[duxup]

I don't know if we're talking about exactly the same thing but this is my side story:

Even small requests to AI I find myself accidentally including some words or phrases that seem to indicate to AI "Oh he wants this as a function that does all the things very manually".

So I get some fairly capable, but very verbose and often inflexible code.

Yet, that's not what I was asking for, but something in the context set the AI off in that direction. In reality I'm not sure what I want and I'm open to anything.

Often I suddenly realize "Wait, there's gotta be some built in things in this language that does this or part of this..." and often there is that is far more reliable and a better way to do it. Somehow AI skipped that and gave me a different answer.

It strikes me as similar to customers who come to me with "I want an email that's sent on Tuesdays that are single digit calendar dates and this field contains the letter Q in them and ..." But when I ask them what they're trying to accomplish I find all that specificity isn't needed, and they really mean they order all their grapes on Tuesdays at the begging of the month and they just want a list of their grapes orders every few weeks.

[extr]

Yeah this is a similar phenomenon. AI is not so good at recognizing that you're looking for the "general" solution to the problem, one that will holistically fit in with the rest of the codebase/objective, and what has been provided as an example is really just a special case.

I think part of the problem is that instruction fine tuning is not done on full codebases, just shorter problems that fit into reasonable (8K, 32K) context windows. By nature these problems are more specific, so they are biased in that direction from the start.

[steve1977]

And that is why the I in AI is still misleading.