All well said, Abe. A colleague is using Claude as an assistant on a programming project that has a lot of very similar but subtly different things. Yes, I'm being deliberately vague: point is, he knows how to do it, but doesn't want to have to almost repeat the code hundreds of times. He's VERY experienced, about to retire (like most of us), and so is as interested in the process as the actual results.
The yippee-skippy oh-so-chipper aspect of the LLM was driving him nuts. He got it to calm down by telling it to, but then it kept "forgetting" because it would overrun the token window. He finally created a file and whenever it gets rambunctious just tells it to "read <filename>". That worked, once he also figured out how to get it to not comment on the contents of that file! This chipper **** reminds me of Amazon Echo (Alexa), which is similar in that it keeps wanting to offer crap nobody sane would want. E.g., 8AM, "Alexa, temperature now" (I use that because just "temperature" gets me an entire forecast, which is not what I want). It reported the temperature, then: "By the way, would you like me to play bouncy music in the morning?" "Alexa, **** no". Which works, fortunately... -----Original Message----- mFrom: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Abe Kornelis Sent: Monday, November 17, 2025 3:22 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: It's not a bug it's a feature Dave, you wrote: > Bottom line, talking to Copilot is much like talking to a human. He's > exceedingly knowledgeable, but he's not always right. And just like > with any real person, I have to be alert for that. Generally, with a > bit of discussion, we can usually zero in on the truth. But in my experience it's a flatterer. If you insist that 5+5=9 it will concede. Customer is always right ... They've managed to create yet another mechanism to reinforce information bubbles, alas. You are right however that working with AI feels much like working with a very junior programmer: has learnt how to code - but does not understand the problem you're trying to solve. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
