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I use these tools and that's my experience.
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I think it all depends on the use case and a luck factor.

Sometimes I instruct copilot/claude to do a development (stretching it's capabilities), and it does amazingly well. Mind you that this is front-end development, so probably one of the more ideal use-cases. Bugfixing also goes well a lot of times.

But other times, it really struggles, and in the end I have to write it by hand. This is for more complex or less popular things (In my case React-Three-Fiber with skeleton animations).

So I think experiences can vastly differ, and in my environment very dependent on the case.

One thing is clear: This AI revolution (deep learning) won't replace developers any time soon. And when the next revolution will take place, is anyones guess. I learned neural networks at university around 2000, and it was old technology then.

I view LLM's as "applied information", but not real reasoning.

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Ok, I'll bite. Let's assume a modern cutting edge model but even with fairly standard GQA attention, and something obviously bigger than just monosemantic features per neuron.

Based on any reasonable mechanistic interpretability understanding of this model, what's preventing a circuit/feature with polysemanticity from representing a specific error in your code?

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Do you actually understand ML? Or are you just parroting things you don't quite understand?

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Polysemantic features in modern transformer architectures (e.g., with grouped-query attention) are not discretely addressable, semantically stable units but superposed, context-dependent activation patterns distributed across layers and attention heads, so there is no principled mechanism by which a single circuit or feature can reliably and specifically encode “a particular code error” in a way that is isolable, causally attributable, and consistently retrievable across inputs.

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Way to go in showing you want a discussion, good job.

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Nice LLM generated text.

Now go read https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit... or https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19382 to see why that text is outdated. Or read any paper in the entire field of mechanistic interpretability (from the past year or two), really.

Hint: the first paper is titled "Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet" and you can ctrl-f for "We find three different safety-relevant code features: an unsafe code feature 1M/570621 which activates on security vulnerabilities, a code error feature 1M/1013764 which activates on bugs and exceptions"

Who said I want a discussion? I want ignorant people to STOP talking, instead of talking as if they knew everything.

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Your entire argument is derived from a pseudoscientific field without any peer-reviewed research. Mechanistic interpretability is a joke invented by AI firms to sell chatbots.
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Ok, let's chew on that. "reasonable mechanistic interpretability understanding" and "semantic" are carrying a lot of weight. I think nobody understands what's happening in these models -irrespective of narrative building from the pieces. On the macro level, everyone can see simple logical flaws.
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> I think nobody understands what's happening in these models

Quick question, do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that. Try skimming through this first: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/NfFST5Mio7BCAQHPA/an-ex...

> On the macro level, everyone can see simple logical flaws.

Your argument applies to humans as well. Or are you saying humans can't possibly understand bugs in code because they make simple logical flaws as well? Does that mean the existence of the Monty Hall Problem shows that humans cannot actually do math or logical reasoning?

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> do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that.

The mere existence of a research field is not proof of anything except "some people are interested in this". Its certainly doesn't imply that anyone truly understands how LLMs process information, "think", or "reason".

As with all research, people have questions, ideas, theories and some of them will be right but most of them are bound to be wrong.

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