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Warranty Void If Regenerated

nearzero.software

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Warranty Void If Regenerated

#1
As an experiment I started asking Claude to explain things to me with a fiction story and it ended up being really good, so I started seeing how far I could take it and what it would take to polish it enough to share publicly.

Over the last couple months, I've been building world bibles, writing and visual style guides, and other documents for this project… think the fiction equivalent of all the markdown files we use for agentic development now. After that, this was about two weeks of additional polish work to cut out a lot of fluff and a lot of the LLM-isms. Happy to answer any questions about the process too if that would be interesting to anybody.

Warranty Void If Regenerated
nearzero.software

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#3
excellent story, it was both interesting and mildly terrifying. to think that one day software could be malleable seems so wrong to me - you would think having deterministic results is important for programming - and yet with "vibe coding" that really seems to be where it's going.

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#6
Often suggested by optimistic podcast guests these days: the as-yet-unknown new careers that will replace the familiar old ones and thus give employment in the AI era. I think your story is more a commentary on the current AI goldrush than an insight into future careers.

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#8
A fun read!

I'm mildly thrown off by some inconsistencies. Carol says "I’ve been under-watering that spot on purpose for thirty years," and then a paragraph down Tom's thoughts say "Carol didn’t know that she under-watered the clay spot." Carol considers a drip irrigation timer the last acceptable innovation, but then the illustration points to the greenhouse as the last acceptable illustration. Several other things as well, mostly in the illustrations.

Are these real inconsistencies or am I misunderstanding? Was this story AI-assisted (in part or all)? Is this meta-commentary?

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#9
I do enjoy this sort of speculative fiction that imagines though future consequences of something in its early stages, like AI is right now. There are some interesting ideas in here about where the work will shift.

However, I do wonder if it is a bit too hung up on the current state of the technology, and the current issues we are facing. For example, the idea that the AI coded tools won't be able to handle (or even detect) that upstream data has changed format or methodology. Why wouldn't this be something that AI just learns to deal with? There us nothing inherent in the problem that is impossible for a computer to handle. There is no reason to think AIs can't learn how to code defensively for this sort of thing. Even if it is something that requires active monitoring and remediation, surely even today's AIs could be programmed to monitor for these sorts of changes, and have them modify existing code when to match the change when they occur. In the future, this will likely be even easier.

The same thing is true with the 'orchestration' job. People already have begun to solve this issue, with the idea of a 'supervisor' agent that is designing the overall system, and delegating tasks to the sub-systems. The supervisor agent can create and enforce the contracts between the various sub-systems. There is no reason to think this wont get even better.

We are SO early in this AI journey that I don't think we can yet fully understand what is simply impossible for an AI to ever accomplish and what we just haven't figure out yet.

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#10

It’s a neat piece of writing, but not nearly dystopic enough for my taste. There will only be one farm and whoever is fixing it will be on the other side of the world.

Dystopians are too easy. The real challenge and reward are interesting utopian novels.
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