sdevonoes

> I think if a person like this is struggling to find work, but the donkeys who code my government's dysfunctional websites are all fully employed, it suggests the software industry is in very big trouble.

I don’t think so. I think what happens is that people believe in meritocracy or karma or universal justice. Generally, one cannot rely on that. You make one mistake and then another and you are out, no matter how much goodness you have done. It’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s absurd, but we must keep pushing the rock and be happy (or else the alternative is s…)

Very. Short. Sentences. That’s AI

It’s simpler to just use “review code”. It’s also way cheaper

It certainly makes readability of Go code harder.

We don’t want that

Coauthored by protoc?

The problem is who verifies that the code is good. With AI slop all the effort goes to the reviewer. At least before AI, the effort wasn’t as daunting as it is now (anyone can generate thousands of loc effortlessly)

Software is probably the worst landscape.

Tabs vs spaces Vim vs emacs Dozens of programming languages that do the same

Do I need to write “coauthored by protoc” when pushing grpc changes? “Coauthored by gofmt” when formatting? “Coauthored by React when using npx create-next-app”?

No. So, same goes for ai

> how long does it take me to ship something that is useful in production and solving a real problem

But that’s only half of the problem. What about “and how easy it is to maintain long-term”. If you say that maintenance can be done via LLM, I would argue that there is zero guarantees that LLMs are backwards compatible and that the markdown you wrote now will work just as fine in 1,2,3 years

I don’t think that’s true based on experience. Maybe “<“ instead of “<<“, yeah. But even in that case, it’s an awful trade off for any serious codebase that needs to be maintained over the years (and you don’t know what LLMs are gonna look like next year, so there are zero guarantees all your MD is gonna work as good as it’s “working” right now)

> At some point this starts to look like we're all just moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language.

This is the problem nobody is talking about. I see codebases growing in MD files with instructions and guidelines and requests that are also LLM generated… and it’s all piling up. No one is reviewing it 100% , and even when we do, it’s all very subjective. What’s the difference between “Follow a RESTful approach”, “We use REST, not graphql”, “90% of our endpoints are resource oriented, but we have a couple of endpoints that look rpc-ish; please ignore the latter”… It’s all very stupid.

But not enough to afford an office room with enough space that one can put their desk facing space.

You wrote a lot of things, but said nothing.

I guess you’re another bot

> Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?

Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays

Compared to what LLMs actually consume, your agent makes zero difference

It’s not impressive. He’s a celebrity. Celebrities are not impressive

My company doesn’t give a damn about me either… and they don’t pay what meta pays. What’s the point? If you are an employee, 99% of the companies out there couldn’t care less about you.

So businesses don’t mind sharing ALL their internal documents, plans, code, designs with Anthropic? Or did that ship already sail?

I know that Google, Atlassian, Microsoft et al have been having access to our emails and online docs for a while… it just strikes me as naive to now sharing everything by default to a single company just like that. They are not just training on internal business data, I would imagine they also have plans to monetise it somehow

Nobody cares about “tokens”

But gmail is not free. Google benefits from our email data, way more than charging a mere 9.99$/month

Weird. I got bored with the Tanenbaum books (because they are very abstract and theoretical). The 3 piece book OS was very refreshing and I actually learned stuff

Unclear. Very good products tend to be about doing one or a few things very well; not about doing tons of stuff. So far, all I see is “Man, Im a 10x engineer now!”, shipping more code but without clear direction and taste. At this point, most of LLM-based work is just noise.

If you think they can survive without hype, you are the naive one

Exactly. Always asks “who benefits from this?” . The answer in this case is: AI vendors, not us.

There are software components out there that are the backbone of our industry, and they are not governed by multibillion dollar companies. Linux, postgres, HTTP, TCP/IP, qemu,…

It’s not that anthropic/google/openai/etc are unavoidable

The same way most of us use linux (not windows) and postgres/mysql (not oracle), many of us are using open source models and not proprietary ones.

Biggest problem right now is that we have teams pushing dozen of MD files, dozend of thousands of lines of English prose as if they were specs. There’s no way we can validate so much written prose because it’s plain English: perhaps one sentence is written in a way LLMs will read between the lines; perhaps line 100 and line 1000 are contradictory in such a subtle way that LLMs may not be aware of it.

In my company we have so much english prose committed to MD files that Im starting to think it’s all just snake oil. I cannot trust an engineer that writes “no bugs , please” and can go on with their lives.

Sounds awful. Just filling the time with worthless stuff. You are basically a liability. Wouldn’t like to have you in my team. Less is more (nowadays more than ever)

It isn’t man. Anyone can easily split a single good commit into 10 just to inflate the numbers. C’mon, this is 101 git