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The Coming Loop

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Re: The Coming Loop

#81

Post by turzmo »

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…

I never understood this perspective. Just because a person's behavior is market-rational, it does not mean they can't be criticized for externalities.

That is, in fact, an important thing to do. It turns those externalities into public perception, which turns into market forces that adjust the behavior, if you want to think purely in market terms.

The analogy with Budweiser is not a good one. This would be the CEO of Budweiser actively pushing more drinking while the nation's drinking was increasing. And yes, people would be right, and effective, to oppose this (see Oxycontin).

Re: The Coming Loop

#82

Post by kzrdude »

jazzypants wrote: post #24
nfcampos wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they really are my thoughts, I've been doing this stuff pretty much every day for the past 6 months

No offense, but this sentiment is diluted by commits like this: https://github.com/nfcampos/loop-dev/commit/e28b1fce0078e605... I assume that GP was just saying that they would prefer to read these thoughts written by a human author (preferably you). I agree.

That's a perfect use case for an LLM: grammar-aware find and replace (spicy find and replace.)

Re: The Coming Loop

#83

Post by iterateoften »

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…

> we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance

But we would start to wonder if the CEO of Budweiser started advocating binge drinking.

Re: The Coming Loop

#84

Post by crymeth0t »

ramon156 wrote: post #4

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my curr…

> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race.

Same. I'm currently trying to find _my next thing_ and all anyone wants to talk about is how I'm using AI and it's absolutely maddening. It's become a lazy, lossy proxy for productivity. I've had a few intros for the types of orchestration engineering roles which are described in this post and they're just completely unappealing -- especially the prescriptive aspects. Like, the sort of JDs I'm seeing are variants of, "we want a back-end developer who has experience with XYZ but they must use agentic harnesses to do their work." Why does any serious person give a flying fuck how the end result is reached? The flip side of all this is that rates are also being driven through the floor by loop cowboys who are generating steaming piles of shit which are _good enough_ ... until they aren't. I'm being completely serious when I say that stocking shelves at Tractor Supply is becoming more appealing by the day and I also just thought to myself, "Maybe I should just join the Army while they'll still take me?"

Re: The Coming Loop

#85

Post by Lambdanaut »

contagiousflow wrote: post #75

> 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.

In my experience, some language like this is the result of witnessing it speak for itself.

Re: The Coming Loop

#86

Post by kzrdude »

jazzypants wrote: post #55
zipy124 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This commit seems to mostly be grammar fixes? If someone used a spell/grammar checker it might produce a diff similar to this. Why does the fact it was Claude and not Microsoft Word or other matter in this case?

Because Microsoft Word doesn't write blog posts for you Edit: I just realized that Microsoft Word probably does do that now, and I hate it.

Copilot is the new clippy meme. Copilot is hiding in every MS product and is ready to write an email for you, anytime.

Re: The Coming Loop

#87

Post by dvogel »

contagiousflow wrote: post #75

> 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.

I couldn't agree more. Thus far I'm still objectively more productive than all of the AI enthusiasts I've worked with. I think a lot of the activity with these tools is coming from people who just enjoy using them more than they enjoyed coding. They feel more productive not because they are producing more but because they are producing somewhat less with much effort. It takes them roughly the same amount of time even if it changes the distribution of time spent on each task.

> and in recent weeks it has started to dominate the Twitter discourse.

As a general rule, I don't waste my time with the advice of people who still think Twitter is a source of wisdom.

Re: The Coming Loop

#88

Post by CuriouslyC »

Part of the problem is that models don't have a strong sense of taste, part of the problem is that the context in which projects exist is incompletely represented in the LLM context, and part of the problem is that LLMs tend to be myopic.

The lack of taste can be mitigated to some degree by improved training, though taste is not a stationary distribution in humans (see trends/fads/etc), we can at least better track the cutting edge. I think this area still has low hanging fruit but frontier labs are more concerned with being able to solve problems than the style of the solution right now (for evidence of this just look at the Opus 4.5 -> 4.8 arc).

The problem of incomplete context is partly a human problem and partly a harness/interconnectivity problem.

LLM Myopia is a harder problem to solve just by virtue training models on question/answer pairs. Countering this requires emphasizing RL on solution paths rather than just prompt/response, which is doable but harder.

Re: The Coming Loop

#89

Post by pdimitar »

meowface wrote: post #16
ramon156 wrote: post #4

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my curr…

I and my friends go back and forth, every day, on whether coding with LLMs is a net plus or a net negative. I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer. I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This…

I am with you here but don't get overly pessimistic: devising hooks and stopgaps and flows and constantly tuning what to watch out for does not only improve the quality of the LLM-output code. It hones and refines your own abilities.

CC has made some pretty dumb stuff in my projects but I don't resent those occurrences. They taught me (more accurately: reminded me, because I already knew but was not applying that knowledge too often) very valuable lessons on code quality -- that's still a dark area to this day and every ray of light on it is valuable for the future programming.

To me programming with LLMs made me a better programmer. But yes, I don't just rubber-stamp PRs.

It also finally allowed me to be less of a code monkey and more of an architect and a backend lead than before. Which I was really missing.

Re: The Coming Loop

#90

Post by relaxing »

> Present-day models tend to produce code that is too defensive, too complex, too local in its reasoning. They avoid strong invariants. They add fallbacks instead of making bad states impossible. They duplicate code, invent bad abstractions, and paper over unclear design with more machinery. Worse though: I so far see very little progress of this improving.

It’s almost as though these models were trained on a vast corpus of largely mediocre code. They will never outperform the median Github user - it is all they know, it is all they can do.

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