The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving.

I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder.

Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again.

Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

They already do, extensively. Its not Shakespeare, in fact, it sucks at prose and creativity, like most newer llms.

But people are not as alike as you think. I doubt I share your unique preferences.

That said, I don't spend much time telling it how to behave. Are you sure you're not fighting the default system prompt?

This is really it for me as well. At the heights of complexity AI can do magical things. But really a lot of the time I just want it to do mundane things right. And currently it just cannot. It writes garbage text, consistently ignores something you have told it, makes mistakes a human makes once but the AI remains uncorrectable.

>Half of my work is telling claude how to behave

Dijkstra in the Foolishness of Natural Language Programming

[...] the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system.

Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do!

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...