The big problem is that a person making a mistake can be taught to not make that mistake again. That's also not foolproof but at least it works a lot of the times. AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck.

That is to say I do agree that building reliable processes out of unreliable parts with feedback is the modus operandi. However AI cannot meaningfully handle feedback and learn. And that is a key unsolved problem.

> AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck.

If the Model makes repeated mistakes on the same subject matter, you can update your agent.md file, or you can add skills to deal with specific prompts, or you provide a better default harness.

The whole idea of coding agents is their harness makes a big difference vs a pure raw model.

> However AI cannot meaningfully handle feedback and learn

How do you think models are created? They are trained on feedback and learn.

Its not cheap but you can post train models. This is how custom models are mode, that deal with specific tasks more efficiently and accurately.

Example ... Composer? Its base Kimi v2.5 model that has been post-trained 2 weeks, to create Composer 2.5, what is a much better coding model.

Its literally trained to make less mistakes by feeding it correct data. Hell, a lot of the models you are using, are often the same base model, where v2.0 was the initial released model but the model keeps training, so when they release v2.1, its still the same model, but with more training time on feedback provided to v2.0.

LLM Models are not a cake you cook one time and they are done, and you start from zero again. If you have the money, and a powerful server setup, you can take a model like GLM 5.2 and post-train it, to reduce specific errors. Sure, you need a ton of money because its a large model.

But people have been doing this with 5M, 100M, 1B, 5B models for a long time already. To the point that some of the small models can do specific tasks, almost or better then some of the huge more general trained models.

I don't know of any modern workflows that rely on "we'll tell the person not to do it again", though. There's a reason that companies have adopted blameless postmortems, because if your response to the DB going down is "It's fine, Kevin learns and next time he won't misuse the prod credentials", you are guaranteeing prod will go down again in the same way at some point.

Indeed. Any meaningful AGI/ASI will have to have a form of memory / continual learning. Sam Altman said last year that this will be the focus for GPT-6.

The whole "soul.md" stuff today is a poor approximation to that. But I wonder whether it will grow into it, like chain of thought prompting grew into reasoning models.

> The big problem is that a person making a mistake can be taught to not make that mistake again. That's also not foolproof but at least it works a lot of the times. AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck.

I feel like this line of thinking is kind of an unfair comparison. I'm not saying LLMs are magical beings that can suddenly learn by themselves after getting something wrong, but your "person making mistake then being corrected" assumes you do tell the person about the mistake and tell them to avoid doing the same mistake in the future, but for the "LLM making mistake" example you then intentionally avoid letting the prompt being changed in response to the mistake, which would be the "then being corrected" part on the LLM side of the comparison.

Similarly, if you just let a person make a mistake and don't let them know about the mistake, they might keep making that same mistake over and over again.

If you update how you use the LLM as you discover what mistakes it does, just like you'd correct a person, then you can use an LLM and also the LLM can "be taught to not make that mistake again".

"AI are unteachable, if you have given them a good prompt and they do something wrong 90% of the time you are shit out of luck."

please take a look at the error(s) made in the prior run. what could've been done better? create or modify an existing skill to emphasize this, or suggest additional language in AGENTS.md.