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The Eternal Sloptember

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Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#291

Post by rvz »

extr wrote: post #125
georgehotz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I have never said that phrase before this blog post and certainly understand the absurdity of it. I certainly don't mean that you need something biological or whatever consciousness might or might not be. However there's still a distinction. Unless I'm responding to an LLM, you had a childhood. You learned about the world and space and agency before you ever learned how to program. And you didn't learn i…

For a lot (most) of what we do with programming, the process actually doesn't matter. I understand you are a real ass dude who is in this shit for the love of the game. I respect that. You are a true artisan and exist in a kind of rarified space. There will always be a place for people like you and in some senses you are correct - you are not replaceable by any AI as they currently function today. However, 99.9999% o…

LLMs are even more useful to experts who know the limitations. However the process matters even more if you want to build robust and scalable secure systems that generate millions of dollars and can explain that accurately to high value clients.

I do not want a $10M - $100M dollar issue (lawsuits) because I admitted that I don't understand why a breach happened after using a coding agent. Responsiblity and reputation can't be vibe-coded.

So:

> However, 99.9999% of coding is not like that. Non-coders don't care about the code at all. They just care about outcomes. People don't care if it's "slop" if it works. Similar to bug prevalence, the optimal level of slop is not zero and will be decided by the market, not by coders.

There's a vast difference between code that works as a prototype vs how it works in production. I don't think you would trust anyone with no experience to fly a commercial plane with them vibe-coding a flight simulator without knowing the process of becoming a pilot.

But since "it works", it is ok right?

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#292

Post by fingerlocks »

Ekaros wrote: post #251
bruce511 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goods are usually (although not always) inferior when made by a machine. A hand-crafted solid wood table is still superior to something from Ikea. Of course hand made tables are expensive. They service a sliver of the market. Ikea serves the rest of us who'd prefer not to eat off the floor. Fundamentally, Luddites didn't like being replaced by a machine. They were skilled workers, who used to have very desirable skil…

I wonder what percentage of wooden furniture is truly hand-crafted in whole chain. That is felled with hand-made tools by hand. Transportation maybe can be ignored. Then hand sawed without power tools. All other tools after that being hand made from ground up. Like saws, planes, sand paper, glues(most likely at least some parts are glued together wood)... Most likely vanishingly small number.

Anything “live edge” is often done by hand. Also true for end grain cutting boards, end grain anything really, and any furniture made with mostly burl and heartwood. Coffee tables are common.

The reason is that knotted wood is dangerously unwieldy to machine without a lot of additional preparation. End grain work is just hard to automate. Lots of gluing into a shape that can’t be planed easily and prone to exploding if one is careless.

If you want to peek in to the weird long tail, the guys over at Sawmill Creek love to one-up each other in a never ending contest to be the king of traditional wood working.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#293

Post by jappgar »

pickleRick243 wrote: post #280

Agent harnesses have barely been available for a year, and reasonably reliable for only half, and there's already fatigue. I think this says less about whether LLM's will actually be able to program and more about how mentally exhausting AI-assisted programming can be, which involves a higher frequency of decision making and reading an astronomical amount of both code and prose if you actually want to stay on top of…

The technology doesn't have an existence outside how people use it.

If everyone who uses it correctly finds it frustrating, and if the only people who love it produce a mountain of unmantainable slop, we will quickly abandon it to the dustbin of history.

A lot of things have "potential" but never amount to anything.

We're going to keep using LLMs but the utility of agentic coding has already peaked in my opinion.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#294

Post by m132 »

Didn't expect this to come from him. Seeing some of his recent YouTube streams and previous blog posts, he seemed like he has unconditionally bought into the idea of vibecoding, even as he had Opus 4.5 (latest at the time) stuck failing to enumerate a serial device for solid hours. What a turn.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#295

Post by jappgar »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #170
SCdF wrote: post #141

So currently there are people who are buying grey market peptides[1], marked "not for human consumption" and injecting themselves with them based on dubious anecdotes and vibes, to make their skin clearer, build muscle mass, and so on. Are they are all suddenly turning into zombies? No. Do they have any real idea what that is going to do to their body a few years down the line? Also no. Could it be catastrophic? Mayb…

I think smart developers will be building isolated modules, so if your AI generated module keeps failing, you can amputate it and make a fresh one.

Where do you find the smart developers in 2026. Half are rage quitting and the other half have full-blown psychosis.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#296

Post by mexicocitinluez »

farhanhubble wrote: post #14

I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…

An electronic medical record system. It's got too many moving parts and they all have to unify.

I've had a lot of success in using LLMs in smaller tasks that I peal off myself, but it's largely due to having an existing architecture that makes sense. The times in which I've tried to let the agent loose to make architectural decisions, it tends to wildly-overcomplicate stuff (which I'm only able to recognize because it's a problem I suffer from too).

That's not to say those smaller tasks aren't useful or time-consuming. They're important, but I try to remove the critical assumptions that might need to be made.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#298

Post by threatofrain »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #170
SCdF wrote: post #141

So currently there are people who are buying grey market peptides[1], marked "not for human consumption" and injecting themselves with them based on dubious anecdotes and vibes, to make their skin clearer, build muscle mass, and so on. Are they are all suddenly turning into zombies? No. Do they have any real idea what that is going to do to their body a few years down the line? Also no. Could it be catastrophic? Mayb…

I think smart developers will be building isolated modules, so if your AI generated module keeps failing, you can amputate it and make a fresh one.

And interactive feedback rather than having to specify everything up-front.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#299

Post by bluegatty »

kelnos wrote: post #104
bluegatty wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is absurdly wrong. It's ridiculous to suggest that 'AI can't code' - when the entire development world has moved into agentic coding, including all of the best developers in the world, and it's yielding positive results in most scenarios. It's a callow 'bad twitter take' the length of an article. He's not wrong to suggest that IA is a 'stochastic mechanism' over all the code that's ever been written, but t…

> when the entire development world has moved into agentic coding Careful, your bubble is showing.

“By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine.”

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#300

Post by pickleRick243 »

hansmayer wrote: post #230
cafkafk wrote: post #74

I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…

> But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers That's just those of us with longer memory holding the AI companies to the standards they declared themselves. Nobody forced Sam Altman to blab about a team of pocket PhDs, did they? I don't want the crap that does it correct 60℅ of the time - where is the god damn nation of PhDs in a datacemter already? Where is the AI doing all…

You want the AI that's doing all the SWE work in 3-6 months? Somehow I doubt that.
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