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by Aachen 110 days ago
My experience is that they somehow print quite modern code despite things like ES6 being too new to be standard knowledge even for me and I'm not even middle-aged yet

Maybe the last 10 years saw so much more modern code than the last cumulative 40+ years of coding and so modern code is statistically more likely to be output? Or maybe they assign higher weights to more recent commits/sources during training? Not sure but it seems to be good at picking this up. And you can always feed the info into its context window until then
3 comments
skeeter2020 110 days ago
This is not my experience. Claude has been happily generating code over the past week that is full of implicit any and using code that's been deprecated for at least 2 years.

>> Maybe the last 10 years saw so much more modern code than the last cumulative 40+ years of coding and so modern code is statistically more likely to be output?

The rate of change has made defining "modern" even more difficult and the timeframe brief, plus all that new code is based on old code, so it's more like a leaning tower than some sort of solid foundation.

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SahAssar 110 days ago
ES6 is 11 years old. It's not that new.
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Aachen 109 days ago
Hence the example of how long it takes non-LLMs to pick that up, whereas LLMs seem to get it despite there being loads of old code out there

See also my reply to the sibling comment with the same remark https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47151211

My mistake for saying 10 instead of 11 years btw, but I don't think it changes the point

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chrisweekly 109 days ago
> "ES6 being too new to be standard knowledge"

Huh? It's been a decade.

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Aachen 109 days ago
Exactly, I learned coding JS before 2015 (it was my first language, picked up during what is probably called middle school in english). I haven't had to learn it again from scratch, so I need to go out of my way to find if there is maybe a better way to do the thing I can already do fine. It's not automatic knowledge, yet the LLM seems to have no trouble with it, so I'm pointing out that they seem to not have problems upgrading. The grandparent comment suggested it would need to be trained anew to use this new method instead. Given how much old (non-ES6) JS there is, apparently it gets it quite easily so any update that includes some amount of this new code will probably do it just fine
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