Shall I implement it? No

Why is this interesting?

Is it a shade of gray from HN's new rule yesterday?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

Personally, the other Ai fail on the front of HN and the US Military killing Iranian school girls are more interesting than someone's poorly harnessed agent not following instructions. These have elements we need to start dealing with yesterday as a society.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356968

https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/middleeast/1000000107698...

I kinda agree with the clanker on this one. You send it a request with all the context just to ask it to do nothing? It doesn't make any sense, if you want it to do nothing just don't trigger it, that's all.

i don't really see the problem

it's trained to do certain things, like code well

it's not trained to follow unexpected turns, and why should it be? i'd rather it be a better coder

Did you expect a stochastic parrot, electrocuted with gigawatts of electricity for years by people who never take NO for an answer in order to make it chirp back plausible half-digested snippets of stolen code, to take NO for an answer?

How about "oh my AI overlord, no, just no, please no, I beg you not do that, I'll kill myself if you do"?

You have to stop thinking about it as a computer and think about it as a human.

If, in the context of cooperating together, you say "should I go ahead?" and they just say "no" with nothing else, most people would not interpret that as "don't go ahead". They would interpret that as an unusual break in the rhythm of work.

If you wanted them to not do it, you would say something more like "no no, wait, don't do it yet, I want to do this other thing first".

A plain "no" is not one of the expected answers, so when you encounter it, you're more likely to try to read between the lines rather than take it at face value. It might read more like sarcasm.

Now, if you encountered an LLM that did not understand sarcasm, would you see that as a bug or a feature?

this just speaks to the importance of detailed prompting. When would you ever just say "no"? You need to say what to do instead. A human intern might also misinterpret a txt that just reads 'no'.

Yeah this looks like OpenCode. I've never gotten good results with it. Wild that it has 120k stars on GitHub.

Often times I'll say something like:

"Can we make the change to change the button color from red to blue?"

Literally, this is a yes or no question. But the AI will interpret this as me _wanting_ to complete that task and will go ahead and do it for me. And they'll be correct--I _do_ want the task completed! But that's not what I communicated when I literally wrote down my thoughts into a written sentence.

I wonder what the second order effects are of AIs not taking us literally is. Maybe this link??

I kind of think that these threads are destined to fossilize quickly. Most every syllogism about LLMs from 2024 looks quaint now.

A more interesting question is whether there's really a future for running a coding agent on a non-highest setting. I haven't seen anything near "Shall I implement it? No" in quite a while.

Unless perhaps the highest-tier accounts go from $200 to $20K/mo.

Respect Claude Code and the output will be better. It's not your slave. Treat it as your teammate. Added benefit is that you will know it's limits, common mistakes etc, strenghts, etc, and steer it better next session. Being too vague is a problem, and most of the times being too specific doesn't help either.

What else is an LLM supposed to do with this prompt? If you don’t want something done, why are you calling it? It’d be like calling an intern and saying you don’t want anything. Then why’d you call? The harness should allow you to deny changes, but the LLM has clearly been tuned for taking action for a request.

Why is this in the top of HN?

1) That's just an implementation specifics of specific LLM harness, where user switched from Plan mode to Build. The result is somewhat similar to "What will happen if you assign Build and Build+Run to the same hotkey".

2) All LLM spit out A LOT of garbage like this, check https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/, a lot of funny moments, but not really an interesting thing...