adamddev1

It's also no surprise that they are markedly worse than the already low status-quo. Just because it was bad before doesn't justify it getting worse.

> LLMs are not generating better compilers nor better kernels than what exists. They're producing insanely inefficient CRUD garbage.

Exactly. People always talk about how LLMs can produce CRUD user-apps and then say, ok there's no more reason for humans to write code anymore.

These CRUD apps are the most trivial, simple things. The AI agents make inferior, bloated, unmaintainable, and unreliable versions of these simplest of things which have already been done to death.

There is a a whole other realm of programming innovative tools, performant systems, truly insightful solutions that people will need to keep working on. No AI agent swarm is creating the next FFMPEG, or coming up with and implementing the whole idea of using monads and do notation. They're not creating true progress (spam-solved math proofs have yet to hold out as solid and useful), only making half-baked, inferior copies of the patterns that are already out there.

Saying, "Some programming is being replaced by AI agents therefore all programming will be replaced by AI agents," is a big converse logic error.

What did you transition to?

This guy knows what's what. Excellent input here on this thread.

Yes, exactly. And this is why I don't think that the LLMs can make significant process beyond what humans have done and published.

"But the math proofs," people will say. A lot of those seem to be spam-solving things with a huge swath of existing lemmas, and a some of these are being debunked and retracted.

Just today I was quizzing ChatGPT about a basic grammar question for a language that has huge training data but for which the grammar was not well documented. It kept giving me confidently wrong answers until I drilled and drilled it and then finally it found/gave back an explanation that perfectly fit a pattern given in one particular grammar, citing that as a source. It doesn't appear to have been able to figure out the inner structure on it's own. It appears only able to pattern match and put things together from what humans have already discovered and written.

This is one of the most wonderful things I've seen on the internet in a long time.

Do you mean "derailed?"

> But that slow formation led to software that was durable rather than ephemeral, with a strong foundation that could be built upon.

People say that agentic development is great because you can churn out so much so fast. But that doesn't mean that any of it will be truly good and reliable.

The things that are truly insightful and solid end up being used exponentially more, which makes the linear cost of extra development time (asymptotically) insignificant in the cost/benefit equation.

> "Whatever you’re asking for has likely already been thoroughly done and explored before and is nothing novel."

This.

Excellent write-up. This reminds me of a quote from "Dialektik der Aufklärung." (My English translation below)

"Die Menschen bezahlen die Vermehrung ihrer macht, mit der Entfremdung von dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben."

"People pay for the multiplying of their power with the alienation from that which they exercise their power over."

This kind of thing is awful if this is how engineering is going for user-facing apps, but disastrous if this is how it's going for infrastructure and libraries.

In another discussion I shared about how LLMs took my completely novel work on a human-language grammar and parrotted it back to me in chats, using the terms and concepts that I invented.

But there were two big problems:

1. It misunderstood things and didn't communicate the ideas properly, in essence making these helpful terms very misleading and confusing.

2. It refused to cite my work as the source of these terms and concepts. I prodded and prodded and it just kept citing other works that never mentioned the terms.

I am not worried about intellectual property theft. My work is free and out there for the public. What is deeply concerning is the inability to deterministically nail things back down to the source. Who created this and who said this, where can we get to the source and check if this is true? Good luck.

LLMs are using what would would be considered the most deplorable practices of plagiarism, lying, and mangling sources. Any student would fail doing this. But they are being pushed as the number one source of truth and progress.

This is part of how LLMs are hurting progress. People are moved away from things like StackOverflow or new projects where they pose and answer questions with real people, or create novel things, and pushed more and more to whatever answers or solutions the LLMs will spit out for them.

I moved my CI to a runner on my Forgejo (using a cheap Hetzner server) and it works beautifully and reliably.

Yes, the CI takes a bit of setup but I used a cheap Hetzner server as my runner and the CI is rock solid and reliable.

I also get docker registry hosting.

Where do you live?

I'm so happy to be working in Forgejo now. Goodbye GitHub.

Github seems to get slower and slower, while Forgejo running on my $5 VPS lets me fly through repos and files instantly.

Great write-up. People keep saying "we can just write tests" or more recently "we can use formal verification," thinking these are sufficient safeguards we can use and then relegate all the implementation to LLMs. But the fact is that probabilistic guessing machines can't save them. People can't escape the need to actually understand the things they are building.

Exactly. Software seems to be getting worse. The internet is getting filled with more and more bloat and falsehoods.

I have yet to see any truly great products made with heavily agentic coding. Correct me if I'm wrong?

But what does "getting left behind" mean? Not producing as many LOC or apps as someone else?

The old "Mythical Man Month" might apply here. Throwing bigger swarms of agents at things and making bigger projects may not lead to more progress and usefulness.

Often it's the small, insightful, well-crafted thing that goes much further than 100 decent projects. Git was a little tool written on a weekend and it went a lot further than giant projects written by giant teams.

Alan Kay answering questions on Quora. What a cool gift to the world!

This is one of the thing we lose as more and more of the conversations turn to people privately asking LLMs things, who do their best to scrape out answers from the existing info or make up a best guess. People are losing the ability to ask experts with real, unique knowledge and then share that knowledge with humanity.

Excellent post. People always defend agentic/LLM-driven development by saying, "Well it's good enough", or "It works most of the time."

That may be tolerable for some user-facing app. But what if we start normalizing failures in the libraries, the infrastructure, and the compilers? Everything descends into a mess of unreliability, and that slows EVERYTHING and EVERYONE down.

I think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.

Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.

Why does a blog page need three loading spinners at the top to load a couple of simple text banners asynchronously?! ... And this from one of the biggest software giants. We have fallen so far.

I just tried ChatGPT on a simple find an error in the proof question today and it completely butchered it ignoring the main constraint that two variables a and b were natural numbers. It said, "a and b might not be natural numbers" and then went on to produce a very elaborate, completely wrong answer.

Thank you. The apps created like this are absolutely an embarrassment. But to me the bigger horror is if people are going to be convinced to develop the critical libraries and infrastructure in the same way. Then we'll have bloat and rot in the deeper levels and everything will become exponentially worse and unreliable. It makes me so sad that people can't see this.

When people talk about AI being able to handle everything I keep wondering, have these people built anything complex, novel or serious? Just because people can see a website or a simple app improved, does that mean that all code can be handled by LLMs? It's like people are totally forgetting a whole category of careful, well-thought out programming for the critical parts.

Well summarized, but I believe this is sadly why we're seeing a decline in software quality all over. And if people keep following this trend for libraries and core utilities... yikes things will get bad.

It's more than that though. I authored the original work. Then the Baron in the Castle collected the work and uses it without fully understanding it. The Baron gives it out but in a partly-true, distorted form. He misunderstand how it applies and teaches people false clearly facts with it, with an air of authority. But when people try to find the source argument to see if the Baron is really on track, they have no idea. The Baron is just confidently parroting a compelling sounding set of words.

For me the issue is more about the loss of truth than the loss of my IP.

I wrote something original in a language learning grammar online. I coined a term to describe something about how a certain language with negative language functions.

I tried talking to an LLM about it and sure and enough, it had scraped it and learned to use that terminology and explanation that I made up. I asked the LLM, "Where did that concept/term come from, who made it up?" It did a bunch of searching and tried to site a whole bunch of other sources which did NOT contain the terms of the explanation I had written. It simply would not cite or mention my source. It kept parroting my material semi-correctly and hiding the source. By any other actor that would be an egregious act of sloppiness, dishonesty, and plagiarism.

Generative AI is speed-running a widespread corruption of truth. I do not believe any of the gains are worth this.