B.Y.O.C.: Baby Bird Failure Case

Baby birds!!!!!

Growing up I was if you touch a bird egg, the scent you leave will mean that when the Mom returns she'll sense something is amiss and no longer identify the eggs/babies as her own, abandoning them.

How I'm observing the baby birds.

Probably because baby birds have been (delightfully!) top-of-mind, I've started calling a recurring failure mode of my claw-inspired streetlight.jakesimonds.com as a Baby Bird Failure.

Baby Bird Failure:

The LLM takes something you jotted down to remember but weren't done thinking about, and transforms it. You see the transformation, and now the idea as yours anymore. Womp womp.

Two Examples

An example of Baby Bird Failure:

This is a blog post I wrote. This is my system taking my half-formed idea and not at all helping! It was harder to think once I had seen the Midas Touch of my system turning my thoughts to slop.

But it's tricky. Because other ideas are not such fragile eggs.

Another example:

I was thinking of writing about another analogy, that maybe people who do know how to program maybe like pre-atomic steel.

This time, the system produced this . And I found it useful.

I think in this case, the difference was for pre-atomic steel, I had just some basic questions about how steel is made that got answered (it takes lots of air being blown through the molten stuff to make steel, and the air had the trace amounts of radioactivity).

But that's playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback. How in the world do you tease apart where these systems help vs where they just get in your way?

Beats me.

I'm a believer in claw-inspired systems, but this distinction I think is really tricky.