Comment by noosphr
6 hours ago
There is an old saying back home: an idiot never tires, only sweats.
Claude isn't tenacious. It is an idiot that never stops digging because it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'. Chain of thought's whole raison d'etre was so the model could get out of the local minima it pushed itself in. The issue is that after a year it still falls into slightly deeper local minima.
This is fine when a human is in the loop. It isn't what you want when you have a thousand idiots each doing a depth first search on what the limit of your credit card is.
> it lacks the meta cognition to ask 'hey, is there a better way to do this?'.
Recently had an AI tell me this code (that it wrote) is a mess and suggested wiping it and starting from scratch with a more structure plan. That seems to hint at some meta cognition outlines
Haha, it has the human developer traits of thinking all old code is garbage, failing to identify oneself as the dummy who wrote this particular code, and wanting to start from scratch.
It's like NIH syndrome but instead "not invented here today". Also a very human thing.
Perhaps. I've had LLMs tell me some code is deeply flawed garbage that should be rewritten about code that exact same LLM wrote minutes before. It could be a sign of deep meta cognition, or it might be due to some cognitive gaps where it has no idea why it did something a minute ago and suddenly has a different idea.
Someone will say "you just need to instruct Claude.md to be more meta and do a wiggum loop on it"
I asked Claude to analyze something and report back. It thought for a while said “Wow this analysis is great!” and then went back to thinking before delivering the report. They’re auto-sycophantic now!
Metacognition As A Service, you say?
Running on the Meta Cognition Protocol server near you.
1 reply →
I think that’s called “consulting”.
I mean, not always. I've seen Claude step back and reconsider things after hitting a dead end, and go down a different path. There are also workflows, loops that can increase the likelihood of this occurring.
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