4 ms·
Until a couple weeks ago, I considered this a promising approach. What changed? Agents, and Claude code in particular. My prior experience was that LLMs were n
by _alternator_ 1y ago
Until a couple weeks ago, I considered this a promising approach. What changed? Agents, and Claude code in particular.
My prior experience was that LLMs were not much better than reading the docs, and certainly you wouldn’t get far vibe-coding in Rust. But Claude code behaves like I would, writing code that does t compile (typical LLM behavior), then reading the errors, correcting the code, and iterating until it compiles.
Its first attempt at a graph based scheduler in Rust took about $3 and 10 minutes to work correctly. It was ~500 loc, so definitely faster than what I can write in rust. (To be fair I spent a decent amount of time drafting a description of what I wanted in a markdown file to get Claude started).
- gdiamos 1y agoIf you have two methods that both improve accuracy, why not stack them?
- _alternator_ 1y agoThis reasoning is at odds with recent history. A lot of effort was put into making machines that could only output grammatically correct sentences. Yet LLMs output grammatically correct sentences when needed, and a whole lot more as context demands, without ever hardcoding it. It would be foolish to restrict LLMs to only grammatical sentences at this point, but it might be a good tool to run on generated docs because sometimes words are misspelled or sentences are confusing. Similarly, we have a tool that makes sure the type and syntax are correct, namely, a compiler. Building an LLM that can only output syntactically correct code is one approach of stacking them, but in fact it will significantly worsen the ability of the LLM to reason and construct code. The winning choice seems to be to emulate the workflow of humans: code, compile, read errors, repeat.