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Comment by malloryerik

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Comment by malloryerik

Oh I agree the LLM not reasoning at the AST level, and was trying to say I believed this even more strongly than the person I was replying to, but that it didn't matter if you coded or had the LLM code in an appropriate style for a lisp. And then I made a tried to hint at a further claim that the base LLM is not reasoning at all beyond its attention heads I think. As I understand it the corpus space itself -- meaning the relations between tokens and lexemes and so on -- contains the shape of what we call reasoning, so that the language itself + weighting , attention heads, is doing any "reasoning" at all unless the LLM directly starts a chain-of-reasoning where it talks to itself, and if it's doing that just for one's delimiters then one probably hasn't used the lisp very well. I was probably unclear and sounding like I thought the LLM was fundamentally a reasoning device. As far as I understand, "reasoning" or an internal model other than the the language (training corpus corpus) + weights only exists when an LLM does "self talk" either as sub turns, a strong but expensive hack, or as a result of multiple turns layering up context. My claim is that the model can get delimiters right despite not reasoning about them, but deeply nested. My sense is that the model doesn't need to reason to track until attention heads are overwhelmed by nested delimiters; does those sound right? Anyway super interesting conversation, and I do think I was giving less credit to LLM reasoning, as seems to me an LLM trained on AST might still get it wrong a lot. So I don't tend to think AST is something that in and of itself makes languages with ASTs any better. But... immutability, which is practical thanks to AST, is another story. And if I'm wrong about anything here please let me know; I'm not an expert!
Replies malloryerik · 2026-08-14
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