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Thats a bit like calling the code your intern just handed in "legacy". Modifying AI code doesn't have all the same shortcomings as with a legacy codebase, because the AI code was likely not very good in the first place. It feels like doing code review for a newbie. They come up with nice ideas, but if you take a good look at it, you usually find logic errors.


I can see your point, AI is in many ways like an intern. And I'm not saying that interns can't be helpful.

I wonder though if I have an intern and I tell them what is wrong with their code, they do learn from my feedback. One purpose for having interns write code is for them to learn. But is it the same with AI? Does it really learn from my feedback, or will it then just try something else, until I'm happy with its output?

When (and if) AI learns from my feedback, does it then apply it's learning when other people ask it to do similar tasks?


It doesn't learn from your feedback beyond the current conversation that you are having with it: https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/29/training-not-chatting/

The difference between using AI and working with an intern is that the intern learns from you while the AI doesn't... which means that YOU need to learn from your interactions with the AI so you can prompt it more effectively next time.

All of my Claude interactions include "(no react)" because I learned from past experience that without that it writes a React component which is much harder to export out and use separately.

I've also learned to remind it to use 16px text sizes on input boxes (to avoid a zoom effect when selecting an input field on Mobile Safari), and I habitually say "Add a copy to clipboard button that changes its text to Copied! for 1.5s after you click it" because then I get a better UX for the copy feature.


If you want the AI to "learn" something about your methods, you need to put that stuff into the context window, done. Thats basically why "You are a helpful assistant." is not enough for a prompt. You basically need to put in your coding standard, so that the machine knows what style to follow. Whenever you think it should "learn" something new about your methods, extent your system prompt. IOW, put everything you tell your intern, into the system prompt :-)




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