zzleeper

And I did gave the program a bunch of code guides -- this [1] for instance -- which included quotes like "Prefer straightforward code over clever code." but somehow that didn't matter.

A big problem I have with OpenAI's models (and of course Claude) is that they tend to write the most over-engineered pieces of code, beyond the imagination of any architecture's astronaut.

Just this week I asked 5.6-sol-ultra to update a 1000 LOC python script I had, to "incorporate the key lessons learned when using it for another project".

I left it overnight and went to sleep. In the morning I realized it had created a monstruosity of 180 PYTHON SCRIPTS, with maybe 100,000 lines of code, each more crazy than the other. It took me minutes even to track where a single action took place, due to all the crazy imports, defensive coding, and premature optimization.

Similarly, anything they write is riddled with jargon that almost feel like they want me to give up trying to understand. Made up phrases that ended up with me having no idea of what was going on.

So now to my assessment: The reason why " Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory" [1], and why even SOTA LLMs struggle so much with open-ended unsupervised tasks is precisely this. They somehow let complexity explode, and unless it's also accompanied with an explosion in e.g. the number of agents, the amount of processing time, etc. then projects become broken/unmanageable.

Sure, LLMs are great at producing code that can be thrown out, so they are amazing when searching for exploits, for instance. But as of 5.6 they still lack either a better harness that encourages KISS principles, or a better RL step.

(And not sure why, but doubt Astra will fix this.. they seem to be aiming for AGI and for beating crazy benchmarks, which is not very aligned with KISS)

A big problem I have with OpenAI's models (and of course Claude) is that they tend to write the most over-engineered pieces of code, beyond the imagination of any architecture's astronaut.

Just this week I asked 5.6-sol-ultra to update a 1000 LOC python script I had, to "incorporate the key lessons learned when using it for another project".

I left it overnight and went to sleep. In the morning I realized it had created a monstruosity of 180 PYTHON SCRIPTS, with maybe 100,000 lines of code, each more crazy than the other. It took me minutes even to track where a single action took place, due to all the crazy imports, defensive coding, and premature optimization.

Similarly, anything they write is riddled with jargon that almost feel like they want me to give up trying to understand. Made up phrases that ended up with me having no idea of what was going on.

So now to my assessment: The reason why " Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory" [1], and why even SOTA LLMs struggle so much with open-ended unsupervised tasks is precisely this. They somehow let complexity explode, and unless it's also accompanied with an explosion in e.g. the number of agents, the amount of processing time, etc. then projects become broken/unmanageable.

Sure, LLMs are great at producing code that can be thrown out, so they are amazing when searching for exploits, for instance. But as of 5.6 they still lack either a better harness that encourages KISS principles, or a better RL step.

(And not sure why, but doubt Astra will fix this.. they seem to be aiming for AGI and for beating crazy benchmarks, which is not very aligned with KISS)