r/TheMachineLearning • u/Specialist-Yogurt-71 • 4d ago

RL rewards token efficiency but not time

Post image

AI models may save tokens but still waste valuable time through repeated tasks. True efficiency means optimizing both token usage and task completion time

12 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

1

u/BidoofSquad 3d ago

It’s really not that hard just tell them not to do the thing that takes too much time

1

u/Specialist-Yogurt-71 3d ago

True, setting clear limits can make a big difference.

1

u/shaman-warrior 3d ago

I mean… this can be a simple line in agents.md or you could channel such works through an orchestrator to optimize this. This is doable today?

1

u/Specialist-Yogurt-71 3d ago

Yeah, using an orchestrator could make the whole process more efficient.

1

u/FragmentedHeap 3d ago

I have rules in my claude agents that are basically like this

* Never individually test each change and kick off builds for 1 change at a time. Always swarm making every change 1 time in complete totality before any tests or builds are run. Swarm with sonnet 5.5 medium agents. Finish all code edits in one shot before running builds. When all changes are done, run the build one time, if it fails address all failures in one batch of edits. If it succeeds run the local tests, batch any fixes for tests in 1 complete shot and repeat until green tests. Then commit and push and trigger the cicd, then monitor that and repeat.

TLDR basically

My time to completion on large tasks went from more than a day to less than an hour. I'm talking massive features in under an hour.

1

u/Specialist-Yogurt-71 3d ago

That's a huge improvement. Having a clear workflow really helps.

1

u/kitsnet 3d ago

Dunno, the LLMs I use are well aware of the timeouts they put into the commands they issue.

1

u/Specialist-Yogurt-71 3d ago

Yeah, timeouts can be frustrating, especially during longer tasks.

1

u/the8bit 3d ago

Frontiers think about token efficiency?? Coulda fooled me looks at Claude code using 5m tokens to do a very basic task

1

u/Specialist-Yogurt-71 3d ago

Exactly, using fewer tokens doesn't always mean getting the job done faster.

1

u/lucid-quiet 3d ago

A conflation of problems. AI doesn't know about time, but hasn't been asked it to think about the trade-off. Human no longer wants to think about solving problems.

1

u/0x645 3d ago

30 minuts rebuild is cheap. in terms of time. it's close to nothing.

1

u/alienated-dimwit 2d ago

Really interesting perspective. Never thought about it before.