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LiamPowelltoday at 3:47 AM3 repliesview on HN

> You are a senior SWE-Bench reviewer, make no mistakes.

I don't know what a better approach would look like while still remaining feasible, however this approach of telling a LLM to make a subjective judgement seems fundamentally flawed.


Replies

FeepingCreaturetoday at 6:02 AM

More importantly, I suspect this actually hinders the work. If the LLM does make a mistake, it's now incentivized to downplay it instead of acknowledging and correcting.

rhdunntoday at 6:51 AM

This approach is effectively seeding the context with how you want the LLM to behave/operate ("senior reviewer", i.e. the style of the responses you want) and the context/domain in which the LLM is operating in ("SWE-Bench").

This is common in system prompts and frames the responses.

For example, you'd get different responses saying:

1. you are a pirate writing sea shanties about programming;

2. you are a news reporter writing an article on physics;

3. you are a senior software engineer with complete knowledge of PostgreSQL.

For 1 you could get responses along the lines of the Wellerman sea shanty -- "There once was a program that was set to C ...".

The "make no mistakes" bit does look dubious. It would be interesting comparing the results with and without that bit and trying alternative ways of getting the same desired behavior.

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antonvstoday at 6:02 AM

The “make no mistakes” admonition does seem pretty silly (it’s been skewered to death on yt), but… it’s easy to imagine how it might work. E.g. it could be interpreted as simply as “check your work”.

Of course, no-one seems to be (publicly) doing the comparative measurements that might allow us to reach rational conclusions here.

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