Comment by sarchertech
7 days ago
When pigeons are offered random rewards from a treat dispenser, they start doing all kinds of funny little dances and movements because they think the rewards are in response to their actions.
7 days ago
When pigeons are offered random rewards from a treat dispenser, they start doing all kinds of funny little dances and movements because they think the rewards are in response to their actions.
Funny dances like "writing tests" and "planning"
Robot, you must follow the rules of the house!
It is imperative that you do not kill me when delivering my breakfast!
You must not make your own doors by punching holes in the wall!
It is critical that you remember that humans cannot regrow limbs!
“You’re absolutely right…”
This is my favorite thing about this whole situation. I spend years trying to get teams to follow best practices. And then suddenly if you follow them the LLM is more effective so now they follow them ignoring that they could have been more effective this whole time.
Or daily standups.
I don’t know what you’re trying to imply here but it sounds very strongly like it is put in bad faith.
I’m critiquing the term “vibe engineering” by highlighting that because of the random, chaotic, black box nature of LLMs it is very difficult to distinguish valid techniques from superstitions.
Thus what you are doing is closer to pigeons bobbing their heads to attempt to influence the random reward machine than it is to engineering.
For example saying things like “It is critical that you don’t delete working code” might actually be a valid general technique, or it might have just been something that appeared to work because of randomness, or it might be something that is needed for current models but won’t be necessary in a few months.
The nature of LLMs makes correctly identifying superstition nearly impossible. And the speed with which new models are released makes trying to do so akin to doing physics in a universe where the laws of nature are constantly changing.
You’re an alchemist mixing gunpowder and sacrificing chickens to fire spirits, not an engineer, and for the foreseeable future you have no hope of becoming an engineer.
I’m also highlighting the insanely addictive nature of random rewards.
See this is where I think I fundamentally disagree. It’s more like being a scientist who takes 10 rats and tries to train them to sniff out TB, and once they find one that can do it reliably, they go and do real work with it. Just because the rat is the one doing the sniffing doesn’t mean the scientists aren’t real scientists. And just because we work with a tool that isn’t perfectly reliable doesn’t make us any less engineers as long as we manage and take ownership of the output as we alter and massage it from the machine. Imagine back in the day calling devs that didn’t write in assembly “alchemists” because they didn’t fully understand how a compiler works and just trusted it instead. As long as they’re reading the code, testing the logic, and working towards an outcome they take ownership of, they’re engineers, and so are people who use LLM’s. It’s dangerously close to elitism gatekeeping to say otherwise.
Also I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years so I think I don’t “have no hope of becoming a software engineer”, no personal attacks please.
Ahhh you mean cargo culting!
2 replies →
gotta source or two? it's an ungooglable topic due to "see pigeon do funny dance" social media spam
Google Skinner Pigeons.
“One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.”
“The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
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