falkensmaize

What fairly complex software has it written autonomously for you?

Our government needs to get tf out of the “fixing things” business and back to the “maintaining a framework where people can fix things themselves” business that it was designed to be. Everything they “fix” ends up in much worse shape than it was before.

Nah, OpenAI can’t have it both ways. If they’re going to assert that their model is intelligent and is capable of replacing human work and authority they can’t also claim that it (and they) don’t have to take the same responsibility a human would for giving dangerous advice and incitement.

AI companies are actively marketing their products as highly intelligent superhuman assistants that are on the cusp of replacing humans in every field of knowledge work, including medicine. People who have not read deeply into how LLMs work do not typically understand that this is not true, and is merely marketing.

So when ChatGPT gives you a confident, highly personalized answer to your question and speaks directly to you as a medical professional would, that is going to carry far more weight and authority to uninformed people than a Reddit comment or a blog post.

This sounds like an “I want to get my ass kicked” application.

Software that won’t compile and doesn’t do anything is not software, it’s just a collection of text files. A computer that won’t boot isn’t a computer anymore, it’s a paperweight. A car that won’t start isn’t a car anymore, it’s scrap metal.

I can bang on a keyboard for a week and produce tons of text files - but if they don’t do anything useful, would you consider me a programmer?

We might cure cancer in 10 years. We could have Martian colonists in the next decade. Everyone might be commuting to work with a jet pack. Literally anything could happen, especially given a long enough time horizon.

Citing the absolute worst practices from terrible developers as a way to exonerate or legitimize LLM code production issues is something we need to stop doing in my opinion. I would not excuse or expect a day one junior on my team that wrote pointless tests or worse yet removed tests to get the CI to pass.

If LLMs do this it should be seen as an issue and should not be overlooked with “people do it too…”. Professional developers do not do this. If we’re going to use Ai for creating production code we need to be honest about its deficiencies.

What is happening?

What diminishes your value is that suddenly everybody can (in theory anyway) do this work. There’s a push at my company to start letting designers do their own llm-assisted merge requests to front end projects. So now CEOs are greedily rubbing their hands together thinking maybe everybody but the plumber can be a “developer” now. I think it remains to be seen whether that’s true, but in the meantime it’s going to make getting and keeping a well-paying developer gig difficult.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Today I tried to get it to upgrade Nx, yarn and some resolutions in a typescript monorepo with about 20 apps at work (Opus 4.5 through Kiro) and it just…couldn’t do it. It hit some snags with some of the configuration changes required by the upgrade and resorted to trying to make unwanted changes to get it to build correctly. I would have thought that’s something it could hit out of the park. I finally gave up and just looked at the docs and some stack overflow and fixed it myself. I had to correct it a few times about correct config params too. It kept imagining config options that weren’t valid.

This was my first thought too. We already have terraform for repeatable, source controlled service provisioning and we have the relatively straightforward aws cli for ad hoc management. I don’t know that I really need another layer, and it feels quite risky.

‘How does a model “trigger” self-harm?’

By telling paranoid schizophrenics that their mother is secretly plotting against them and telling suicidal teenagers that they shouldn’t discuss their plans with their parents. That behavior from a human being would likely result in jail time.

Not to be cheeky, but isn’t this just

display: flex; align-items:center;

now?

I buy vinyl for one reason - it forces me to actively listen to the music. My teen daughter does the same.

I have many happy memories of getting a new record as kid, laying in the floor and listening from start to finish while poring over liner notes and album art. There was a level of connection with the music that I just don’t get from listening to Spotify while I’m washing the dishes or something.

I know it’s sentimental, but I get so much joy out of watching my daughter do the same thing now. She has a blast going to our local record store, finding records from her favorite bands old and new and then coming home and just listening. No devices, no distractions, just her and the music she loves. In a sometimes horrible and depressing world, it’s a sweet escape.

"I am not scared to go back flipping burgers again."

You should be - in all likelihood you'd have to work 3 burger-flipping jobs to make enough money to pay rent and buy food. Inflation and housing issues have hit a lot harder than most people who make 6-figure incomes realize. It's really tough out there right now. I am very, very grateful for the income I have and don't take it for granted.

Man, come on - what planet are you from, seriously? I got into this business because I enjoy programming, but I also wanted to for once in my life make a decent living and be able to save something. I have kids I'd like to send to college. I'd like to be able to retire someday. I have aging parents that need expensive care. This is one of the few professions that you can upskill into without years of expensive degrees.

People need to make money to survive, now more than ever. It seems incredibly selfish to wish for that to disappear just so you can "purify" the profession.

"will continue to do so"

What evidence do you have for this statement besides "past models improved"?

It seems pretty obvious that the opposite is true. I know I’ve experienced some serious skill atrophy that I’m now having to actively resist. There’s a lot lost by no longer having to interact with the raw materials of your craft.

Thinking is a skill that is reinforced by reading, designing and writing code. When you outsource your thinking to an LLM your ability to think doesn’t magically improve…it degrades.

The only way to truly fix these cycles is to finally let the bubble actually pop. Make laws against government bailouts. Let companies and investors who acted recklessly go broke. Send criminals to jail. That’s the only way to restore sanity to the system - if it’s actually their own money they are gambling with they’ll start doing due diligence and stop gambling.

I've had this same thought for some time. There should have been an explosion in startups, new product from established companies, new apps by the dozen every day. If LLMs can now reliably turn an idea into an application, where are they?

Spot on. Ten or fifteen years ago, participating in the internet was something I got excited about, now I just get excited about getting away from it.

This 1000%. When my wife was a teacher she would often comment on what a huge distraction chromebooks and tablets were. Most of the things being learned through high school do not require a computer and do not benefit from them. Added to that, having kids spend 40 hours a week away from screens is a huge bonus.

EarFun Air Pro 4

Yes actually. That was one of my biggest annoyances with non-Apple earbuds in the past, but these actually do seamlessly connect to all my Apple devices and switch quickly and reliably to the active device.

This is not an ad, just personal experience, but I went through two pairs of AirPod Pro 2s in the last couple of years and both developed problems outside of warranty. I bought a pair of Earfuns from Amazon and they’re honestly pretty great. 95% of the sound quality and functionality of AirPod pros for about 25% of the price.

Are you serious? The obvious benefit is they get to lay a bunch of people off and pretend it’s because they’re forward thinking innovators instead of poor managers that are having difficulty growing their business. There’s a huge incentive to present this fiction to stockholders, which is the only opinion they care about.

"But it will get better, a lot better."

I see statements like this a lot when talking about AI in general. People seem to think it is a foregone conclusion that no limit to LLM model improvement and capability exists. What causes you to believe this and what evidence do you have to back it up?

Serif makes a very capable alternative also called Publisher. I really like their software - you can buy it without a subscription and it's very polished.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/publisher

This is really impressive - nice work. I too use Ruby at work, and would love to build something like this.