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The Coming Loop

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Re: The Coming Loop

#101

Post by soulofmischief »

camillomiller wrote: post #32
bee_rider wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One car went Mach 1, ever, apparently. Anyway, I don’t think the analogy fits. Ford or whoever didn’t loudly and frequently predict Mach 1 cars, right? The situation is more like: Altman & co are predicting their new car will replace all vehicles: horses, trains, planes, motorcycles, there’s a real possibility the concept of vehicles will not exist other than cars, in the future. Meanwhile it hasn’t really done highw…

It is a terrible analogy that shows terrible thinking. After all, there's one thing we can bet with more confidence on: delegating thinking to this mediocrity machines is affecting the ability to do the same in scores and scores of previously smart people.

Terrible thinking? Delegating thinking to mediocrity machines? "Previously" smart people? I don't think you can project your own limited and malformed understanding of the world any harder. Please go touch grass and learn how to engage with others on the internet without being so negative.

Re: The Coming Loop

#102

Post by _verandaguy »

endemic wrote: post #94
_verandaguy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I'm in the same boat. I'm hoping to go back to school in 2027 and be out of work that revolves around programming in 5 years. I'm not enthusiastic about the field anymore, which sucks, because I used to love working in programming.

What are you going to do? Asking for a friend.

I'm still trying to figure that out. Something diplomacy-adjacent would be interesting to me; maybe conflict studies, or international relations.

Based on word from my friends who work in the field, a lot of it is people who have a lot of respect for the field, and a lot of professional respect for eachother. It's also a field I feel is unlikely to suffer from the same kind of scams that are taking over software while still offering an engaging environment.

It's also work with real-world impact, which is nice, though obviously comes with its challenges.

Re: The Coming Loop

#103

Post by dofm »

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.]

FWIW, the CEO doesn't seem to be the CEO? If I understand what I read properly, he has one direct report — his "chief of staff". So arguably the true chief executive in a functional sense (the person to whom the organisation ultimately reports through hierarchy) is his sister, who appears to be grounded in reality.

I suspect that the reason Anthropic is generating such developer-negative, toxic, insensitive influencer sentiments like these from Boris has to do with Dario being a fantasy-fiction-reading quasi-mascot who thinks it's his job to tell scary stories, who is being allowed to do just that by a sibling who perhaps prefers he's not involved in the day-to-day.

Re: The Coming Loop

#104

Post by artisin »

This.

> 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.

Context-smithing can help to a degree and cyclomatic-like complexity rules tend to make matters worse. So, you either roll up your sleeves or close your eyes and hope for the best. I've had limited success with the latter.

Re: The Coming Loop

#105

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Coming Loop

#106

Post by soulofmischief »

camillomiller wrote: post #8
soulofmischief wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've just invented the car and you're upset it hasn't achieved Mach speed yet.

I was literally quoting Sam Altman

No, you mentioned his discussion of the "billion dollar one person startup", which we can both agree is a fanciful idea and more of an eventual "possibility" that will of course not occur as once anyone can be a billionaire, the whole system is going to change.

However, your "tasteless high level wanking" is not a quote from Altman, it's a vague and directionless insult that manages to sweep quite a lot of legitimate discussion about the future of automation and professional work under its thumb.

It's wrong because you're saying, "where are the billion-dollar one-man startups?" in the same way that I might look at a Benz Velo and go, "But it's so slow! Horses can go faster than that! Everyone saying cars are going to change the fabric of society are just tasteless wankers!"

The point is that you are applying future aspirations on the present-day relatively brand-new model space and getting upset that we aren't there yet.

Re: The Coming Loop

#107

Post by draginol »

This is really terrible advice right now for most people.

I've had to rip out a lot of pretty terrible code made by engineers who have tried this.

I don't disagree that eventually, "loops" when combined with unlimited tokens and amazing models in the hands of people who know how to set them up right will be amazing. But for the typical Claude Code user, it's disaster.

The problem is not that loops write bad code once. Humans do that too. The problem is that loops apply local pressure repeatedly: add a fallback, add a guard, special-case the failing input, quiet the exception, satisfy the test. Over time that selects for code that is more survivable in the short term but less intelligible in the long term.

Re: The Coming Loop

#108

Post by soulofmischief »

bee_rider wrote: post #31
soulofmischief wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've just invented the car and you're upset it hasn't achieved Mach speed yet.

One car went Mach 1, ever, apparently. Anyway, I don’t think the analogy fits. Ford or whoever didn’t loudly and frequently predict Mach 1 cars, right? The situation is more like: Altman & co are predicting their new car will replace all vehicles: horses, trains, planes, motorcycles, there’s a real possibility the concept of vehicles will not exist other than cars, in the future. Meanwhile it hasn’t really done highw…

Yes, one car did Mach 1. And the first production car, the Benz Velo, could only go 12mph. It's an apt analogy.

As I mentioned to OP, applying future aspirations to the current space is incorrect. Some people are able to understand the progression of industrial automation, some people aren't. But if you look at the current batch of frontier models and say, "I just don't see how this is going to be useful", then you're in the camp of those in the 80's who didn't understand personal computers, or in the 90's who didn't understand the web. In hindsight, the technologies evolved massively and found routine use cases that no one initially predicted.

Re: The Coming Loop

#109

Post by handoflixue »

artisin wrote: post #104

This. > 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. Context-smithing can help to a degree and cyclomatic-l…

I was really surprised by this part!

I've run into the issue a lot; I know it happens. I handled it manually for a while by just having a fresh instance inspect the code - "review this for DRY violations" and "how would you re-write this into a global architecture instead of a bunch of local code".

Eventually the list ended up long enough that I've got an agent that handles it. You've just got to treat "write code that works" and "write elegant code" as two separate tasks - either a fresh instance or an Agent will work

Re: The Coming Loop

#110

Post by contagiousflow »

unknownfuture wrote: post #100
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.

You're being uncharitable. I don't read it as intentionally FOMO inducing. I read it as the exhausted sigh of resignation from someone who sees where the wind is blowing whether they like it or not. I see it as someone watching tech management and execs listening rapt as Boris pours the poison of AI maximalism in their ears. I read it as someone who sees developers around them either drinking from that same poisoned…

"the industry" is not some monolith, and treating it as such is no productive. There are all types of software and many ways in which it is created. If the companies that are "AI enabled" are so much better we should see some big changes soon. But I'm still waiting for products I use from "AI enabled" companies to start churning out features at unprecedented speed.
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