[kristiandupont]

I had Claude help me get a program written for Linux to compile on macOS. The program is written in a programming language the author invented for the project, a pretty unusual one (for example, it allows spaces in variable names).

Claude figured out how the language worked and debugged segfaults until the compiler compiled, and then until the program did. That might not be magic, but it shows a level of sophistication where referring to “statistics” is about as meaningful as describing a person as the statistics of electrical impulses between neurons.

[compass_copium]

But the programming language has explicitly laid out rules. It was not trained on those sets of rules, but it was trained on many trillions of lines of code. It has a map of how programs work, and an explanation of this new language. It's using training data and data it's fed to generate that result.

[selridge]

What doesn't that explain tho?

What behavior would you need to see for that explanation to no longer hold? Because it seems like it explains too much.

[orf]

That’s still over-general to the point of being useless.

What you wrote would apply to a human approaching this task as well, sans the “many trillion lines of code”.