Live data from Hacker News

Gaslight-driven development

tonsky.me

61–70 of 113 posts

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#61

If it were somehow a human that was consistently and confidently handing out made up programming advice about one's products, would companies still respond by just adding whatever imagined feature and writing a vaguely bemused blog post about it?

Isn’t this the whole shtick of Mr Martin, author of “Clean Code”?

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#62
Is there a general name and framing we could apply to these “AI” that is equally as accurate but sheds all of the human biases associated with the terms?

Like… it’s just a really, really, really good autocomplete and sometimes I find thinking of it that way cleans up my whole mental model for its use.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#63

Is there a general name and framing we could apply to these “AI” that is equally as accurate but sheds all of the human biases associated with the terms? Like… it’s just a really, really, really good autocomplete and sometimes I find thinking of it that way cleans up my whole mental model for its use.

It's really difficult because many of the task types we use AI for are those that are linguistically tied to concepts of human actions and cognition. Most of our convenient language use implies that AI are thinking people.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if you need to depart your lane in a hurry you cannot be expected to use the blinker first and the car should not fight you to do so

No you're most often breaking traffic laws and increasing a chance of a collision, than the off chance of needing to make such a maneuver to avoid an accident. The societal cost of collisions is worth more than your freedoms. Or you should pay higher premiums for turning those safety features off.

> No you're most often breaking traffic laws and increasing a chance of a collision, than the off chance of needing to make such a maneuver to avoid an accident

For all you know I need to exit my lane in a hurry to avoid a collision. The car doesn't have the same context that the driver has. It only cares about staying between two painted lines, it might not have any idea about a truck coming straight at me going the other direction

> The societal cost of collisions is worth more than your freedoms

If a semi is in my lane barrelling toward me I'm not obligated to just accept death so I don't endanger anyone else by accident by swerving to avoid it

The fact is that human drivers have a lot more information and awareness than a handful of sensors installed by idiot engineers that think the only bad thing that ever happens when driving is that someone changes lanes without signalling

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#65
post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

Same here. I don't have the time or patience to hack the page like the siblings comments suggest. There are more articles on the web than I will ever be able to consume in my lifetime, so I just close the tab and move on when the UX is aggressively bad.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#67
post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

It's hilarious but I literally can't click on their gh or patreon links because of it

natural selection at work

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#68
post #3

I like seeing what users are currently viewing the same page, but man the constant jostling of users coming and going made it hard to read the post.

I ended up using safari remove distracting content, which seemed to work nicely.

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#69
Maybe it's spite-driven development, but I'd love to hear about someone who, upon learning that LLMs are suggesting endpoints in their API that don't exist, implements them specifically to respond with a status code[0] of "421: Misdirected Request". Or, for something less snarky and more in keeping with the actual intent of the code, "501: Not Implemented". If the potentially-implied "but it might be, later" of 501 is untenable, I humbly propose this new code: "513: Your Coding Assistant Is Wrong"

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

Re: Gaslight-driven development

#70

Is there a general name and framing we could apply to these “AI” that is equally as accurate but sheds all of the human biases associated with the terms? Like… it’s just a really, really, really good autocomplete and sometimes I find thinking of it that way cleans up my whole mental model for its use.

Does that actually clean up your mental model though? At some number of "reallys" that autocomplete starts to sound like intelligence. Like, what is "taking customer requirements and turning them into working code" if not just really really really really really really really good autocomplete with this mental model?
Post reply on HN