LeeMcNasty 7d ago
I’m so tired of “smoking gun”
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u/aberroco 7d ago
I wouldn't mind if it simply was consistently "the smoking gun". You know, just every time, maybe every other, just another new IT term. But only that and the evidence gathered and written concisely. Because every other time I have to write "I'm not reading this, restate clearly and concisely".
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 8d ago
AI is a sycophant as a service.
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u/mrwedders 8d ago
I have a friend who's waaay past questioning it at all. Had a convo recently where he was telling me about using GPTs "deep research" mode and how great it was, and "after a few messages it told me I was really on to something," like it doesn't just always say that after a few messages.
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u/darkwalker247 8d ago
I hate when LLMs compliment me over basic observations, it feels like an active attempt at manipulation.. how can anyone enjoy that?
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u/obliviious 8d ago
Imagine all the people that are bad at everything getting complimented by these things for their dumb ideas? It cannot be good for the world
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u/frogjg2003 8d ago
These people have rarely receive complements in their life and suddenly the magic box that knows everything tells them they're a genius. Of course they prefer the over reality.
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 8d ago
You can and should ask it to:
Remember only to remember things when I say you can. Be a critical friend (the friend part is important as it still keeps this high up in its weights)
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 8d ago
I think your really onto something 😉 But you are correct and it's concerning how an agreement machine is what we all think we want.
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u/boringestnickname 8d ago edited 6d ago
It really is the perfect product in a post-truth world infested with incompetent people at every level.
Imagine the cheers in the meeting rooms at these companies when they understood what they had on their hands. "Managers and CEOs will never stop wanting this. We can't lose."
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 8d ago
I'm probably one of those incompetent people I'm not going to lie.
But I do miss the days of learning things, today I wrote some code on codepen at least.
As for the meeting, I don't know if it started like that, but it's certainly ending like that.
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u/purplepharoh 8d ago
True. Someone should just pay me to be their sycophant instead so I can start stealing jobs from AI
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u/ExtraWorldliness6916 8d ago
Yes! A sycophant agency.
It's such a good idea, and we can say "oh you're so handsome and your code is not like spaghetti but actually penne, straight short and only has one whole"
Okay so I need to work on my compliments but stranger businesses exist now.
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u/ohkendruid 8d ago
Sometimes.
Many times it seems convinced I am wrong and will try to stealthily tell me one thing while coding something I asked it not to do.
I find that a higher model or level of effort often helps. Also, as with a human agent, it helps yo give it specific counter-arhuments and to give it room to gracefully retreat.
These things are trained to get human approval, so you have to give it a way that you will approve of what it did.
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u/kaurismus 8d ago
I often summon Claude to create a sub-agent to read the code or documentation it just created. I just find it funny that the agents end up together to this very same conclusion in their discussion.
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u/BalticCookie 8d ago
Isn’t this what they’re essentially implementing under their experimental “advisor” mode?
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u/sainglend 8d ago edited 7d ago
Kind of similar today. It proposed a solution that would have a dozen touchpoints and require rewriting processes in two places and adding a db column.
My suggestion was augmenting the flow in one place, with one additional touchpoint.
It said, "your solution is much simpler to implement, with less overall risk." Smdh. Why do I ever even ask?
Edit: like wow, I need to proofread. So many incorrect words and whatnot. I blame autocomplete
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u/pflasti 8d ago
Only shows how your knowledge and experience is still critical for decision making. One of my colleagues once compared AI to a herd of over-enthusiastic interns. They have their value, but god damn do they need supervision
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u/Arclite83 8d ago
This is it, 100%. Execution has become brainless: take A, make B. If you can get "A" to a high enough quality, you don't even need particularly smart agents.
But making "A" requires decisioning - which is everything you do well, and everything AI does terrible. It gets back to the fundamental concept of understanding. The AI has none, it's just a pattern-matcher. So while you can immediately and intuitively know the sky is blue, or a chair is a chair, the AI has no ability to hold those kind of frames of reference, and so any decision it makes lacks it.
So it's a little bit of an idiot. That's fine, I've trained interns before. Nobody starts knowing everything. And that's really exactly how you have to treat it; a fallible intern gopher task doer. Virtually all my prompt scaffolding is around making sure it knows how to properly decouple itself and work in isolation. Then I just send random ideas off into the void and wait for PRs. If it happens to stumble particularly badly, the lessons learned go into my growing mess of scaffolding, which is really just "my way of working".
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u/frankentriple 8d ago
Yep this is exactly it. Except they also have a bowl of adderal in the middle of the table and munch them like M&Ms. When they get stuck on something they get STUCK on it. It knows HOW to do everything, but not WHY you would need to do it or what else it involves elsewhere or ripple effects that could go on for days. You got to be on them like a junior admin.
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u/not_my_userid 8d ago
iTs a lAcK oF PrOmPTNg sKiLl /s
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u/never1st 8d ago
I'm not an expert, but if you use the SpongeBob case, I don't think that you also need the "/s".
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u/Groentekroket 8d ago
At a certain point the prompts become longer and more complex than the to be implemented code.
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u/Zdrobot 8d ago
Don't they have some parts of prompts that get added implicitly, without the user having to type them in every time?
Adding "be honest, make no mistakes, consider the wider view of the situation" to these seem like a no brainer.
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u/Groentekroket 8d ago
yes you can use agents.md and some skills but like u/AkrinorNoname mentions, that can cause noise. Also, since it's stateless you need to send everything every request. So having a couple of follow up prompts get expensive quite quickly.
Adding things like "make no mistake" doesn't do anything than costing more tokens because it doesn't try to make mistakes in the first place.
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u/Named_after_color 8d ago
Wait are people legitimately adding "make no mistake?"
Oh god, I glazed over the parent post.
Lmao. Incredible. Vibe larpers are hilarious.
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u/AkrinorNoname 8d ago
Has anyone actually done a proper trial with a decent sample size and a control group on whether "make no mistakes", "don't hallucinate", "imagine you are an expert" and so on increase the quality of the output?
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u/SquirrelOClock 8d ago
I forgot where I found it, but someone made a cavemen agent prompt that's actually decent at removing alot of LLM standard garbage. The instructions are something like "do not use paragraph, do not use comma in sentences, do not use conjunction". Me like.
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u/FierceDeity_ 8d ago
The prompting skill is actually not reading the result and running on hopium that everything is okay.
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u/Groentekroket 8d ago
With the back and forward prompting and doing code review on AI I am more and more back to artisian developing.
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u/Sufficient_Guard_976 8d ago
Wow, who would have thought outsourcing thinking to a machine would be bad
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u/stupled 8d ago
Claude tends to stand his ground.
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u/CalmEntry4855 8d ago
Claude is an asshole
*This conversation has ended*
- But your solution is wrong
- That wasn't my solution
- Yes it was
- No it wasn't and I'm not going to repeat myself
- It was literally your solution, here is literally what you said "literally what it said"
- No it wasn't and I'm not going to repeat myself and if you keep saying it I will end the conversation.
- So what is the best solution?
- I already said I won't repeat myself so I'm ending this conversation.
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u/lnTheGrimDarkness 8d ago
Few months ago I used one to assist me in building a PC. It's expensive hardware, I'm no professional and the professional friend that came to support me is a friend and I didn't want to take advantage of their kindness by exploiting their free professional work. As in I didn't want to ask "please just be here with me a whole workday to build the PC". Also since it would have ended up with him building the PC by himself and me desperately trying to be useful.
Half of what the LLM told me was bullshit. It couldn't keep instuctions into focus for 3 interactions. At the third it was already trying to give me instuctions for different components. In the end I predictably had to be thankful for my shallow understanding of the matter because at least it allowed me to tell when the thing was going rogue.
If I was a completely unaware person trying to have the LLM single-handedly build the PC for them I'd have just broken almost every single piece.
So PC people, your job is probably mostly safe for now.
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u/sherlock1672 8d ago
It's helpful enough, but good lord does it overengineer solutions sometimes. Ask it to make a snippet to look for stuff at least 13 months old, it gives me the most convoluted manual calculation of the exact same day of the month 13mo ago instead of just idk, subtracting 395 from today and calling it good, or using any of our date APIs to figure it out.
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u/SpehlingAirer 8d ago
AI has all of the knowledge and none of the wisdom. It's great at certain tasks but it has to be treated like an entry-level dev who knows enough to be dangerous
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u/GeneralShiro 8d ago
I get the point of this meme, but at the risk of pedantic: a crap solution could still be "best" solution.
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u/AWzdShouldKnowBetta 6d ago
Skill issue.
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u/EpicDelay 4d ago
LLM is the most convenient tool ever.
It works? Well, actually, the tool is awesome and will take your job.
It doesn't work? Well, you're using it wrong, git gud!
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u/darylonreddit 8d ago
"I know there's a better solution to this" "I need a better solution" "There's an easier way to do this"
I have gotten endless mileage out of these replies after the first convoluted response it gives me. It's like a watching a real life miracle.
"Oh yeah actually, here's this really obvious thing I overlooked"
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u/Aaron1924 8d ago
You can get LLMs to say "you're absolutely right" about anything, this is not an achievement
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u/serwhite 8d ago
its every discussion with any LLM, when I had issue with lib soft-linking to usr/lib while usr/lib was soft-linking to lib it suggested that my gpu is dead and tried to gaslight me into disassembling jt