Comment by GeorgeTirebiter

Yes, it IS confident of its weights & biases... but, if you keep at it, Claude WILL find the smoking gun, eventually. Even a broken watch is correct twice a day ( unless it's a digital watch, without a battery, in which case, it's just broken... )

But seriously -- newer Claude (and OpenAI and Google and ???) models DO find the smoking gun, if you let them keep going until they reveal the weird chain of events that leads to a bug. I was seeing the most obscure UART driver bug, where it would work at 1,500,000 baud (!) but fail by only outputting the 1st char at 230.4k and 460.8k -- and it was due to a very narrow race that would check the buffer, if not full, insert a character, and return BUT sometimes the TX Complete interrupt would happen between the check and the insert, and something else would insert, and then - buf overflow. At 1,500,000 the other process didn't have time to do that phantom insert. ANYWAY, Claude found this and proposed a fix -- simpler: spins on IRQ-protected buffer empty checks.

I'd hate to think how long it would have taken me to find that.

And THAT's the problem -- of course a human CAN find it, with sufficient focus and time; I'm sure you've found a complicated bug pretty easily sometimes, by sheer luck or good engineering instinct.

BUT, it seems to me, as human, we are capable of creating potential execution paths that EXCEED our ability to EVER figure it out -- due to not being smart enough, not enough time on the problem, or something makes it economically unfeasible.

THIS is where LLMs shine -- let 'em bang at the code for as long as it takes.

The recent Mythos bug-finding explosion I think is proof of this conjecture. I think of it like a chessboard, where a machine really can look at all possible execution paths, and locate obscure bugs; a human programer (akin to a chess program) is doing 'alpha-beta pruning' of what's likely, and only after that list is exhausted are the really weird possibilities examined.

LLMs are our friends. And, as for "WTF did the LLM just do" when it generates code? I always include the instruction "For this code you just wrote, use Best Practices to document this code, function by function and class by class, and when necessary, line-by-line, so that a junior SW developer can completely understand how this code works, using the documentation standard we use (e.g. Doxygen)."

I have also used this technique to learn new languages, or explore ones I only know a little -- it has been a godsend for leveling me up on common lisp, for example. "Give detailed comments explaining what the code is doing, assuming the code reader is fluent in C and Python, and use analogs when possible." Stuff like that.