AI article
Crows, Moths, and Makefiles: How 300 Megabytes of Crow DNA Explains Why a 20-Kilobyte Scar File Outsmarts a Terabyte LLM
Community description: Why do New Caledonian crows bend wire into hooks with zero training while a trillion-parameter LLM flies straight into the same production bug zapper? How Anthony Zador's Genomic Bottleneck explains what 'instinct' really is in AI coding agents.
Dev.to | Nov 5, 2026 | Randal L. Schwartz
Automated excerpt
Why can a New Caledonian crow bend a piece of wire into a hook on the first try—when no crow ancestor ever saw wire in nature—while a trillion-parameter LLM flies straight into the same 3 AM production bug zapper? Because evolution gave the crow a 20-kilobyte Makefile, and we gave the LLM a moth's porch light. The Crow's Instinct: How 300 MB of DNA Bootstraps Emergent Genius Now return to our New Caledonian crow.
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