What it feels like to work with Mythos • Hacker News Board

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#301

Post by justinclift » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:46 PM UTC

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #287

anonzzzies wrote: post #284

Been working on my pet project today with Fable; it seems pretty solid but not too far removed from 4.8; same hallucinating, same type of bugs, same focus in large projects on just doing what you ask and just ignoring whatever that may touch/break/influence. Running tests in the beginning but when fuller context, just 'will run later' and never doing it in the end unless you tell it to (using some assorted swear word…

It clearly saw things immediately that 4.8 had missed on my projects. But shortly thereafter, having step functioned past those issues and impressed the crap out of me doing so, it got stuck in the usual endless loop talking about stuff more than doing stuff, occasionally deciding to pause so I'd have to whack it to get it going again. So nope, not the AGI. But definitely an improvement.

> it got stuck in the usual endless loop talking about stuff more than doing stuff

That's the kind of behaviour I've seen in Claude Code (Opus 4.8) when it's context space is over the 40-50% range.

I tend to keep an eye on the context usage (ie `/context`) quite a lot, and generally see good results as long as the context usage is ~30% or below.

Which isn't heaps, considering having to ensure it has the required docs/stuff it needs can take 15-20% of context by itself.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#302

Post by justinclift » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #126

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> despite the fact that 90% of people would be able to make do with a Macbook Neo. Myth. Total myth! I recently had to beg for more RAM after continually hitting swap space which causes tools like dictation to stop working, failure to load certain websites without rebooting, and so on. Devs do in fact need powerful machines and the ~$500-1000 an employer saves upfront in machine costs is dwarfed by productivity losse…

Surely devs could just uninstall Slack, and get the same combined RAM & productivity boost?

s/Slack/Teams/ ;)

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#303

Post by queenkjuul » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:49 PM UTC

not only is the site completely unusable on mobile ootb, but when i enable desktop mode on Android, my taps are detected in the wrong spot--clicking Chicago registers as Saskatoon.

At first i thought its routing was just completely botched.

The text overflow on the legend is pretty funny considering how well the other graphics turned out

(Edit: referring to the map app)

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#304

Post by kordlessagain » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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…

[dead]

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#305

Post by justinclift » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

rgmerk wrote: post #184

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

It put the chart title directly on top of Australia. Which just about sums up my experience with using LLMs to code, really (though not with these state-of-the-art models, admittedly) - it's amazing what they can do, but left to their own devices they'll make boneheaded decisions.

> it's amazing what they can do, but left to their own devices they'll make boneheaded decisions.

Yeah, the whole "can run for 9 hours on a task" to me is not a positive.

I tend to find if Opus 4.8 runs for ~15 mins on a task, then the end result has gone off in a weird direction at some point, and it needs winding back a fair bit.

And that's with extremely clear direction, literal specification docs to follow, etc.

That being said, having functional code already created beforehand (ie by a human) goes a long way to ensuring the AI model has a path it can build on without making too many dumb architectural choices by itself. Generally.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#306

Post by queenkjuul » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:54 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #267

prmoustache wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Except that i witness it create new bugs while fixing existing ones?

Not 50:1 but it does happen

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#307

Post by popcorncowboy » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

amarant wrote: post #240

rstuart4133 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them. You underestimate what these models cost. Uber's budget is $1,500/dev/month. I gather that was put in place because the dev's were going through $6,000/dev/month, which Uber decided could not be cost justified. Fable costs at least twice as much, or $12,000/dev/month. Fable can apparently work for hours without supervision, which means a s…

Not to argue myself out of a job, but I cost around $20k/month, all costs considered(taxes, social fees, PTO, healthcare, benefits). If my efficiency is tripled(which it absolutely is, even before fable) for a mere 6k/month(in reality, 1k is more than enough though), that's ~10x ROI. I kinda get why execs are excited

> If my efficiency is tripled

Our 401ks turn on this actually being true. Otherwise pop.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#308

Post by queenkjuul » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

Schmerika wrote: post #252

shimman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making side projects isn't a trillion dollar industry tho, adding to the fact that we are facing another global supply chain crisis due to the Iran War; the US is about to commit the biggest self-own ever in the history of empire.

There are actually quite a few trillion dollar industries that exist thanks to "side projects". Apple was Woz's side project, once upon a time. Adsense came from Google's 20% time. Social media started as a side project. Forests grow from trees. Trees grow from seeds. More potential seeds = more potential forests.

All the undiscovered Woz's of the world add up to a trillion dollars? There's $1T of money out there waiting to be spent on side projects?

The question was "are side projects a trillion dollar industry" not "has a side project ever started an industry"

How much of a new $1T software product will anthropic capture in token costs, anyway?

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#309

Post by queenkjuul » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

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 use Claude Code at a fintech, and I'm seeing garbage PRs from careless coworkers all the time. I'm having to correct Claude output regularly.

Yes, it does nearly all the typing for me now. But left to its own devices, it'll happily spit out awful code.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#310

Post by skydhash » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 3:11 PM UTC

munksbeer wrote: post #298

skydhash wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 autoc…

> Are you seeing a quality increase? Less customer bugs, less outages, faster resolution? Are you measuring those? We're not at the stage to measure yet. We may be behind others, not sure. Actually, this isn't quite true. I was interested, so a created an ad-hoc report (with AI) on PRs landed per week over time. This has gone up over the last 6 momths. But that is hard to say why that is. It might just be people are…

> And then I come to HN or reddit and I see people telling us that they cannot write decent production code, and this is just wrong. This isn't opinion wrong, it is objectively wrong

So how can you justify this comment of yours from your reply if you’re not measuring anything? Mind you, I can easily get good results from AI tools, but I don’t like the experience and the code is often over-engineered and drifts away from my target architecture.

But the worst is quickly loosing sight of the tiny technical details that matters when solving bugs or altering features. I don’t like typing code. What I like is to be able to go directly to the code that I need to change, modify it, and then verify that it works. Most of my time is spent deep thinking about the design of the software which is orthogonal to code.

And if there is one thing that is common about people fully onboard with LLM is that they can talk about the product, but they can’t argue about its behavior and its correctness. There’s no intrinsic model that they can compare with the real code. They don’t know the edge cases, the technical pitfalls, how the software will react if you modify one component. Any brainstorming session quickly turns into a slog because they cannot contrast approaches anymore. You can see the decay of understanding in realtime.