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andaitoday at 2:29 AM1 replyview on HN

When I was doing some important work, I had 2 worktrees, each running a frontier model from a different company, and I passed their responses between them in markdown files and had them critique them. I thought they'd prefer their own solutions, but they frequently preferred the other model's solutions.

I went back and forth like this until we converged on a solution "everyone" was satisfied with.

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Context: I'm a solo dev and working outside my area of expertise, so I'm leaning heavily on LLMs. It's not great (definitely too vibey for my taste, and I keep running into issues) but the alternative is spending the next few years studying several specializations instead of shipping. So this is the "least bad" thing I could come up with.

I'm definitely increasingly making time for "learning sprints" to catch up on specific knowledge gaps. For example today I spent 2 hours debugging something because I was missing a fact that would have taken me 1 minute to learn...

I went from "fully hand crafted" to "fully vibed" (when Fable came out), back to "fully hand crafted" (once I realized I no longer understand the code!), and now I'm at "making very careful use of AI, asking for the smallest possible changes, and double checking everything"...


Replies

erutoday at 11:00 AM

> I thought they'd prefer their own solutions, but they frequently preferred the other model's solutions.

I suspect that's downstream from their sycophancy.

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