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559 points Gricha | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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xnorswap ◴[] No.46233056[source]
Claude is really good at specific analysis, but really terrible at open-ended problems.

"Hey claude, I get this error message: <X>", and it'll often find the root cause quicker than I could.

"Hey claude, anything I could do to improve Y?", and it'll struggle beyond the basics that a linter might suggest.

It suggested enthusiastically a library for <work domain> and it was all "Recommended" about it, but when I pointed out that the library had been considered and rejected because <issue>, it understood and wrote up why that library suffered from that issue and why it was therefore unsuitable.

There's a significant blind-spot in current LLMs related to blue-sky thinking and creative problem solving. It can do structured problems very well, and it can transform unstructured data very well, but it can't deal with unstructured problems very well.

That may well change, so I don't want to embed that thought too deeply into my own priors, because the LLM space seems to evolve rapidly. I wouldn't want to find myself blind to the progress because I write it off from a class of problems.

But right now, the best way to help an LLM is have a deep understanding of the problem domain yourself, and just leverage it to do the grunt-work that you'd find boring.

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kccqzy ◴[] No.46233163[source]
Not at all my experience. I’ve often tried things like telling Claude this SIMD code I wrote performed poorly and I needed some ideas to make it go faster. Claude usually does a good job rewriting the SIMD to use different and faster operations.
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zahlman ◴[] No.46233379[source]
That sounds like a pretty "structured" problem to me.
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1. chrneu ◴[] No.46233431[source]
that's one of the problems with AI. as it can accomplish more tasks people will overestimate it's ability.

what the person you replied to had claude do is relatively simple and structured, but to that person what claude did is "automagic".

People already vastly overestimate AI's capabilities. This contributes to that.