[neilk]

That’s what I’m seeing too. I had a problem with some Hashicorp Packer scripts and posed it to ChatGPT. It did have an idea of the shape of the problem. To solve it the bot just hallucinated syntax. It spoke with great authority that this was the solution and provided a beautifully syntax-colored excerpt of something that wouldn’t have even compiled.

This was perhaps a very hard problem for an LLM, as the Packer tool’s nature is to manage layers of context. Environment variables passed through templates then passed to scripts which themselves might be in other frameworks. So in this case it to be confused about what was Ansible syntax and what was Packer.

So the bot seems to have different failure modes than humans. Distinguishing context layers seems to be a weak point. And an answer that is a wild guess looks as authoritative as a solid answer. But it’s still extremely impressive.