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I still haven't worked out how to get LLMs to avoid adding increasingly more complexity to projects. The projects I tend to want them to work on are like multi threaded C++ projects, so maybe I should just stick to getting them to write little python tools to make my life simpler.

I don't have any relevant expertise with multi-threaded C++, I would be surprised to hear they're much less effective at that The most important trick I know is making sure they have a test suite they can run - most of my Claude Code sessions start with me saying "first run the tests like this:"

I asked Google (no quotes): "how good is ai at writing c++ multithread code". Google's reply included limitations like this: "Multithreaded programming [involves]... issues like data races, deadlocks, and race conditions. AI models may struggle to identify and prevent these subtle bugs..."

simonwillison.netGoogle search hallucinates Encanto 2Jason Schreier on Bluesky: I was excited to tell my kids that there's a sequel to Encanto, only to scroll down and learn that Google's AI just completely made this …

Google's AI overviews are still the worst widely available AI models! I just checked and it's STILL saying Encanto 2 is a real movie, that bug is nearly a year old now simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/29/...

27/11/25, 9:21 pm0 reposts23 likes

Pekka Lund

@pekka.bsky.social

@stevepowell99.bsky.social

It says "There is no officially confirmed Encanto 2 movie" for me. Even though all the top Google results below and next to it are YouTube videos and Reddit posts etc. indicating it exists or is confirmed to be coming.

Steve Powell

Yes why is that? I use LLMs all day, for everything, but those AI summaries on Google search are verifiably absolute pants

My guess I'd it's a cost thing - the Google SERP is one of the highest traffic pages on the internet and needs to respond really fast, so they have to use a small, cheap but weak model for it

@stevepowell99.bsky.social

Well, Google's "AI Overview" is apparently good enough to get this right: 😉 '"Absolute pants" is British slang meaning something is complete and utter rubbish, nonsense, or very bad. It's a strong way to express that something is worthless, bad, or of poor quality.'

Steve Powell

Nailed it

Are you saying you disagree with: "Multithreaded programming [involves]... issues like data races, deadlocks, and race conditions. AI models may struggle to identify and prevent these subtle bugs..."? I wouldn't think that was a controversial statement.

I think "AI models may struggle to identify and prevent these subtle bugs" isn't a particularly useful statement - it's safe, but it's avoiding the more interesting question of how capable the latest generation of models actually are