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A comment on Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML. Parent comment

Re:Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I writ... by lelanthran on Sunday May 03, 2026 @08:17AM (#47996184)
> I think you are confusing the spec as "this is how it must be built", as opposed to, "this is what the software must do and must not do to be acceptable".

You can't enforce a "do not do this" to an LLM. Just putting it in the context by saying "don't do this" makes it more likely that it will eventually do that.

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Re:Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I writ... by jychang on Sunday May 03, 2026 @08:40AM (#47996375)
Yes, I agree. If you tell humans "do not think of pink elephants", they are more likely to think about pink elephants.

Therefore, you must not use humans for any important work.

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Re:Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I writ... by lelanthran on Sunday May 03, 2026 @08:44AM (#47996410)
> Yes, I agree. If you tell humans "do not think of pink elephants", they are more likely to think about pink elephants.

> Therefore, you must not use humans for any important work.

Counterpoint, all important work done in the history of humans were done by... humans, and yet I see no pink elephants created as a result of telling humans "do not think of pink elephants".

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Re:Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I writ... by jfreds on Sunday May 03, 2026 @09:31AM (#47996790)
I’ve seen loads of very bad/wrong code written by humans
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Re:Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I writ... by lelanthran on Sunday May 03, 2026 @09:56AM (#47996986)
> I’ve seen loads of very bad/wrong code written by humans

Have you seen any pink elephants?

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Re:Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I writ... by jychang on Monday May 04, 2026 @04:48AM (#48006169)
Yes, I see them all the time when I drink lots of alcohol [1]. This is a common issue with humans called "hallucination" which proves that humans are unreliable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_pink_elephants

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