> ... if the LLM hits a wall it’s first inkling is not to step back and understand why the wall exists and then change course, its first inkling is ...
LLM's do not "understand why." They do not have an "inkling."
Claiming they do is anthropomorphizing a statistical token (text) document generator algorithm.
The more concerning algorithms at play are how they are post-trained. And the then concern of reward hacking. Which is what he was getting at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking
100% - we really shouldn't anthropomorphize. But the current models are capable of being trained in a way to steer agentic behavior from reasoned token generation.
> But the current models are capable of being trained in a way to steer agentic behavior from reasoned token generation.
This does not appear to be sufficient in the current state, as described in the project's README.md:
Why This Exists
We learned the hard way that instructions aren't enough to
keep AI agents in check. After Claude Code silently wiped
out hours of progress with a single rm -rf ~/ or git
checkout --, it became evident that "soft" rules in an
CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md file cannot replace hard technical
constraints. The current approach is to use a dedicated
hook to programmatically prevent agents from running
destructive commands.
Perhaps one day this category of plugin will not be needed. Until then, I would be hard-pressed to employ an LLM-based product having destructive filesystem capabilities based solely on the hope of them "being trained in a way to steer agentic behavior from reasoned token generation."
LLM's do not "understand why." They do not have an "inkling."
Claiming they do is anthropomorphizing a statistical token (text) document generator algorithm.