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I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.
by taeric 17d ago
I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.
- skinfaxi 17d agoPeople don't make rational decisions that make rationalized decisions. Is there any thought to pulling your hand off a hot surface?
- autoexec 17d agoPeople do both. Some choices aren't worth the time and effort of detailed analysis and contemplation and some are basically instinctual, but there are plenty of times that choices are carefully considered and well reasoned before being made and acted on.
- nemomarx 17d agoI kind of want my computer systems to be more reliable and predictable than paying an intern to manage something and asking why they messed up
- jaggederest 17d agoAt this point it very dramatically is more reliable and predictable than any human I've worked with. Do you know anyone who actually reads and adheres closely to all of the documentation every time it's changed?
- bluefirebrand 17d agoI don't know anyone who has that kind of time, no
- wccrawford 17d agoThat was my experience with Claude when my vibe-coded project was small. But now that I've been working on it a month and there's a lot of documentation, it's pretty clearly ignoring parts of the documentation and parts of the code. It will come up with some ridiculous statement about how something works, and I'll challenge it, and it'll admit I'm right. It definitely reads more documentation than any programmer I've ever worked with (myself included) but because it doesn't have a memory other than the documentation, it still makes mistakes like that. I haven't turned on "memory" or tried it with Codex, so I don't know how that'll change soon, though.
- jaggederest 17d agoYeah the biggest task these days that I do manually is curating the documentation. AGENTS.md in every major directory, and a variety of reference docs that are explicitly referenced in those files. # See DOC-ITEM-NAME DOC-ITEM-NAME.md When referencing documents, always use the exact syntax See <TAG> - this is enforced by a lint on precommit And those doc items are basically all of the values, architectural, strategic, and tactical items. It's a poor man's in-repo RAG but it's shockingly effective, especially if you keep them small. I may migrate some/all of them to skills over time, but I usually update them biweekly, and I only allow agents to make small edits or propose new notes. And typically I go through and delete or curate any agent edits before merge. Depending on language I've seen this scale past multiple millions of lines of code, as long as you pair it with all of the linting and tooling that you can possibly build.
- voakbasda 17d agoEvery time I hear someone complain about hallucinations, I laugh at the total lack of self awareness about our species. Humans are just as bad (now, probably worse) at telling the truth, whether due to intention or poor memory.
- lathiat 17d ago“Post Hoc Rationalisation” https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-rationalisation-reasoning-our-intuition-and-changing-our-minds/ https://www.patheos.com/blogs/tippling/2013/11/14/post-hoc-r...
- BurningFrog 17d agoI learned this from "The Elephant in the Brain", which I strongly recommend: https://amzn.to/4iSyLX8 https://amzn.to/4iSyLX8
- jameshart 17d agoI learned this from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which I strongly recommend.
- BurningFrog 16d agoI read that book and strongly recommend it too! Don't remember that part though. It's been a few decades.
- supern0va 17d agoExactly. I am becoming increasingly convinced that this is actually just a part of how intelligence/cognition works.
- astrobe_ 17d agoBut is it really what we want, machines with the same defects as humans? I don't want a pocket calculator that make mistakes "sometimes" so I have to double-check the results, I want a pocket calculator that works (to those who want to argue that pocket calculators don't give the correct result for (1/3)*3: STFU).
- CookieCrisp 17d agoNo, but it makes sense to me that we’d need to go through this step to get where we want to go
- bmacho 17d agoNo. People have an inner monologue, partial results and ideas and they remember that. If they've worked some minutes/hours/weeks on something and you ask them why did they do that, they will either answer honestly and truthfully, lie, or say "I missed that/didn't seem important so I just chose something at random". None of these cases are similar to how AI works.
- yawnxyz 17d agoI think this is true with some people, but I don't think this holds true for some (or even most) people across the US (at least not all the folks I've worked with)
- croo 17d agoActually split brain experiments tells a different story. The left hemisphere actively confabulates, inventing plausible explanations for actions it didn’t initiate, suggesting that much of human self-narrative may be post-hoc storytelling.
- satvikpendem 17d agoIndeed. People literally make stuff up when their corpus callosum is severed.
- bmacho 17d agoAand what if their corpus callosum isn't severed?
- satvikpendem 17d agoThey also make stuff up.
- deleted 17d ago[deleted]
- bmacho 17d ago
- yonatan8070 17d agoAFAIK this really is true. I've seen some videos about patients who had the connecting part between the left and right halves of the brain cut as a (archaic) treatment for epilepsy. While it did help the epilepsy, their brain was essentially two brains controlling two halves of the body. With one controlling speech. There were experiments where one eye was shown some instruction text, the corresponding hand performed that instruction, and when asked why they dix that action, the speaking half just made up some plausible, yet completely wrong reason, just like an LLM.
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- Terr_ 17d agoI see this observation frequently, and I dislike how it often has the unsound subtext of: "Therefore something is going well or at least not too badly." If you build a robot where a pressurized hose leaks causing fluid to destroy part of the circuitry, we don't praise it as progress towards the human ideal of having brain aneurysms. A similar failure-path is not a reliable indicator of a similar success-path.
- krupan 17d agoAll people at least some times, absolutely yes. Isn't it awesome we built machine that does the exact same thing, but even faster and more often? /s