> You realize you can no longer trust the codebase.
This cuts to the problem and is excellent framing. A rogue employee can achieve the same, but probably less quickly, and we've designed systems to help catch them early.
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
291–300 of 505 posts
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product.
Oh ye of little faith in the possible. We still don’t have truly transparent transference in locally-run software. Go anywhere in the world, and your locally running software tags along with precisely preserved state no matter what device you happen to be dragging along with you, with device-appropriate interfacing. We still don’t have single source documentation with lineage all the way back to the code. We still do…
It's interesting how everything you list is created problems in the tools themselves.
If you step back and just look at "can this do what I wanted" without worrying about what shit storm of software makes it work.
Mind you perfectionists will always have work. That doesn't mean anything.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Climate change would be a big one. That's generous. Climate scientists were right, climate doomers were definitely wrong. Society is mostly unchanged due to climate change. That's not to say climate has no effect, but it is certainly still not some doomer scenario that's played out. New York and Florida are most certainly not underwater as predicted by the famous "Inconvenient Truth". People still live in deserts j…
The effects of climate change are just starting to happen. Ecosystems are dying. Very few "climate doomers" thought the world would be like the Day after Tomorrow. The earth is becoming more hostile to it's inhabitants. There are famines caused by climate change. We will undoubtedly within the next 20 years see mass migration from the areas hardest hit. Climate scientists, and climate reporting, often UNDERSTATED the…
> The earth is becoming more hostile to it's inhabitants. There are famines caused by climate change. We will undoubtedly within the next 20 years see mass migration from the areas hardest hit.
If this is true then how are there more people than ever, fewer famines than ever? Migrations due to climate has been a part of human history since the beginning of all of human, and animal history. It's almost as if that's the default state of being. Are people migrating more than ever? Yes, but not just because of climate change, because it's so god damn easy to do so in modern times.
We aren't walking across a sheet of ice to try to survive a drought. We are on boats with motors and a life vest at our worst, in first class getting wine and dined at our most hedonistic. Entire (illegal) migration pipelines have been made and turned into a black-market economy. There are government funded apps created to support these migration pipelines.
Again, you're a doomer that has failed to predict the impact of what you're observing, and it mostly comes down to the fact that you underestimate human creativeness and ingenuity, and human drive for progress.
You frame every scenario as if humans will just stare at impending doom like deer in headlights and let it wash over them, while at the same time arguing that mass amounts of people are so adaptable that they would be willing to traverse the entire globe to find a better life. Your model of reality contradicts itself from the very start.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#294Just looking at the LiteLLM disaster from yesterday and so much slop flowing around, I couldn’t agree more.
It’s time to slow the fuck down!
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible , and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software -…
Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible…
The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes?
When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately
Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#296Once again I appeal: who is shipping code they don't understand? Those who do so are creating the problem, not the coding agent.
I use agents all day, every single day. But I also push back, understand what was written, and ensure I read and understand everything I ship.
Does it slow me down? Uh, yup. You bet.
Yes, this article literally advocates for slowing the fuck down, but it also makes the coding agents out to be the problem, but they're not.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were you not reviewing every line when a human wrote it before it went to prod? I think the output of these tools is about as good as a human would write - which means it needs thorough review if I’m going to be on the hook to resolve its issues at 2AM.
Maybe that's the distinction. If I write it, you can call me at 2AM. If an AI wrote it, call the AI at 2AM. Oh, it can't take the phone call and fix the issue? Then I'm reviewing its output before it goes into prod.
This is a weird analogy. You can ask the A.I. to fix the issue at any time of day (assuming the person asking someone with enough technical knowledge that can evaluate the fix at least).
You won't always be able to get ahold of someone at 2am. You won't be able to get ahold of me at 2am, for example. It'll throw some notification on my screen and I won't see it until I wake up.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to sha…
In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and project…
> What value is left to provide for users?
A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of us use software written by other people we have no reason to trust and we haven't reviewed - most of open source libraries.
At least with any open source library I use, many other people have.
Yeah a nice thing about OSS is that they usually come with a community and you can ask questions or even submit bug fixes.
Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments. I would bet a lot of money that the price of LLM assistance will go down, not up, as the hardware and software advance. Every genre-defining startup seems to go through this same cycle where the naysayers tell us that it's all going to collapse once the investment money runs out. This was def…
> Oil is a finite resource that comes out of the ground Yes but the chips, hardware, copper cables, silicon and all the rest of the components that make up a server are finite. Unless these magically appear from outer space, we'll face the same resource constraints as everything else that is pulled out of the ground. These components are also far more fragile to source, see COVID and the collapse of global supply cha…
> Yes but the chips, hardware, copper cables, silicon and all the rest of the components that make up a server are finite. Unless these magically appear from outer space, we'll face the same resource constraints as everything else that is pulled out of the ground.
Raw material cost is not a driver of datacenter GPU costs.
> Over supply makes price come down but if supply is kept artificially low, then prices stay high.
Where are you getting "supply kept artificially low" when we're in the middle of an explosion of datacenter buildouts and AI companies?
We're in a race to the bottom on pricing. I haven't seen a realistic argument for why you think prices are going to go up. You're starting with a conclusion and trying to find reasons it might be true.