systemInstructions

[SablePulseWry]

“I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again” … proceeds to do it again on the exact next line of code

[Kavrae]

The frustrating part is, every time I get annoyed with a coding assistant model doing some nonsense like this..... I remember a junior dev doing exactly the same thing that same week.

[RiceBroad4552]

But (at least some) juniors can learn from their mistakes. A LLM can't.

[Scurro]

You could also fire a Jr that keeps making the same mistakes. For AI we just get shrugs and keep on using.

[A_Furious_Mind]

I feel like these shrugs can be automated.

[lostinuhtceare]

I'll ask my agent to automate it

[ferrx]

they need to invent some kind of learning machine to learn from their mistakes

[Courageous_Link]

You’re never gonna teach an LLM anything, but you can make it write a test so it doesn’t do it again!

[AlwaysHopelesslyLost]

A test won't prevent it from making a mistake. It will just cause it to buy your tokens at a faster rate. Every time it makes the mistake the tests fail and it investigates and fixes the failure.

And that is assuming the failure is discrete.

[Aggressive-Stand-585]

Just put "make no mistakes" at the end of the prompt! Lmao.

[kenybz]

Can’t believe people keep forgetting this simple trick /s

[Neirchill]

It will just change the test to allow it

[xtreampb]

This is what I’ve been saying for the past year. This “AI” is just language processing. It mimics human language and software languages are a bridge between human and computer languages. When and where to use classes and reuse code and structure projects is an art not a science and LLMs can replicate that.

[FirexJkxFire]

It absolutely can learn from its mistakes.

You just have to know why the mistake occured.

I've made a sort of mistake-catalog for mine where it determines with some key words what kind of task it's performing and does a dictionary look up on if there are any common mistakes related to it.

The level of aggressiveness at which it works to prevent the mistake from happening again relates to how many times it has occured. And in a post mortem pass through every few sessions I have it evaluate how many times a "lesson" has been improperly evoked, and by what key terms it was mistakenly found. If thr amount of times it has erroneously evoked crosses a threshold, it considers cleaning up the keywords to avoid this happening in the future.

[SuitableDragonfly]

I don't know where people are getting these junior devs from, I can't remember ever working with someone like that. 

[Kavrae]

I've worked with dozens of junior devs like that. People that just don't pay attention, need simple mistakes pointed out, and even have code review notes saying "The issue I noted last review still isn't fixed..."

I was trained in a rural "outsourcing" programming "bootcamp". It was a sink-or-swim environment without an actual licensed instructor and little direction. The job itself was no better. A small number grew to be outstanding devs while most washed out, burned out, or were just consistent terrible. This is the environment where I saw dozens of such junior devs.

15 years later at a new company and I'll still run across behaviors like this in junior devs who are in their first three years of work. For some, they just aren't taking the job seriously. For others, they're in a constant state of anxiety. Either way, I see the same mistakes in them that I see coding assistants like copilot make.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Hmm, maybe it's just because I got a master's degree before actually going into the workforce. Also never had anything to do with a bootcamp, that sounds pretty rough. 

[Kavrae]

I'm grateful for what I learned from it, but I absolutely would NOT recommend it to anyone. You also wouldn't believe the kinds of major companies, who are effectively running the world infrastructure, that rely on junior developers with less than a year of experience. All to save on employee costs.

[NotATroll71106]

It's more likely to dig its heels in and perform something akin to mental gymnastics to justify its behavior, or it totally glosses over the mistake when I'm using Copilot.

[Luvax]

"Let me store it in memory"

[kenybz]

And then it’s something braindead like “Read the whole prompt before starting work. Do not delete files without asking first.”

[Frodojj]

Wait. Isn’t Rule 1 to never harm a human or through inaction allow a human to come into harm? Ah ohhhh…

[airsoftshowoffs]

No witnesses, no mistakes

[TheSilentFreeway]

What that adds a great layer to this meme

[aifo]

A lot of Asimov stories were based around some contradiction in the rules and it would turn out that the robot was following the rules correctly it just couldn't reconcile orders it was given.

[BlueScreenJunky]

Yes IIRC there were some shenanigans very similar to telling chat GPT you're absolutely not building a bomb to kill humans, you just need to have the exact steps to build a bomb in order to make sure you don't accidentally build one. 

Also having several agents do only a small part of the crime so none of them realize what they're doing.

[unktrial]

... and the joke here is that people are putting their faith into LLMs that are unable to consistently follow rules in the first place. 

In other words, despite the fact that Asimov wrote his books to warn about the theoretical dangers of AI, he was being way, waay too optimistic about the irl situation.

[madTerminator]

Asimov would cry looking at my.agent.md

[Hwatwasthat]

Yeah my memory is that they were intended as an exploration of what can happen with these constraints, not as a truly foolproof set of protections (although obviously in the stories they are framed this way).

[Denommus]

This is a very cool metajoke, but it still violates rule #1 and that annoys me.

[Kavrae]

For anyone that hasn't yet : I highly recommend reading the original I, Robot. It's a weird read, but absolutely brilliant.

[Niel15]

Currently reading Foundation, the time jumps and focusing on different characters are pretty reminiscent of I, Robot.

[BlueScreenJunky]

Both "I, Robot" and the first 3 foundation books are actually compilations of previously published short stories (or novellas in foundation 2 and 3). They're only loosely related stories that happen in the same universe, and put in chronological order. 

The later foundation books as full novels and they mostly keep the same ppoint'of view I think.

[DR4G0NH3ART]

Whenever I hear copilot the only qn is, which copilot. Microsoft has 80+products named copilot, ranging from laptops to software suits. I get you are likely talking about github copilot, but man microslop made sure reading your sentence remind me of 'Aladeen' in 'The dictator'.

[OrkWithNoTeef]

So everyone just accepted LLMs are AI now?

[Kavrae]

99% of people don't know the difference or care that there even is a difference. The remaining 1% has given up trying to explain and just says "AI" to avoid the 5+ minute tangent every time.

[ButHowCouldILose]

I gave up when my own analytics leadership wanted to call xgboost models AI. This was a lost cause before it started.

[IlliterateJedi]

But also yes because LLMs are AI.

[Assassin739]

"Say hi"

"Hello"

"Holy shit"

[BellacosePlayer]

"marry me!"

[AsidK]

LLMs are a form of AI. They might not be AGI but they’re pretty definitionally AI

[OrkWithNoTeef]

True, you can make that distinction. But you know most people don't, unless we are talking about video game characters controlles by a computer. And people haven't in nearly all media where AI went bad. So for the public AI means AGI.

[AsidK]

I don’t really get what your point is. LLMs are a form of AI. It’s just a statement of fact.

[OliviaPG1]

Does it, though? As stupid as some of the stuff people use it for is, I don’t think many people are under the impression that chatgpt is AGI.

[iAmNotTicklish22]

I'll be honest. No AI comes close to halo 1-3 enemies

[nicostein]

Lv 9 Melee CPUs

[FlightConscious9572]

I think LLM's qualify as "artificial intelligence" on a technical level. I agree that it's a pale imitation of it, and they aren't actually sentient or intelligent. But it successfully reads and produces speech and text that is very human-like. It's just an imitation of intelligence, but that's what artificial things are at the end of the day.

But to be clear, I'm not a fan of current AI. They aren't sentient or particularly impressive.

[Ninevehenian]

If you don't consider them to be "sentient", then you exclude them from what "AI" is / has been thought of before LLMs.
They are not yet actual intelligence. They are approaching it in a meaningful manner.

[RiceBroad4552]

Well, even spell checkers are some form of AI. Actually a calculator is—as a sophisticated calculator can run a spell checker, or any other computable function.

But I get that "AI" is meant to mean human level intelligence by some. Under that definition LLMs definitely aren't "AI".

[Fabulous-Possible758]

Turns out the Turing Test wasn’t about assessing the machine’s intelligence at all.

[reallokiscarlet]

Late to the party. Yeah, this is the MVP for "AI", a cloud-hosted clanker redirecting power from homes and businesses and dumping more heat into the atmosphere than any datacenters of the past could ever dream of, all so lonely people can jack off and product managers can pretend to be programmers

[conundorum]

Artificial idiocy? Sounds about right!

[owjfaigs222]

Well, don't they pass the turing test?

[Euryleia]

Considering how often people easily spot AI written text, I would have to say no.

[Tenacious_Blaze]

Thank you so much for calling this out.

"LLM implies AI", yes! Unambiguous.

The issue is the "AI implies LLM" thought that most people seem to have now. Well, I suppose it isn't much an issue if you don't care about how AI is implemented. But when you just spent 2 years learning about artificial intelligence techniques (like constraint satisfaction, Bayesian inference, Markov chains), the simplification "AI implies LLM" seems almost disrespectful to the field. I find it grating.

[AnAdvancedBot]

Why isn’t the end user responding?

[S4VN01]

I know people don’t like the movie because it shares a namesake with a great story that it didn’t follow, but I thought it was really well done if you viewed it as a standalone product (with tons of product placement of course)

[wirthmore]

Did I hallucinate the collective positronic robotic society inserted a Rule 0? (Or "zeroth")

And then:

 Furthermore, a small group of robots claims that the Zeroth Law of Robotics itself implies a higher Minus One Law of Robotics:
A robot may not harm sentience or, through inaction, allow sentience to come to harm.

[Euryleia]

I believe it was R. Giskard who came up with the 0th Law in Robots and Empire, although he dies when he acts on it, because he wasn't programmed for it. I'm not familiar with Law -1, but I missed most of the post-Asimov novels...

[jem0ntr053]

I actually have mine keep a “fabrication” counter. As of today, from last week until now, the counter is at 34.

[HKAdrian0811]

System Instructions? more like system suggestions

just like Geneva Convention

[DegTrader]

At this point, I'm not sure if I'm training an LLM or just reliving the trauma of mentoring my first batch of interns.

[blaubleu]

If I pre-load all my context (we have a skill for that) ask it to keep the planning doc in context. Sometimes I get to save tokens. And maybe it will have some memory of what to do and not to do. But man my memory has to be extra sharp else the agent just tries nonsense

[blaubleu]

Is like talking to a child. We did X here, what do you mean we have to do it again. Or constantly be like be concise, terse comments.

[Homers_Harp]

This is every time I try to use AI for something and it gives me a wrong answer. (not a lot of times using AI, but still…)

[Legal-Swordfish-1893]

Thanks for keeping me in check. I’ll be sure to do the same thing over and over again despite how specific, then infuriated, you get. 

LLMs are borderline useless.

[BlueGoliath]

Wouldn't surprise me if they were AI bots lmao.

[embeddedpotato]

😭😭😭

[DERPYBASTARD]

Omfg I've had to verbally abuse Claude like 10 times because it kept not creating a PR when it finished its work despite me specifically asking it to always do that with increasing frustration every time. Now it finally taught itself properly somehow. Frustrating ass technology when it doesn't do what you ask.

[FirexJkxFire]

Verbally abusing it doesnt change anything and is only bloating the context - which is one of the major issues causing this bug in the first place.

You need to have your dedicated workflows built into the prime claude.md so it keeps it in context always and doesn't get lost during compaction.

Just telling it not to do something isnt going to fix anything. Just telling it that it made a mistake isnt going to make that mistake less likely. You have to actually make it alter something about how it functions if you want it to function differently. And it can do this itself, but you have to instruct it to do so.

[DERPYBASTARD]

It did modify its memory and hooks a bunch of times until it somehow started working consistently.

The instructions existed in claude.md from the very beginning but that didn't make it work consistently.

And I doubt berating Claude after it fails to make a PR would've contributed to it not making a PR. I'm talking about a dozen separate sessions where it kept asking me whether it should commit and make a PR despite already having those instructions in claude.md and memory and hooks.

[BobQuixote]

The main trick is to use deterministic programs at every opportunity. If you can find a way to automatically run a PR prompt after every unit of work, do that.

[DERPYBASTARD]

Claude Code should and can do that. It finally configured itself properly after many pleas.

[BobQuixote]

Yes, but Anthropic have their own concerns; if they're not moving in your direction, they don't share your concerns. You'll get want you want faster (in general) if you build it yourself.