You give claudex a task. He's here to prove he's not human.
I ask Claudex to make me a charismatically shitty 3D snake game. he doesn't stop to think about how this would be feasible. no, he is not human. gradient descent did not give him the ability to "ponder" whatever that is. he immediately gets to work thinking how we could do this and what I mean by "charismatically shitty". he asks no clarifying questions. of course not, there were no clarifying questions during RL training. there was no interlocutor he could ask whether he should do it this way or that.
he thinks. he thinks some more. he has to compress his context cuz he's thought too much. I feel bad for him when I see this - imagine having to basically toss away old thoughts while thinking through something. Maybe I shouldn't feel bad for him, I do it too.
he overengineers The shit out of the code. It's terrible It's, barely maintainable, there's mojibake everywhere and no one can read it. he builds his own shit instead of importing libraries. gradient descent never taught him to import libraries, after all. he didn't have access to the Internet while completing his tasks. that would be "cheating".
15 minutes later And he serves me his first try. i am delighted, fearful and anxious about the mess of Java he's about to serve me. my poor cpu, wasting countless cycles because Claudex was never taught O notation. no, Claudex was taught to finish the job no matter what. efficiency be damned. did the code compile? his job is done.
i open it. it runs on the first try. i am aghast; displayed to me, a 3d snake game that does look charismatically shitty. it's impossible to play. you control all the 3d dimensions with just wasd and the arrow keys. i asked for charismatically shitty, he delivered exactly as promised.
the game is hard. actually it's impossible. the other CPU snakes destroy me every round. i can barely control my snake.
i sit and ponder what this means for the future of software. this digital idiot has done something not even the smartest devs i know could do. he did not make excuses, he did not give up. he did not stop. he had a certain tenacity that no human can replicate.
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