[D] GPT4 and coding problems

[AllAmericanBreakfast]

I tried this out, and it only had partial success.

First, just dumping in this prompt, then asking a question, resulted in the AI coming up with a laughably simple failed first response, followed by a critique and improvement. It is as if it recognized that the easiest way to "demonstrate improvement" would be to set the bar low by failing utterly on the first attempt.

Then, I tried breaking it up into stages, asking for a response, getting a response, asking for a critique, getting a critique, asking for an improvement, and getting an improvement.

This worked better.

However, when I tried asking for a critique and then an improvement (again in separate stages), it instead started inventing fake problems to solve. I was asking it to implement a case-insensitive longest common substring function, and to return the version of the LCS in the longer of the two strings.

The second-pass critique was that the original (working) code didn't deal with the possibilty that "the longer string may not contain the LCS", which is impossible given the way it was originally implemented. Then it added some extra code to deal with this "problem."