361–370 of 630 posts
In the backend, we're mostly just pushing data around from one place to another. Not much changes, there's only a few ways to really do that. Your data structures change, but ultimately the work is the same. You don't even really need an LLM at all, or super complex frameworks and ORMs, etc.
I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right. "AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.
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Borg logic consists of framing matters of choice as "inevitable". As long as those with power convince everyone that technological implementation is "inevitable", people will passively accept their self-serving and destructive technological mastery of the world. The framing allows the rest of us to get ourselves off the hook. "We didn't have a choice! It was INEVITABLE!" And so, we have chosen.
But history shows that it is inevitable. Can you give me an example of a single useful technology that humans ever stopped developing because of its negative externalities? > "We didn't have a choice! It was INEVITABLE!" There is no "we". You can call it the tragedy of the commons, or Moloch, or whatever you want, but I don't see how you can convince every single developer and financial sponsor on the planet to stop…
> see if you can stop everyone in the world from smoking tobacco
[1] https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco...
As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significan…
I have a hell of a time just getting any LLM to write SQL queries that have things like window functions, aggregates and lateral left joins - even when shoving the entire database schema DDL into the context. It's so frustrating, it regularly makes me want to just quit the profession. Which is why I still just write most code by hand.
What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…
I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…
for simple stuff, sure, React was ALWAYS inefficient. Even Javascript/client-side logic is still overkill a lot of the times except for that pesky "user expectations" thing.
for anything codebase that's long-lived and complex, combinatorics tells us how it'll near-impossible to have good+fast test coverage on all that.
part of the reason people don't roll their own is because being able to assume that the library won't have major bugs leads to an incredible reduction in necessary test service, and generally people have found it a safe-enough assumption.
throwing that out and trying to just cover the necessary stuff instead - because you're also throwing out your ability to quickly recognize risky changes since you aren't familiar with all the code - has a high chance of painting you into messy corners.
"just hire a thousand low-skilled people and force them to write tests" had more problems as a hiring plan then just "people are expensive."
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I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…
Huh, I've been assuming the opposite: better to use React even if you don't need it, because of its prevalence in the training data. Is it not the case that LLMs are better at standard stacks like that than custom JS?
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> ... or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better. It doesn't. The only people I've seen claim such speedups are either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme.
I am a professional engineer with around 10 years of experience and I use AI to work about 5x faster on a site I personally maintain (~100 DAU, so not huge, but also not nothing). I don’t work in AI so I get no financial benefit by “reinforcing this meme”.
I think what you're working on has a huge impact on AI's usability. If you're working on things that are simple conceptually and simple to implement, AI will do very well (including handling edge cases). If it's a hard concept, but simple execution, you can use AI to only do the execution and still get a pretty good speed boost, but not transformational. If it's a hard concept and a hard execution (as my latest project has been), then AI is really just not very good at it.
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WSJ has been writing increasingly about "AI Psychosis" (here's their most recent piece [0]). I'm increasingly seeing that this is the real threat of AI. I've personally known people who have started to strain relationships with friends and family because they sincerely believe they are evolving into something new. While not as dramatic, the normalization of the use of "AI as therapist" is equally concerning. I know t…
That's NOT AI psychosis, which is real, and which I've seen close-up. AI psychosis is getting lost in the sauce and becoming too intimate with your ChatGPT instance, or believing it's something it's not. Skepticism, or a fear of being outside the core loop is the exact opposite, and that's what Karpathy is talking about here. If anything, this kind of post is an indicator that you're absolutely NOT in AI psychosis.
What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…
> the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore.
But this usage? I'm fully on board. Too much abstraction is when it's incomprehensible. To who is the next question (my usual complaint is that a junior should not be that level) and I think you're right to point out that the "who" here is everyone.
We're killing a whole side of creativity and elegance while only slightly aiding another side. There's utility to this, but also a cost.
I think what frustrates me most about CS is that as a community we tend to go all in on something. We went all in on VR then crypto, and now AI. We should be trying new things but it more feels like we take these sides as if they're objective and anyone not hopping on the hype train is an idiots or luddite. The way the whole industry jumps to these things just feels more like FOMO than intelligent strategy. Like making a sparkling water company an "AI first" company... its like we love solutions looking for problems