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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

41–50 of 505 posts

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#41

If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. Integration is the key to the agents. Individual usages don't help AI much because it is confined within the domain of that individual.

> If there is anyone who absolutely should slow down, it's the folks who are actively integrating company data with an agent -- you are literally helping removing as many jobs as possible, from your colleagues, and from yourselves, not in the long term, but in the short term. I'm one of those people and I'm not going to slow down. I want to move on from bullshit jobs. The only people that fear what is coming are thos…

That's a mighty high horse you are riding there

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#42
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

That a personal website? Prod means different things in different contexts. Even then, I'd be a bit worried about prompt injection unless you control your context closely (no web access etc).

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#43
> While all of this is anecdotal, it sure feels like software has become a brittle mess

That may be the case where AI leaks into, but not every software developer uses or depends on AI. So not all software has become more brittle.

Personally I try to avoid any contact with software developers using AI. This may not be possible, but I don't want to waste my own time "interacting" with people who aren't really the ones writing code anymore.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#44
> Companies claiming 100% of their product's code is now written by AI consistently put out the worst garbage you can imagine. Not pointing fingers, but memory leaks in the gigabytes, UI glitches, broken-ass features, crashes

One thing about the old days of DOS and original MacOS: you couldn't get away with nearly as much of this. The whole computer would crash hard and need to be rebooted, all unsaved work lost. You also could not easily push out an update or patch --- stuff had to work out of the box.

Modern OSes with virtual memory and multitasking and user isolation are a lot more tolerant of shit code, so we are getting more of it.

Not that I want to go back to DOS but Wordperfect 5.1 was pretty damn rock solid as I recall.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#45

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

Maybe back in the beginning, but I don't think it's an engineering discipline now. I don't think that's bad though. I always thought we tagged on the word "engineer" so that we could make more money. I'm ok with not being one. The engineers I've known are very strict in their approach which is good since I don't want my deck to fall down. Most of us are too risky with our approach. We love to try new things and patte…

classic ... https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#46
post #16

> You installed Beads, completely oblivious to the fact that it's basically uninstallable malware. Did I miss something? I haven't used it in a minute, but why is the author claiming that it's "uninstallable malware"?

It's not really malware, but it's a mess. It installed so much shit and it interfered with your git hooks and stuff. It was kind of messy. I kind of gave up on it. I just went back to using built-in claude code todowrite tasks.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#47
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to move on from bullshit jobs. So are you aiming for death poverty? Once those bullshit jobs go, we’re going to find a lot of people incapable of producing anything of value while still costing quite a bit to upkeep. These people will have to be gotten rid of somehow. > and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve. There will be plenty of problems to solve. Li…

Name a single time doomers were right about anything. Doomers consistently overstate their expected outcome in every single domain and consistently fail to predict how society evolves and adapts. Again: The only people that fear what is coming are those that lack imagination and think we are going to run out of things to do, or run out of problems to create and solve.

> Name a single time doomers were right about anything.

- NFTs

- Surveillance schizos

- Global Pedophile Cabal schizos

- Anyone who didn’t believe we were a year out from Star Trek living when LLMs first started picking up steam

- People who predicted the flood of people entering Software via bootcamps, etc. would never cause any problems because their god of software is consuming the world too quickly for supply and demand to ever be a real concern.

- Anyone amongst the sea of delusional democrats who did indeed believe Trump could win a second term.

All of those doomers were vindicated, and that’s just recently.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#48
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a world where every line of code written by a human should be reviewed by another human. We can't even do that! Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever.

> Nothing should go straight to prod ever, ever ever, ever. I'm one-shotting AI code for my website without even looking at it. Straight to prod (well, github->cf worker). It is glorious.

There's a middle ground here. Code for your website? Sure, whatever, I assume you're not Dell and the cost of your website being unavailable to some subset of users for a minute doesn't have 5 zeroes on the end of it. If you're writing code being used by something that matters though you better be getting that stuff reviewed because LLMs can and will make absolutely ridiculous mistakes.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#49

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

>After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely.

That's increasingly not possible. This is the first time for me in 20 years where I've had a programming tool rammed down my throat.

There's a crisis of software developer autonomy and it's actually hurting software productivity. We're making worse software, slower because the C levels have bought this fairy tale that you can replace 5 development resource with 1 development resource + some tokens.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#50
This assumes that only (AI/Agentic) stupidity comes into play, with no malice on sight. But if things go wrong because you didn't noticed the stupidity, malice will pass through too. And there is a a big profit opportunity, and a broad vulnerable market for malice. Is not just correctness or uptime what comes into play, but bigger risks for vulnerabilities or other malicious injected content.
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