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559 points Gricha | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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pdntspa ◴[] No.46233365[source]
That's why you treat it like a junior dev. You do the fun stuff of supervising the product, overseeing design and implementation, breaking up the work, and reviewing the outputs. It does the boring stuff of actually writing the code.

I am phenomenally productive this way, I am happier at my job, and its quality of work is extremely high as long as I occasionally have it stop and self-review it's progress against the style principles articulated in its AGENTS.md file. (As it tends to forget a lot of rules like DRY)

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1. AStrangeMorrow ◴[] No.46234010[source]
Yeah at this point I basically have to dictate all implementation details: do this, but do it this specific way, handle xyz edge cases by doing that, plug the thing in here using that API. Basically that expands 10 lines into 100-200 lines of code.

However if I just say “I have this goal, implement a solution”, chances are that unless it is a very common task, it will come up with a subpar/incomplete implementation.

What’s funny to me is that complexity has inverted for some tasks: it can ace a 1000 lines ML model for a general task I give it, yet will completely fail to come up with a proper solution for a 2D geometric problem that mostly has high school level maths that can be solved in 100 lines