I have a lot of respect from Simon and read a lot of his articles.

But I'm still seeing clear evidence it IS a statistical text prediction model. You ask it the right niche thing and it can only pump out a few variations of the same code, that's clearly someone else's code stolen almost verbatim.

And I just use it 2 or 3 times a day.

How are SimonW and AntiRez not seeing the same thing?

How are they not seeing the propensity for both Claude + ChatGPT to spit out tons of completely pointless error handling code, making what should be a 5 line function a 50 line one?

How are they not seeing that you constantly have to nag it to use modern syntax. Typescript, C#, Python, doesn't matter what you're writing in, it will regularly spit out code patterns that are 10 years out of date. And woe betide you using a library that got updated in the last 2 years. It will constantly revert back to old syntax over and over and over again.

I've also had to deal with a few of my colleagues using AI code on codebases they don't really understand. Wrong sort, id instead of timestamp. Wrong limit. Wrong json encoding, missing key converters. Wrong timezone on dates. A ton of subtle, not obvious, bugs unless you intimately know the code, but would be things you'd look up if you were writing the code.

And that's not even including the bit where the AI obviously decided to edit the wrong search function in a totally different part of the codebase that had nothing to do with what my colleague was doing. But didn't break anything or trigger any tests because it was wrapped in an impossible to hit if clause. And it created a bunch of extra classes to support this phantom code, so hundreds of new lines of code just lurking there, not doing anything but if I hadn't caught it, everyone thinks it does do something.

It's mostly a statistical text model, although the RL "reasoning" stuff added in the past 12 months makes that a slightly less true statement - it has extra tricks now to help it bias bits of code to statistically predict that are more likely to work.

The real unlock though is the coding agent harnesses. It doesn't matter any more if it statistically predicts junk code that doesn't compile, because it will see the compiler error and fix it. If you tell it "use red/green TDD" it will write the tests first, then spot when the code fails to pass them and fix that too.

> How are they not seeing the propensity for both Claude + ChatGPT to spit out tons of completely pointless error handling code, making what should be a 5 line function a 50 line one?

TDD helps there a lot - it makes it less likely the model will spit out lines of code that are never executed.

> How are they not seeing that you constantly have to nag it to use modern syntax. Typescript, C#, Python, doesn't matter what you're writing in, it will regularly spit out code patterns that are 10 years out of date.

I find that if I use it in a codebase with modern syntax it will stick to that syntax. A prompting trick I use a lot is "git clone org/repo into /tmp and look at that for inspiration" - that way even a fresh codebase will be able to follow some good conventions from the start.

Plus the moment I see it write code in a style I don't like I tell it what I like instead.

> And that's not even including the bit where the AI obviously decided to edit the wrong search function in a totally different part of the codebase that had nothing to do with what my colleague was doing.

I usually tell it which part of the codebase to execute - or if it decides itself I spot that and tell it that it did the wrong thing - or discard the session entirely and start again with a better prompt.

You can literally go look at some of antirez's PRs described here in this article. They're not seeing it because it's not there?

Honestly, what you're describing sounds like the older models. If you are getting these sorts of results with Opus 4.5 or 5.2-codex on high I would be very curious to see your prompts/workflow.

> You ask it the right niche thing and it can only pump out a few variations of the same code, that's clearly someone else's code stolen almost verbatim.

There are only so many ways to express the same idea. Even clean room engineers write incidentally identical code to the source sometimes.