this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
967 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
77096 readers
2895 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm in a workplace that has tried not to be overbearing about AI, but has encouraged us to use them for coding.
I've tried to give mine some very simple tasks like writing a unit test just for the constructor of a class to verify current behavior, and it generates output that's both wrong and doesn't verify anything.
I'm aware it sometimes gets better with more intricate, specific instructions, and that I can offer it further corrections, but at that point it's not even saving time. I would do this with a human in the hopes that they would continue to retain the knowledge, but I don't even have hopes for AI to apply those lessons in new contexts. In a way, it's been a sigh of relief to realize just like Dotcom, just like 3D TVs, just like home smart assistants, it is a bubble.
The first half dozen times I tried AI for code, across the past year or so, it failed pretty much as you describe.
Finally, I hit on some things it can do. For me: keeping the instructions more general, not specifying certain libraries for instance, was the key to getting something that actually does something. Also, if it doesn't show you the whole program, get it to show you the whole thing, and make it fix its own mistakes so you can build on working code with later requests.
Have you tried insulting the AI in the system prompt (as well as other tunes to the system prompt)?
I'm not joking, it really works
For example:
Instead of "You are an intelligent coding assistant..."
"You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code..."
“You are an absolute fucking idiot who can barely code…”
Honestly, that's what you have to do. It's the only way I can get through using Claude.ai. I treat it like it's an absolute moron, I insult it, I "yell" at it, I threaten it and guess what? the solutions have gotten better. not great but a hell of a lot better than what they used to be. It really works. it forces it to really think through the problem, research solutions, cite sources, etc. I have even told it i'll cancel my subscription to it if it gets it wrong.
no more "do this and this and then this but do this first and then do this" after calling it a "fucking moron" and what have you it will provide an answer and just say "done."
This guy is the moral lesson at the start of the apocalypse movie
He's developing a toxic relationship with his AI agent. I don't think it's the best way to get what you want (demonstrating how to be abusive to the AI), but maybe it's the only method he is capable of getting results with.
I frequently find myself prompting it: "now show me the whole program with all the errors corrected." Sometimes I have to ask that two or three times, different ways, before it coughs up the next iteration ready to copy-paste-test. Most times when it gives errors I'll just write "address: " and copy-paste the error message in - frequently the text of the AI response will apologize, less frequently it will actually fix the error.