Comment by Lambdanaut
1 hour ago
> there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles.
You literally just have to ask it. Before I left software engineering in April, I was using Claude for re-architecture all the time.
But no, it doesn't assume it should re-architect what you're handing it when you haven't asked it to.
That's the point. When a human works on a problem they realize themselves "wait, i probably should re-architect now" - of course you can ask an LLM to do that, but at that point you already know yourself what you need, which defeats the point of LLM working on difficult problems that require insight automatically. A lot of these math problems are sessions over many hours. And of course you can also ask "Think about whether to re-architect at each step" and it will never do the right thing because the context it builds up for itself drives it into a specific solution. It's literally trained to complete exactly that.
why did you leave?
> You literally just have to ask it.
why doesnt it ask itself before proceeding?
Because if you asked it to fix a bug and every time it responds with paragraphs of how you could re-architect the system, it would be incredibly annoying.
exactly. it doesnt have the wisdom to decide when to do what.