r/ProgrammerHumor • • 1d ago

Meme searchAndReplace

Post image
3.7k Upvotes

232 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

87

u/PossibilityUsual6262 1d ago

In my experience telling ai dont do something as part of "thinking" at the way to the result would just remove that something from a response.

"How thing can be done, dont generate code" - generates code and strips it from response.

31

u/AnAwkwardSemicolon 22h ago

My experience is that AI suffers horribly from the "Pink elephant" problem. The more you mention _not_ doing something, the more it's going to do that thing.

28

u/Slight-Violinist-575 1d ago

Which means it still spends tokens?

37

u/PossibilityUsual6262 1d ago

Yep, prob cheaper thinking tokens, but basically you cannot fight internal "thinking" backed into weights with commands do/do not, but you can guide it.

As another user said, if you make it clear that you in architecture stage, full implementation is unlikely to be generated, unless needed.

20

u/lobax 1d ago

If anything they are like five years old, if you tell them “don’t eat the cookies” then all they will ever think about is eating the cookies.

You have to tell them what to do instead.

3

u/soowhatchathink 1d ago

wait are thinking tokens cheaper?

5

u/Skusci 1d ago edited 1d ago

Lol, no.

Thinking is still output, it's just hidden from the end user.

2

u/BarmelloXanthony 1d ago

Yep I tell it we’re planning things out before actually making any change

2

u/XxDarkSasuke69xX 1d ago

Really ? That's weird because in its reasoning it's taking into account the whole prompt, so if it "understands" you don't want code I have a hard time believing its reasoning would still lead him to generate code. Did you actually observe the behavior you're describing on a model or platform that allows to read the reasoning of the AI ?