stonecauldron

> We talk about "technical debt" and "maintainability" and "scalability."

If we are just talking about writing code, I believe LLMs are indeed better than the median programmer already. Where they fail, however, is in the tasks that require proper reasoning.

At a micro-scale, you can simulate reasoning with token prediction, but I think this breaks at a higher-level (e.g. architecture.)

I believe that, given enough complexity, a purely vibe-coded project will always reach a point where each new feature breaks five other ones. So qualms about "maintainability" are important.

Maybe we'll reach the point where LLMs can deal with the complexity of most codebases without human guidance.

But it doesn't change the fact that this limitation is inherent to LLMs: chain of thought is not reasoning, only the illusion of it.

> And then I saw that with guidance and a critical eye, reasonably good specs, guardrails, it performed just as well and sometimes more throroughly than me

Right, and the important part here is that it did so with your guidance and taste, which have both been honed by years of experience.

Because they want to keep the narrative that they'll achieve AGI with LLMs alive.

Right, but my belief is that the LLM paradigm is a dead end for AGI. We need something different to cross that barrier.

Exactly, so this means they're probably gaining something from it.

Glad to hear it made an impression on you! Thanks for trying it :-)

Oh, thanks! I wasn't aware of HN Arcade.

Yup, I did the art, glad to know you like it. I wasn't a complete novice at drawing when I started the project, but I still have a lot to learn. The black and white colour palette, and the minimalist style were both an artistic and strategic choice based on my current skill level.

But I'd wager that the game would be much easier to market if the protagonist was an overworked cute anime girl or something.

Yeah, that makes a lot sense.

Haha, that's not what HR thinks ;-) Thanks for the encouragement, it means a lot at this stage!

Haha, happy to hear you found it worth your time! Thanks for trying it!

Hey, thanks a lot for trying it!

Did you progress past the initial dialogue with the HR and the CEO?

Because you should be able to get up after that. If not, it's a bug.

To progress through the dialogues you have to click the space bar.

But maybe this I should make this clearer in-game, thanks for reporting it!

Exactly, I think that by their very design, LLMs are very sensitive to how a question is framed.

But I wonder how much of that comes from RLHF itself or just from the way token prediction works.

This is especially problematic because of how easily (and unconsciously) one can bias LLMs with how the prompt is framed.

As an experiment, I recently asked an LLM to analyse the export of a text chat to uncover relationship dynamics.

Simply stating that I was one of the people in the chat would make the LLM turn the other person into the villain. None of that was visible if I framed the chat as only involving third party people.