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0 pointsjmcodes6d ago0 comments

What would you consider a "hard" problem?

0 comments

Extrapolating the final position of the goalposts

That's a halting problem, I think.

And Claude can actually tackle it the same way as humans do - here in the real world, where we don't have time to let some nonsense like "mathematically proven to be unsolvable" to stand between us and our goals: it can eyeball the code and give a good enough guess.

goatlover6d ago

It can certainly get in a loop burning up tokens before deciding to exit some time later.

hollowturtle6d ago

I don't know how to define hard problems.

All I know is that we have a gigantic amount of tech debt we accumulated on the web chasing the next web framework built on top of tons of abstractions with very disappointing native web apis that shouldn't be taken seriously nor the w3c who specified them.

And when an Agent it's capable of gluing together a web app with some crud backend with a very rounded corners UI, that solves nothing for end users, we call them capable. These are not hard problems

squidbeak6d ago

You insist that AI needs to be able to tackle hard problems, but can't say what qualifies as a hard problem. Can you see the problem with that? If you don't know what a hard problem looks like, how do you know the models can't tackle them?

skydhash6d ago

It’s that it’s to able to tackle hard problems really. It’s because you have to give it the solution, and the patterns to follow, and then monitor it because it will go down weird paths.

If you’ve ever work directly with a user, you know how vague change requests can be. Try writing some vague prompts like that to the agent and see if it can solve them.

For some, writing down a (good?) specs and handing it to an agent is not very productive. Because by then, they already have an idea of the solution and can use the editor to have it done.

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