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The Coming Loop

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: The Coming Loop

#71

Post by jrmg »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #66
galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

> I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. From a market perspective, he's acting completely rationally in his own interests. Bottom line is that these companies need to do whatever they can to keep growing token consumption because that's their goal. If the nation's drinking skyrocketed, we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance. His job is to…

His job is to do what’s in the long term interests of his company.

[Edit: was thinking of the ‘CEO’. This doesn’t apply as cleanly to Boris.]

Re: The Coming Loop

#72

Post by cadamsdotcom »

yanis_t wrote: post #23

I keep thinking about at which point I should not force myself into the loop. As a developer I really like working on the code structure, making it clearer, thinking about good abstraction, breaking into modules, etc. I really take pleasure in it. At the same time I understand that at some point I am becoming the limiting factor. If the point of the software is benefit people, should I still care about how the code l…

You will always be able to ask the agent to do refactors for you - and it can do mega ones that exhaust you to think about!

Re: The Coming Loop

#73

Post by noodletheworld »

Theres a deep insight in this post about the value of looping for throw away code to explore a problem space, rather than brute force a problem by just applying more tokens and hoping.

The more I play in this space, the more I’m drawn to the idea that some kind of back tracking constraint solver is a better solution than then the current naive while loop / brute force approach here.

The results I see are similar to what you get from a greedy brute force constraint solver; solves trivial problems, sometimes solves harder problems after a long time, takes too long to solve really hard problems; solutions are increasingly non optimal on average as complexity goes up.

We have so much existing knowledge about building good constraint solvers, if we could just figure out how to apply it here somehow.

Re: The Coming Loop

#74

Post by Tade0 »

galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

> This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.

The silver lining appears to be that long term most people won't be able to afford producing slop at current rates.

Re: The Coming Loop

#75

Post by contagiousflow »

> You Cannot Quite Opt Out

I am so over this. I cannot take anyone seriously that claims inevitability of their ideas, and how you must adopt them without "being left behind". If these tools are so good and so capable the result should be able to speak for themselves rather than this FOMO inducing, emotional language.

Re: The Coming Loop

#76

Post by CodingJeebus »

jrmg wrote: post #71
CodingJeebus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. From a market perspective, he's acting completely rationally in his own interests. Bottom line is that these companies need to do whatever they can to keep growing token consumption because that's their goal. If the nation's drinking skyrocketed, we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance. His job is to…

His job is to do what’s in the long term interests of his company. [Edit: was thinking of the ‘CEO’. This doesn’t apply as cleanly to Boris.]

Respectfully disagree. From my view, the tech industry hasn't behaved in a way that regards long-term interests over short-term interests in a very, very long time. Much of the innovation is simply finding new and creative ways to shrink this loop even further, and vibe-coding/slop is just the latest manifestation of that.

Re: The Coming Loop

#77

Post by pedromlsreis »

galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

Reading through the thread, it's striking how many people are feeling the same mix of excitement and exhaustion you describe. I'm in that camp too... the tools are incredible, but the pace and expectations around them can feel overwhelming.

I fully agree with what you say regarding Boris, but I would emphasize that I don't think he has malicious intention either. He still is doing his job, to showcase the features their product offers.

Re: The Coming Loop

#78

Post by baw-bag »

erispoe wrote: post #21
codeDruid wrote: post #19

Yeah I don't know. Don't get me wrong, the article points makes sense. But sometimes I think that we're going to stay near this current point of productivity for a little while. Currently my org of 8 people use around 1000 euro worth of tokens per month. We've recently had a discussion near the water-cooler, that if the cost climbs 5x-10x it may be just more worth it to get more developers (we're EU based). While the…

How do you control code quality?

The way I answer this question is, I don't because my boss is saying to basically accept whatever LLMs spit out which is fine by me because I have explained the risks of doing this to our only product and it was shrugged off. I am both disgusted and excused and just take the salary.

Re: The Coming Loop

#79

Post by pedromlsreis »

meowface wrote: post #68
galoisscobi wrote: post #41

As much as I like Claude Code, Boris has done a lot of harm by encouraging software engineering practices that lead to slopware. We have two camps of people at work, the first camp are the agent goes brrr. They don't understand the code they write. They have loops running, agent orchestrators or agent hype du jour. The second camp is people who are inundated with PRs, are holding the line on quality, and just exhaust…

This sums up the dynamic: https://x.com/danhockenmaier/status/2021617680525172840

Right, which basically means that judgment compounds. AI just makes the slope steeper in both directions.

Re: The Coming Loop

#80

Post by abathologist »

Generally interesting reflections here, yet I see the same kind of myopia and fatalism that is rampant in our (fashion) industry:

> yet I have no doubts that this looping future is going to be our future despite the fact that I presently resent it

Why would anyone concluded this? LLMs are just one kind of application of MLs to software production. There is a vast solution space for automating parts of software production. The idea that slop loops are the inevitable future because they happen to be accelerating output at the moment just seems profoundly short-sighted and lacking in vision.

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