Comment by andai

> you can just provide guidance on how to do things more idiomatically, rather than depend on that knowledge already being encoded in the model

I spent some time a while ago comparing various Claude models to various Chinese alternatives. The main difference I noticed was that Claude's code tended to be much more readable and much more elegant.

I found myself asking Sonnet to clean up code written by other models on a very regular basis. (Maybe that's subjective, but I have a feeling it would win on some objective measures of code complexity as well.)

Eventually I realized I could just prompt the Chinese models to give me elegant code. If you don't tell them that they will give you pretty mediocre code by default. (This has improved a little with recent releases.)

I thought that was pretty funny, but then I remembered, it used to be that way with image generation models too!

Back in the day, you had to add "+good -bad" to the prompt, otherwise they wouldn't know you wanted the art to look good, and they would give you all sorts of crap! (Because they've been trained on all sorts of crap. Well, most of the art online is pretty crap, and that goes for most code too.)