4 ms·
There is an old saying back home: an idiot never tires, only sweats. Claude isn't tenacious. It is an idiot that never stops digging because it lacks the meta
by noosphr 9mo ago
There is an old saying back home: an idiot never tires, only sweats.
Claude isn't tenacious. It is an idiot that never stops digging because it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Chain of thought's whole raison d'etre was so the model could get out of the local minima it pushed itself in. The issue is that after a year it still falls into slightly deeper local minima.
This is fine when a human is in the loop. It isn't what you want when you have a thousand idiots each doing a depth first search on what the limit of your credit card is.
- Havoc 9mo ago> it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Recently had an AI tell me this code (that it wrote) is a mess and suggested wiping it and starting from scratch with a more structure plan. That seems to hint at some meta cognition outlines
- zzrrt 9mo agoHaha, it has the human developer traits of thinking all old code is garbage, failing to identify oneself as the dummy who wrote this particular code, and wanting to start from scratch.
- dpkirchner 9mo agoIt's like NIH syndrome but instead "not invented here today". Also a very human thing.
- globular-toast 9mo agoMore like NIITS: Not Invented in this Session.
- hyperadvanced 9mo agoMetacognition As A Service, you say?
- lbrito 9mo agoSomeone will say "you just need to instruct Claude.md to be more meta and do a wiggum loop on it"
- teaearlgraycold 9mo agoI asked Claude to analyze something and report back. It thought for a while said “Wow this analysis is great!” and then went back to thinking before delivering the report. They’re auto-sycophantic now!
- rurp 9mo agoPerhaps. I've had LLMs tell me some code is deeply flawed garbage that should be rewritten about code that exact same LLM wrote minutes before. It could be a sign of deep meta cognition, or it might be due to some cognitive gaps where it has no idea why it did something a minute ago and suddenly has a different idea.
- Applejinx 9mo agoThis is not a fair criticism. There is _nobody_ there, so you can't be saying 'code the exact same LLM wrote minutes before'. There is no 'exact same LLM' and no ideas for it to have, you're trying to make sense of sparkles off the surface of a pond. There's no 'it' to have an idea and then a different idea, much less deep meta cognition.
- duncangh 9mo agoThey should’ve named him tom instead of Claude in homage to Ten second Tom from fifty first dates
- rurp 9mo agoI'm not sure we disagree. I was pushing back against the idea that suggesting a rewrite of some code implies meta cognition abilities on the part of the LLM. That seems like weak evidence to me.
- karlgkk 9mo agolol no it doesn’t. It hints at convincing language models
- samusiam 9mo agoI mean, not always. I've seen Claude step back and reconsider things after hitting a dead end, and go down a different path. There are also workflows, loops that can increase the likelihood of this occurring.
- cocacolacowboy 9mo ago[dead]