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The peril of laziness lost

bcantrill.dtrace.org

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Re: The peril of laziness lost

#41

Post by xboxnolifes »

dijit wrote: post #36
quantummagic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where my fellow ninety-percenters at?

I think we put too much negative emphasis on people who aren’t as gifted intellectually. In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society. There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.

This is what pains me with how many people respond negatively toward the idea of everyone being able to earn an honest living and raise a family. Too often the idea of "deserving it" comes into it as if doing your small part to contribute to society is not enough.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#42

Post by ChosenEnd »

dijit wrote: post #36
quantummagic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where my fellow ninety-percenters at?

I think we put too much negative emphasis on people who aren’t as gifted intellectually. In reality, the world works because of human automotons, honest people doing honest work; living their life in hopefully a comforting, complete and wholesome way, quietly contributing their piece to society. There is no shame in this, yet we act as though there is.

Human automatons? Why would you have mercy for automatons? Just call them cattle, we might feel more compassion towards them if we don't think of them as machinelike.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#43

Post by lotsofpulp »

fao_ wrote: post #8
johnfn wrote: post #5

As dumb as it is to loudly proclaim you wrote 200k loc last week with an LLM, I don’t think it’s much better to look at the code someone else wrote with an LLM and go “hah! Look at how stupid it is!” You’re making exactly the same error as the other guy, just in the opposite direction: you’re judging the profession of software engineering based on code output rather than value generation. Now, did Garry Tan actually…

Yeah! It's not like code quality matters in terms of negative value or lives lost, right?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_IT_scandal Furthermore, > As for the artifact that Tan was building with such frenetic energy, I was broadly ignoring it. Polish software engineer Gregorein, however, took it apart, and the results are at once predictable, hilarious and instructive: A single load of Tan’s "newsletter-blog-t…

The Horizon IT scandal was not caused by poor code quality, the scandal was the corrupt employees of the UK government/Post Office. Poor quality code might have caused the error, but the failure to investigate the errors and sweep them under the rug was made by humans.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#44

Post by wiseowise »

quantummagic wrote: post #25
njarboe wrote: post #21

German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (a high-ranking army officer in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht era): “I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who i…

Where my fellow ninety-percenters at?

I’m here man. Just want to make money and support my family. Couldn’t care less what some German general thinks about me. Even less care about online clowns trying to put people in buckets.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#45

Post by slyall »

Terr_ wrote: post #32
sdevonoes wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, did Garry Tan actually produce anything of value that week? I dunno, you’ll have to ask him. Let’s not be naive. Garry is not a nobody. He absolutely doesn’t care about how many lines of code are produced or deleted. He made that post as advertisement: he’s advertising AI because he’s the ceo of YC which profitability depends on AI. He’s just shipping ads.

"Follow the money" was always relevant, but especially when it comes to any kind of LLM news or investment-du-jour. The cautionary/pessimist folks at least don't make money by taking the stance.

A few do.

At the extreme end you'll get invited to conferences but further down you could have other products you are pushing. Even non-AI related that takes advantage of your "smart person" public persona.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#46

Post by colechristensen »

btrettel wrote: post #24

Similar to bragging about LOC, I have noticed in my own field of computational fluid dynamics that some vibe coders brag about how large or rigorous their test suites are. The problem is that whenever I look more closely into the tests, the tests are not outstanding and less rigorous than my own manually created tests. There often are big gaps in vibe coded tests. I don't care if you have 1 million tests. 1 million e…

It's a struggle to get LLMs to generate tests that aren't entirely stupid.

Like grepping source code for a string. or assert(1==1, true)

You have to have a curated list of every kind of test not to write or you get hundreds of pointless-at-best tests.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#47

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Abstractions and strong basis as a freedom to think freely at high levels.

The slop drowning and impinging our ability to do good hammock driven development.

Love it. Thanks Bryan.

It's invaluable framing and we'll stayed. There's a pretty steady background dumb-beat of "do we still need frameworks/libraries" that shows up now. And how to talk to that is always hard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711760

To me, the separation of concerns & strong conceptual basis to work from seem like such valuable clarity. But these are also anchor points that can limit us too, and I hope we see faster stronger panning for good reusable architectures & platforms to hang out apps and systems upon. I hope we try a little harder than we have been, that there's more experimentation. Cause it sure felt like the bandwagon effect was keeping us in a couple local areas. I do think islands of stability to work from make all the sense, are almost always better than the drift/accumulation of letting the big ball of mud architecture accrue.

Interesting times ahead. Amid so much illegibile miring slop, hopefully too some complementary new finding out too.

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#48

Post by wiseowise »

simianwords wrote: post #11
lapcat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a person clearly grieving that his hard earned knowledge in his field is now not that valuable. He's co-founder and CTO of his own company, so I think he's doing fine in his field.

It doesn't change the fact that much of what (I think) he prides in himself in is getting commoditised.

LLMs dissolved your brain if you think they commoditize what a guy like this[0] prides in himself.

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/about/

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#49

Post by JeremyNT »

arthurjj wrote: post #9

LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of. e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits a…

I agree, it's not a fundamental characteristic but a limitation of how the tool is being used.

If you just tell these things to add, they'll absolutely do that indiscriminately. You end up with these huge piles of slop.

But if I tell an LLM backed harness to reduce LOC and DRY during the review phase, it will do that too.

I think you're more likely to get the huge piles if you delegate a large task and don't review it (either yourself or with an agent).

Re: The peril of laziness lost

#50

Post by arthurjj »

layer8 wrote: post #34
arthurjj wrote: post #9

LLMs not being lazy enough definitely feels true. But it's unclear to me if it a permanent issue, one that will be fixed in the next model upgrade or just one your agent framework/CICD framework takes care of. e.g. Right now when using agents after I'm "done" with the feature and I commit I usually prompt "Check for any bugs or refactorings we should do" I could see a CICD step that says "Look at the last N commits a…

It’s difficult to define a termination criterion for that. When you ask LLMs to find any X, they usually find something they claim qualifies as X.

Agreed. If I'm looking at what it proposes then about 1/2 the time I don't make the changes. If this were fully automated you would need an addendum like "Only make the change if it saves over 100 lines of code or removes 3 duplicate pieces of logic".

There are other scenarios you would want to check for but you get the idea.

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