misja111

Until half a year ago I used to agree with you, but nowadays Claude has gotten so good that I have to admit it's a better programmer than myself. Its coding style is excellent, it follows whatever conventions are used in the codebase, it has excellent suggestions for refactorings and it spots omissions or mistakes in the specifications I give it.

(I'm using mostly Scala as a language in a large microservices environment)

Tell me you're a bad engineer without telling me.

If you don't understand what you are building, chances are you'll take suboptimal decisions or even come up with a solution that completely misses the point.

To properly understand what you are going to build, it's not enough to read specifications from some manager as gospel. You need to ask questions, and challenge the requirements sometimes, to make them your own.

Exactly what I saw as well. Some not so good ones have even stopped using AI at all, arguing it 'just got confused'. Good ones on the other hand are embracing it, hugely increasing productivity and constantly finding new ways to use it.

> Switch expressions should always have a default/fallback branch,

This will nullify the advantage of being able to treat sealed classes as algebraic datatypes by using the exhaustiveness check.

I used to agree with your sentiment, but the LLM revolution has changed my mind. I noticed that the verboseness of Java leads to a higher token use when compared with Scala.

It's a nice workaround but the necessity of such a non-obvious fix also shows that the design of sealed classes is really flawed ..

> Although Java will produce a compile-time error for a non-exhaustive switch when you compile the consumer (main in this case), it cannot do so if the consumer is not recompiled when the sealed type changes

I think this is quite bad. I think such a change should break binary compatibility between the consumer and the producer api jar. Now any consumer might or might not run into runtime errors when switching to a new producer jar that is binary compatible.

You were lucky, I heard a story of a dentist who ended up breaking the patient's jaw while trying to pull a wisdom tooth out.

> Javascript/Python is the best because there's so much code out there that the LLMs can train on, and LLMs can write lots of tests to make sure everything is correct. There's nothing to compile, so the LLM can iterate quickly.

My experience with Python is different. I noticed that my LLM (Claude) frequently gets stuck in cycles when coding larger features in Python. I'm also doing a lot of work in Scala, a language where much less code is on the Internet, yet Claude does way better, it hardly ever gets stuck at all.

My theory is, that while there is a lot of Python code on the Internet, a lot of that code is crap. This will trap LLM's into coding crappy solutions which will eventually bite them in the tail.

Also, I believe that, especially for larger codebases, a strong type system helps not just humans but LLM's as well.

Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.

Oh man, who said the author was white? And why would this even matter for this post? I can't believe how some people manage to bring up the race issue in any possible context, regardless if it's relevant or not.

> In an effort to limit warming poised to dry out the state, California pledged to shift to 100% clean electricity by 2045.

Well moving to sustainable energy is good, but California being on 100% clean electricity won't have any measurable effect on its warming.

Exactly. You could simplify things by giving AI a limited set of laws, but then you'd risk that AI would make some mistake in the parts that you didn't cover. So a failsafe set of laws would look very much like an actual program.

Fascinating article. I don't have enough knowledge to judge if the author's theory could make sense or not. But cosmology has always interested me, and I never liked the ad hoc and non-verifiable nature of some parts of the Big Bang theory. In particular of the inflation phase. So to me, any theory that gets rid of that is most welcome.

Surely there is a lot of Russian-motivated sabotage going on in Europe, but there's another group that might be motivated:

exactly today, a major farmer demonstration was already planned. They way they usually go ahead in the Netherlands is drive with their tractors over the highways towards The Hague, where our government is based. Obviously this leads to massive traffic jams.

A simultaneous disruption of the Dutch railways would add some extra effect to the expected traffic chaos.

The JRockit JVM had it already 20 years ago, and the company was even bought by Oracle shortly afterwards.

It's not about giving hints to agents because they wouldn't find it out otherwise. It's about saving the work of them having to find out. Good skills files save tokens.

I bet there is some mushroom species in Europe as well that contains that substance. All those stories about dwarfs, trolls etc. and especially in woody area's, they must have come from somewhere.

If this means you will be less prone to buy another Mars Bar, I still don't think it's a bad thing.

But is this a bad thing? I'd say the less Mars Bar you eat the better.

I expect the TSLA stock to jump another 20% based on this

Lol I guess this is our future, we have to prove that we are not bots. How would I prove this to you?

Lol, I have 42 years of experience in coding, of which 29 paid. I learned to program when I was 14 years old, studied computer science and went to work in IT. I'm 56 years old now and working as a tech lead.

> Being a craftsman is a deeply human desire that AI is destroying, not sure if this is a fun future to look forward to.

AI is giving me back the feeling I had when I first learned to program, when I was 14. At 14, I suddenly had a tool in my hands that was like an extension of my imagination. I could create tools, games and what not with it, this is what I loved. AI is that same tool on steroids. If what you like is creating things, AI lets you do it at 10 times the speed.

I feel the opposite, AI is making me less tired at the end of a working day even though I get much more done.

What used to tire me: being forced to have a sharp eye for syntax errors when programming, or simply the effort of all the typing and navigating through source files. Trying to visualize details of the codebase I was changing, while at the same time keeping a high level picture in my head of the feature I was changing.

With AI, I can focus on the high level picture. I can focus on the steps to get there and the steps to verify that it works. I don't have to focus on syntax anymore and there is much less need to visualize large parts of my code base. With AI, work is still tiring but much less, and in a different way.

The RPKI fix is that any node in a rpki tree is signed by the certificate from the authority above it, all the way up until some root certificate that you trust. So you cannot have some party hijacking a prefix, it would not be signed by its parent authority.

> What’s the argument for OpenAI being so inherently critical and interweaved with the rest of the economy that it can’t be allowed to fail?

AI companies are more and more interweaved with the economy because half the world is owning their stocks or has lent them money. Or, they have invested in companies that in turn have invested in AI. It is very similar to the situation before the credit crisis.

Nowadays the main point of PR's is to find out what Claude has been coding for me.

It is not always a good idea not to argue, even given all the points that the author has made. If you have a meeting, and someone proposes something: if you don't speak up, it means you agreed to it.

Let's say you're discussing the next release and someone brings up some disastrous idea. You know he won't listen so you decide to keep quiet. The release comes, things blow up as expected.

Don't be surprised if you find your manager at your desk a bit later asking you to work late shifts to fix it. After all you are all in the same team, and you didn't speak up when the plan was discussed.

So in a meeting, speak up and don't give in if you are sure you are right. I have learned this lesson the hard way.

As someone who has had shoulder issues for the last 25 years or so, including partial tendon tears, I can tell you that even if your tendon would have been damaged, the treatment would have been strange. With moderately damaged tendons, you want:

1. stop any inflammation, by taking NSAIDs for a few days

2. detect and correct any behavioral patterns that could have caused the presumed overwear of the tendon

2. start physiotherapy to strengthen those muscles that can take over the load from the damaged tendon

These are not quick fixes, because quick fixes don't exist here. Stuff like shockwave treatment, massages etc will only lessen the problems for a few hours at most, after which they will come back.

I'd say that in cooler countries, warm water could be very useful, e.g. for heating houses.