157 pointsby desideratum12 hours ago8 comments
  • wwfn9 hours ago
    Tangential (but topical in that "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing" is also on the front page):

    Is the generated python code in the example wrong?

    The prompt

    > Develop a Python function that removes any falsey values from a list. Return the modified list without creating a new one.

    Is answered with list comprehension, which makes a new list and leaves the original unmodified (never mind that the *args input necessarily can't be a modifiable list?)

       def remove_falsey_values(*args): return [val for val in args if val]
    
    Whereas I'd expect something like

        def remove_falsey_values(l):
              for i in reversed(range(len(l))):
                   if not l[i]: l.pop(i)
              # returned list is linked to input l 
              return l
    
        a = [1, 0, False, 'foo']
        x = remove_falsey_values(a)
        x[0] = 2
        print(a) # [2,'foo']
    • hecanjog9 hours ago
      It doesn't fit the requirement to modify the list in place, but the prompt itself contradicts the requirements by asking explicitly for the implementation to use *args and a list comprehension.
      • wwfn9 hours ago
        Ahh I didn't see the full original prompt -- it's overflowing into a horz scroll for me. I thought it was the "critique loop" that injected the *args requirement. I guess garbage in, garbage out. Still unfortunate example to use.
    • desideratum6 hours ago
      Oh I wouldn't be surprised. This is a sample from one of the OSS code datasets I'd used, which are all generated synthetically using LLMs. Data is indeed the moat.
    • __s7 hours ago

          def remove_falsey_values(l):
                l[:] = (x for x in l if x)
    • nusl4 hours ago
      Why would you modify the original list and return it with the second example? Honestly the first is better
      • highphive4 hours ago
        The question isn't really what's better practice, the question is whether the code follows the prompt. The first example does not.
    • semiinfinitely6 hours ago
      your second function is the type of bad code you get from people trying to program python like its c
      • ktm5j3 hours ago
        Is there a pythonic way to satisfy the prompt? IE without making a new list?
      • wwfn3 hours ago
        Absolutely! And the list.pop version is multiple orders of magnitude slower. But I took the prompt to be asking for in-place modification of the existing list. Comprehension does not do that.
  • bdbdbdb10 hours ago
    Dumb question - and I'm not trying diminish the achievement here, I just genuinely don't understand:

    Why would people want to spend $200 to train a coding model when there are free coding models?

    • desideratum10 hours ago
      This is a great question. You definitely aren't training this to use it, you're training it to understand how things work. It's an educational project, if you're interested in experimenting with things like distributed training techniques in JAX, or preference optimisation, this gives you a minimal and hackable library to build on.
      • wongarsu7 hours ago
        It's also a great base for experimentation. If you have an idea for an architecture improvement you can try it for $36 on the 20 layer nanocode setting, then for another $200 see how it holds up on the "full scale" nanocode

        Kaparthy's notes on improving nanochat [1] are one of my favorite blog-like things to read. Really neat to see which features have how much influence, and how the scaling laws evolve as you improve the architecture

        There's also modded-nanogpt which turns the same kind of experimentation into a training speedrun (and maybe loses some rigor on the way) [2]

        1 https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/blob/master/dev/LOG.md

        2 https://github.com/kellerjordan/modded-nanogpt

  • jaboostin10 hours ago
    As someone with zero ML experience, this was a super interesting and digestible read!
    • bwfan1239 hours ago
      agree, great educational tool ! tied a bunch of things around coding agents for me.
      • desideratum6 hours ago
        I appreciate the kind words very much : )
  • wg06 hours ago
    Does this really work? Does this how Anthropic works?

    Any practitioners can elaborate?

  • vova_hn27 hours ago
    > This is a library showing you how to train your own Claude Code end-to-end.

    What does it even mean?

    Claude Code is a so called "harness" - a thing that builds a context for LLMs, calls LLMs, executes tool calls etc. It uses various Anthropic models under the hood.

    It can also use other models AFAIK.

    It cannot be "trained".

    Sorry if this comment sounds nitpicky, I'm just annoyed by the imprecise use of terminology.

    • desideratum6 hours ago
      I see what you mean, but I disagree. I expect that Claude Code is backed by a separate post-train of Claude base which has been trained using the Claude Code harness and toolset.
      • vova_hn26 hours ago
        It is possible of course, but I see no reason to believe it.
        • jasonjmcghee4 hours ago
          fwiw, other models seem to / are reported to struggle much more with using claude code compared with codex / opencode / pi etc.

          that being said, there are other potential explanations

    • krackers7 hours ago
      Yeah it should really be about post-training a model for tool-use.
  • redman257 hours ago
    Not to be confused with nanocoder, the agentic coding harness.

    https://github.com/Nano-Collective/nanocoder

  • tatrions4 hours ago
    [dead]
  • esrausama5 hours ago
    [dead]