Comment by mlhpdx
3 hours ago
Fundamentally aren’t they concluding that tasks assigned to software developers (human or otherwise) are often incomplete, self contradictory or worse? This is the world in which their tool must play. I’m unsympathetic.
3 hours ago
Fundamentally aren’t they concluding that tasks assigned to software developers (human or otherwise) are often incomplete, self contradictory or worse? This is the world in which their tool must play. I’m unsympathetic.
Agreed - "underspecified prompts" being listed as a failure of the tooling is not a strong case. Even interns can understand ambiguous asks with a bit of help, and understand when they need to stop and ask instead of just carrying on. They are often working fairly independently on ambiguous tasks before the end of an internship, too.
So is the argument that frontier models are not just junior engineers, but first-month interns with no capability of progressing beyond that level?
The more subtle point is that there's a gap between the task and its verification. e.g. if you have an open-ended / under-specified prompt, the verification needs to be able to handle all potential solutions.
So you can have a very narrow task prompt that's easy to verify (but likely too simple of a challenge). Or a more realistic task prompt that's much harder to verify. And likely harder to both build the robust verifier and run it cheaply.
A substantial portion of software engineering -- and the fundamental jobs of a proper Product Owner and UX Designer -- is to turn "vague ideas about what we need to do" into "this widget, on this page, it should work like this"
It's not a pipeline, it's an ongoing conversation within any functional team, but this requires buy-in from management, who is often selected for "line must go up this quarter no matter the cost" over "hey, wouldn't it be cool if this company was still a going concern in twenty years?"
Variance in time horizons explains a lot of corporate behaviour.
And it’s rational. We all have limited careers.
I think that all makes a bit more sense as we get older. Optimising for short time horizons is not what I strive for, but explains things.