your error/hallucination rate is like 1/10th of what I’d expect. I’ve been using an AI assistant for the better part of a year,

I’m having AI write computer programs, and when I tried it a year ago I laughed and walked away - it was useless. It has improved substantially in the past 3 months.

CONSTANTLY reinforcing fucking BASIC directives

Yes, that is the “limited context window” - in my experience people have it too.

I have given my AIs basic workflows to follow for certain operations, simple 5 to 8 step processes, and they do them correctly about 19 times out of 20, but that 5% they’ll be executing the same process and just skip a step - like many people tend to as well.

but a human can learn

In the past week I have been having my AIs “teach themselves” these workflows and priorities. Prioritizing correctness over speed, respecting document hierarchies when deciding which side of a conflict needs to be edited, etc. It seems to be helping somewhat. I had it research current best practices on context window management and apply it to my projects, and that seems to have helped a little too. But, while I type this, my AI just ran off and started implementing code based on old downstream specs that should have been updated to reflect top level changes we just made, I interrupted it and told it to go back and do it the right way, like its work instructions already tell it to. After the reminder it did it right : limited context window.

The main problem I have with computer programming AIs is: when you have a human work on a problem for a month, you drop by every day or two to see how it’s going, clarify, course correct. The AI does the equivalent work in an hour and I just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up at that speed, so it gets just as far off in the weeds as a junior programmer locked in a room and fed Jolt cola and Cheetos through a slot in the door would after a month alone.

An interesting response I got from my AI recently regarding this phenomenon was: it provided “training seminar” materials for our development team telling them how to proceed incrementally with the AI work and carefully review intermediate steps. I already do that with my “work side” AI project, it didn’t suggest it. My home side project where I normally approve changes without review is the one that suggested the training seminar.