Large language models (LLMs) will write better code if you ask them, though it takes some software development experience to do so effectively – which limits the utility of AI code help for novices. Max Woolf, senior data scientist at Buzzfeed, on Thursday published an experiment in LLM prompting, to see whether LLMs can optimize the code they suggest on demand. Woolf explained, "If code can indeed be improved simply through iterative prompting such as asking the LLM to ‘make the code better’ — even though it’s very silly — it would be a massive productivity increase. And if that’s the case, what happens if you iterate on the code too much?" This is what happened: Anthropic’s Claude was tasked with writing Python code to find the difference between […]
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