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Comment by smj-edison

16 hours ago

I like to imagine that there's this one employee that oversees RHLF, who has a particular style of writing, and that got so ingrained that it's just them x1000.

I remember asking claude in claude code why the "seams" and it instantly in very fine detail said how it's from a book on working with legacy code

so they might be RLHFing on these specific approaches and then it becomes the entire model

just an anecdote but I found it interesting how it went full on that it's from that book vs just "it's technical jargon"

  • AI model does not know special insight into how model itself was trained. All it tells you is it's prediction of expected explanation.

    • I checked this, and Claude says "it's a real term of art from Michael Feathers' Working Effectively with Legacy Code (2004), where he defines it as a place you can alter a program's behavior without editing in that place."

      While I agree the model doesn't have insight into how it was trained I do think the history of the term itself is interesting.

    • yeah but I didn't prompt it in a way where I tried to get such an answer, it gave an entire boilerplate rundown just from like me asking "what's up with the 'seams'?"

      I might be wrong, but usually it'd be a lot less deliberate, and at least in my mind it wouldn't be surprising if they were heaving training these on these specific "best practices" books/methodologies and thus picking up lingo from them