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What it feels like to work with Mythos

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Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#261

Post by eithed »

rglullis wrote: post #247
locknitpicker wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does AI make incredibly inefficient code most of the time? Yup. But it does it at lightspeed with minimal effort. This hits the nail in the head. Detractors often hang on to examples of coding assistants making mistakes or output subpar code, but they somehow miss the fact that coding assistants can also be prompted again and refactor whole swaths of code just as fast as they introduce oopsies. This means that the…

The problem is that this approach is not sustainable. Errors compound. The cost to fix one issue might seem small at first, but over a stretch of time all these "oopsies" become architectural spaghetti that can only be fixed with a complete rewrite, which will certainly become more expensive than getting the code "organically" developed. The only way I see AI coding working in the long run is if we go back to a Water…

I mirror your thoughts. I think we'll end up with "perfect map" paradox = you cannot be vague or indecisive on what you want (and if you are then these decisions don't matter) and you're creating a 1:1 representation of what the code needs to be.

I'd substitute "owner" for the team and in that sense the owner will not need to be human.

We're at this state where Claude is great at doing the "middle" part of work, but it's crap at gathering requirements and verification of what it has done. I also don't see people caring about these aspects of software development as shown in the article

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#262

Post by eithed »

brazzy wrote: post #257
eithed wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that you can adjust your requirements (either via plan or skill) to ensure the mistakes do not happen. The problem is that neither LLMs, nor humans (that don't work with the domain) will know they made these mistakes. Even coders don't think about everything all the time

> Don't forget that you can adjust your requirements (either via plan or skill) to ensure the mistakes do not happen. No, you can't. Adjusting prompts ensures absolutely nothing.

I disagree. What I should have added is that with agents (as well as humans) you do need to have tests that verify what was done.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#263

Post by skydhash »

munksbeer wrote: post #245
skydhash wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen this pattern again and again, and I don’t bother replying. There’s also the “strong statement, and when you contradict it, they point out some particular circumstances that no one cares about”.

I think a lot of us have stopped talking to each other about this. I see it the other way round to you. I see constant scepticism and doubt that LLMs can build anything useful, and whenever provided with examples, the goalposts just move. And at my own firm, I think every developer is generating most of their code using agentic coding. We're still sceptical enough that we are doing the usual heavy handed human review…

> I see constant scepticism and doubt that LLMs can build anything useful, and whenever provided with examples, the goalposts just move.

> I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong.

At least for me, that has never been the counterpoint that I’ve been making. I’ve never cared about code itself, especially with languages like Java and Kotlin, where you basically autocomplete most of the code, and with SDK like ios where you can collect snippets for most of the patterns that you need. And with frameworks like Laravel, where most big additions are done with the tooling. And because code is so repetitive, editors like emacs and vim have lots of features and plugins to help with copying and pasting (registers, macros, navigation, snippets,…)

And the fact is some code you wrote today will be worthless tomorrow and will be replaced and deleted. So, it’s very rare to care about some particular snippets or patch of code.

What myself, and others, have been complaining about is the quality of the codebase and the sustainability of the practice. Especially with the associated claims about increased productivity.

I care about correctness. Simplicity and reduced amount of code increase my confidence that I can achieve it. New features, until tested in production, are more probable to decrease the reliability of the software. And with each fix for a bug, I need to make sure that I’m not adding five more.

To this day, I’ve not seen any compelling arguments that is about writing better code reliably. I’ve seen a lot about writing more code. It’s like manager thinking if you’re not at your computer typing, you’re not working.

> We're still sceptical enough that we are doing the usual heavy handed human review process, so we're not seeing a huge speed up in delivery times, but we are seeing a volume increase

Are you seeing a quality increase? Less customer bugs, less outages, faster resolution? Are you measuring those?

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#264

Post by eithed »

spicyusername wrote: post #154
eithed wrote: post #38

What I find fascinating that there is so little substance in this article about the quality of produced code and the medium. Is the code documented and tested? Is it understandable and extendable? Is it secure? What language, framework, database was used? Author mentions judgement and taste - well, is the code tasteful? Will the model rearchitecture the entire thing if I ask it to add new functionality, spending anot…

the quality of produced code and the medium A thought I have been tossing around in my head as the models get better is that it really may not matter what the code looks like. If the observed behavior of the software is good, then the software is good. If a bug, of whatever kind, can be fixed by a model on a vibe-coded codebase, then that's a fixable bug. If there are no exploitable vulnerabilities, then the code is…

Don't forget that LLMs are trained on human code. If they cannot understand what your code does then they cannot make changes to it, or at least - having them understand your codebase becomes expensive (more trips to Anthropic servers)

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#265

Post by skydhash »

munksbeer wrote: post #246
geraneum wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point doesn’t seem to have been thought through.

The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials, and to you it felt like driving on the same road, with the same wear and tear and potholes, you wouldn't even notice. If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour, no-one outside of software engineers will know or care.

> The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials,

They do those in labs, and then studies are made to prove that it can replace the current composition. They do not invent those on the spot and let the drivers QA the road.

> If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour

It’s on you to prove that this big “if” can be realized. A -> B only matters when A is true.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#266

Post by endymion-light »

theturtletalks wrote: post #29

This is what he built: https://isochronic-passage-chart.netlify.app/ Doesn’t work too well on mobile but looks interesting

Doesn't work too well on desktop either! This is decent but it's also an early hackathon set-up - this is something that you can set up on a sonnet model fairly easily (without the weird CSS slop that anthropic models seem to love).

I'm not very threatened by this if this is the dangerous Mythos model - it just seems like a slightly incrementally better sonnet

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#267

Post by senordevnyc »

prmoustache wrote: post #194
phil21 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the entire definition of technical debt has changed. I’ve been sceptical of these tools and still approach their output with caution. This very well summarizes my current thinking on the subject as well. And most of my career has been playing the role of technical debt nazi. Much to the detriment of my earning potential. Does AI make incredibly inefficient code most of the time? Yup. But it does it at light…

> I think many software engineers forget they exist to get real things done (in many cases at least) and they are a cost center for most businesses. If your end product is not selling software, very few people actually Doing the Thing(tm) will give a single solitary care about code quality or maintainability when they can just spend 30 minutes and $15 worth of tokens to fix it. I am suprised to hear people so naive t…

I am suprised to hear people so naive they expect their token usage to stay flat if code quality and maintainability starts falling exponentially?

There's no reason to think that quality and maintainability will start falling exponentially. On the contrary, these models get better every couple months, and 99% of software isn't actually that complicated. There's just no reason for the fear-mongering that fixing 2 bugs will cause the LLM to add 50 new ones.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#268

Post by senordevnyc »

phil21 wrote: post #183
bathtub365 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they even need coders to fix these bugs? It would be an order of magnitude (at least) to ask Claude to find and fix them, and it will likely be successful. Building in the physical world has physical and time constraints that cannot be overcome, which is one of the reasons architecture (and engineering) are so important in this domain. In software development these constraints were only inherent when people we…

> I think the entire definition of technical debt has changed. I’ve been sceptical of these tools and still approach their output with caution. This very well summarizes my current thinking on the subject as well. And most of my career has been playing the role of technical debt nazi. Much to the detriment of my earning potential. Does AI make incredibly inefficient code most of the time? Yup. But it does it at light…

I think many software engineers forget they exist to get real things done

One billion percent. I think the vast majority of the anti-AI sentiments I hear from software engineers comes down to them caring more about playing with their tools than actually solving the problem.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#270

Post by endymion-light »

Kiro wrote: post #123
neaden wrote: post #61

Man, that poem it made is terrible. Like just incredibly bad. Sure it's neat that software can make an incredibly bad poem but there is enough bad poetry in the world that we don't need it.

How good can a rhyming poem about a haircut where every word starts with S be?

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

- That's the translated Cyberiad Poem the blog post based it off off (or the AI decided to do so)

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