alt Hacker News> And I've seen Claude identify data races that have sat in our code base for nearly a decade
how do you know that claude isn't just a very fast monkey with a very fast typewriter that throws things at you until one of them is true ?
> And I've seen Claude identify data races that have sat in our code base for nearly a decade
how do you know that claude isn't just a very fast monkey with a very fast typewriter that throws things at you until one of them is true ?
Iteration is inherent to how computers work. There's nothing new or interesting about this.
The question is who prunes the space of possible answers. If the LLM spews things at you until it gets one right, then sure, you're in the scenario you outlined (and much less interesting). If it ultimately presents one option to the human, and that option is correct, then that's much more interesting. Even if the process is "monkeys on keyboards", does it matter?
There are plenty of optimization and verification algorithms that rely on "try things at random until you find one that works", but before modern LLMs no one accused these things of being monkeys on keyboards, despite it being literally what these things are.