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> And for me, past a certain point, even if you continually report back problems it doesn't get any better in its new suggestions. It will just spin its wheels

by diggan 1y ago

> And for me, past a certain point, even if you continually report back problems it doesn't get any better in its new suggestions. It will just spin its wheels. So for that reason I'm a little skeptical about the value of automating this process. It sucks, but the trick is to always restart the conversations/chat with a new message. I never go beyond one reply, and also copy-paste a bunch. Got tired of copy-pasting, wrote something like a prompting manager (https://github.com/victorb/prompta https://github.com/victorb/prompta) to make it easier, and not having to neatly format code blocks and so on. Basically make one message, if they get the reply wrong, iterate on the prompt itself and start fresh, always. Don't try to correct by adding another message, but update initial prompt to make it clearer/steer more. But I've noticed that every model degrades really quickly past the initial reply, no matter what length of each individual message. The companies seem to continue to increase the theoretical and practical context limits, but the quality degrades a lot faster even within the context limits, and they don't seem to try to address that (nor have a way of measuring it).

the_sleaze_ 1y ago
This is my experience as well, as has been for over a year now. LLMs are so incredibly transformative when they're incredibly transformative. And when they aren't it's much better to fall back on the years of hard won experience I have - the sooner the better. For example I'll switch between projects and languages and even with explicit instruction to move to a strongly typed language they'll stick to dynamic answers. It's an odd experience to re-find my skills every once in a while. "Oh yeah, I'm pretty good at reading docs myself". With all the incredible leaps in LLMs being reported (especially here on HN) I really haven't seen much of a difference in quite a while.
- PantaloonFlames 1y ago
  Interesting. This is another problem aider does not experience. It works on a git repo. If you switch repos, it changes context. I’m not affiliated with aider. I just use it. I have a bet that many of the pitfalls people experience at the moment are due to mismatched tools or immature tools.
emporas 1y ago
In other words don't use the context window. Treat it as a command line with input/output, in which the purpose of the command is to extract information signal or knowledge manipulation or data mining and so on. Also special care has to be given to the number of tokens. Even with one-question/one-answer, 5 hundred to 1 thousand tokens can be focused at once by our artificial overlords. After that they start losing their marbles. There are exceptions to that rule with the reasoning models, but in essence they are not that different. The difference of using the tool correctly versus not, might be that instead of getting 99.9% accuracy, the user gets just 98%. Probably that doesn't sound that big of a difference to some people. The difference is that it works 10 times better in the first case.
- tstrimple 1y ago
  I think “don’t use the context window” might be too simple. It can be incredibly useful. But avoid getting in a context window loop. When iterations stop showing useful progress toward the goal, it’s time to abandon the context. LLMs tend to circle back to the same dead end solution path at some point. It also helps to jump between LLMs to get a feel for how they perform on different problem spaces.
  - emporas 1y ago
    Depends on the use case. For programming where every small detail might have huge implications, 98% accuracy vs 99.99% is a ginormous difference. Other tasks can be more forgiving, like writing which i do all the time, then i load 3000 tokens in the context window pretty frequently. Small details in the accuracy do not matter so much for most people, for everyday casual tasks like rewriting text, summarizing etc. In general, be wary of how much context you load into the chat, performance degrades faster than you can imagine. Ok, the aphorism i started with, was a little simplistic.
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      Oh sure. Context windows have been less useful for me on programming tasks than other things. When working iteratively against a CSV file for instance, it can be very useful. I’ve used something very similar to the following before: “Okay, now add another column which is the price of the VM based on current Azure costs and the CPU and Memory requirements listed.” “This seems to only use a few Azure VM SKU. Use the full list.” “Can you remove the burstable SKU?” Though I will say simple error fixes with context windows with programming issues are resolved fine. On more than one occasion when I copy and paste an incorrect solution. Providing the LLM with the error is enough to fix the problem. But if it goes beyond that, it’s best to abandon the context.
PantaloonFlames 1y ago
Aider, the tool, does exactly the opposite, in my experience. It really works, for me. It iterates by itself and fixes the problem.
- diggan 1y ago
  I'm in the middle of test-driving Aider and I'm seeing exactly the same problem, the longer a conversation goes on, the worse the quality of replies... Currently, I'm doing something like this to prevent it from loading previous context: rm -r .aider.chat.history.md .aider.tags.cache.v4 || true && aider --architect --model deepseek/deepseek-reasoner --editor-model deepseek/deepseek-chat --no-restore-chat-history Which clears the history, then I basically re-run that whenever the model gets something wrong (so I can update/improve the prompt and try again).
  - mikeqq2024 1y ago
    why not use /clear and /reset command?

by diggan 1y ago

the_sleaze_ 1y ago

This is my experience as well, as has been for over a year now. LLMs are so incredibly transformative when they're incredibly transformative. And when they aren't it's much better to fall back on the years of hard won experience I have - the sooner the better. For example I'll switch between projects and languages and even with explicit instruction to move to a strongly typed language they'll stick to dynamic answers. It's an odd experience to re-find my skills every once in a while. "Oh yeah, I'm pretty good at reading docs myself". With all the incredible leaps in LLMs being reported (especially here on HN) I really haven't seen much of a difference in quite a while.

PantaloonFlames 1y ago
Interesting. This is another problem aider does not experience. It works on a git repo. If you switch repos, it changes context. I’m not affiliated with aider. I just use it. I have a bet that many of the pitfalls people experience at the moment are due to mismatched tools or immature tools.

emporas 1y ago

In other words don't use the context window. Treat it as a command line with input/output, in which the purpose of the command is to extract information signal or knowledge manipulation or data mining and so on. Also special care has to be given to the number of tokens. Even with one-question/one-answer, 5 hundred to 1 thousand tokens can be focused at once by our artificial overlords. After that they start losing their marbles. There are exceptions to that rule with the reasoning models, but in essence they are not that different. The difference of using the tool correctly versus not, might be that instead of getting 99.9% accuracy, the user gets just 98%. Probably that doesn't sound that big of a difference to some people. The difference is that it works 10 times better in the first case.

tstrimple 1y ago
I think “don’t use the context window” might be too simple. It can be incredibly useful. But avoid getting in a context window loop. When iterations stop showing useful progress toward the goal, it’s time to abandon the context. LLMs tend to circle back to the same dead end solution path at some point. It also helps to jump between LLMs to get a feel for how they perform on different problem spaces.
- emporas 1y ago
  Depends on the use case. For programming where every small detail might have huge implications, 98% accuracy vs 99.99% is a ginormous difference. Other tasks can be more forgiving, like writing which i do all the time, then i load 3000 tokens in the context window pretty frequently. Small details in the accuracy do not matter so much for most people, for everyday casual tasks like rewriting text, summarizing etc. In general, be wary of how much context you load into the chat, performance degrades faster than you can imagine. Ok, the aphorism i started with, was a little simplistic.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Oh sure. Context windows have been less useful for me on programming tasks than other things. When working iteratively against a CSV file for instance, it can be very useful. I’ve used something very similar to the following before: “Okay, now add another column which is the price of the VM based on current Azure costs and the CPU and Memory requirements listed.” “This seems to only use a few Azure VM SKU. Use the full list.” “Can you remove the burstable SKU?” Though I will say simple error fixes with context windows with programming issues are resolved fine. On more than one occasion when I copy and paste an incorrect solution. Providing the LLM with the error is enough to fix the problem. But if it goes beyond that, it’s best to abandon the context.

PantaloonFlames 1y ago

Aider, the tool, does exactly the opposite, in my experience. It really works, for me. It iterates by itself and fixes the problem.

diggan 1y ago
I'm in the middle of test-driving Aider and I'm seeing exactly the same problem, the longer a conversation goes on, the worse the quality of replies... Currently, I'm doing something like this to prevent it from loading previous context: rm -r .aider.chat.history.md .aider.tags.cache.v4 || true && aider --architect --model deepseek/deepseek-reasoner --editor-model deepseek/deepseek-chat --no-restore-chat-history Which clears the history, then I basically re-run that whenever the model gets something wrong (so I can update/improve the prompt and try again).
- mikeqq2024 1y ago
  why not use /clear and /reset command?