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The Coming Loop

lucumr.pocoo.org

151–160 of 322 posts

Re: The Coming Loop

#151

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…

> We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code. I feel like this is the actual problem, but it's not being talked about enough. Logically, it shouldn't matter how a piece of code was written. It either meets our engineering standards or it doesn't. That's what code review is for. But what has actually happened is that, because we have AI now, many organizations hav…

If an organization decides the engineering team should not be looking at code, that should be coupled with a mandate to figure out what good engineering looks like working that way - what constitutes a good contribution vs what's slop? How do we handle massive PRs? The problem is we are in the "messing around phase" of coding with clankers and have much to learn still

Re: The Coming Loop

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Terrible thinking: yes, it's just bad thinking. It's a malformed comparison that misunderstands the conversation. Delegating thinking to mediocrity machines: Based on the statistical nature of their underlying math, LLMs are by definition mediocrity-producing machines, especially if you understand the etymology of mediocre. Previously smart people: Cognitive atrophy in people overrelying on LLMs and agents seems to b…

> It's a malformed comparison that misunderstands the conversation

I invite you to explain how, instead of just making unsubstantiated claims.

> Based on the statistical nature of their underlying math, LLMs are by definition mediocrity-producing mac

You're demonstrating a fundamental failure to understand the mathematics behind these models, by claiming that they produce an average result by nature. You fundamentally misunderstand reasoning manifolds, and how training teaches models new behaviors.

Phrases like "Based on the statistical nature of their underlying math" sure make you sound smart to someone who doesn't know better, but in truth the phrase is completely void of substance: What statistical nature? What underlying math? What about them prove your naive hypothesis that they can only produce "mediocrity", itself an extremely subjective term that leaves you a massive amount of slack with which you can retreat from your claims after someone asks for proof and clarification.

> Cognitive atrophy in people overrelying on LLMs and agents seems to be inevitable

I can pull studies that show reading and writing reduce some cognitive faculties, compared to oral tradition. Or how the use of calculators atrophies basic arithmetic skills: that's not going to stop astrophysicists from using number-crunching simulations instead of doing things by hand.

> maybe you could try to develop one that takes into consideration the humanities, art, the sublime, love, emotions, and everything that makes humans human, instead of looking at the world through the small, mechanistic lens of the hyperengineerization of everything.

Hey, so you're projecting again here. Massively. Nothing about this conversation has given you any information regarding my opinions on the list of extremely subjective and debatable concepts you've provided. You seem to harbor a belief that anyone who extracts meaningful value from these machines is actually a "terrible thinker" who is inconsiderate of the world and only sees things through a "small, mechanistic lens". Besides being considerably insulting, all this projection does is reveal things about how you view the world, how you view those who think differently than you, and how close-minded you can be, prejudiciously writing off someone as a caricatured personal bias in order to avoid critically engaging with their argument.

Honestly, this is a really sad and negative way to talk with others on the internet and you need to stop and review your approach to discourse. There is no value in considering to waste time talking to you until you change your attitude, so I'm going to end the conversation.

Re: The Coming Loop

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'r…

I think my main contention about the analogy is that Mach 1 cars are sort of a ridiculous target, a thing that only happened once just as an attempt to break a barrier, more like a tech demo. Billion dollar startups are very rare of course, but they are real things that happen for practical reasons as part of the industry. Saying that the person you replied to was looking for the former when they really wanted the la…

Billion dollar one person startups are a silly target too, because as we approach that possibility, society will adjust.

I know Sam Altman peddled this concept, but he's not representative of the culture and principles of the entire AI/ML space. So it was wrong of OP to attempt to use his words against the entire idea of neural models.

Re: The Coming Loop

#154

> the right fix is not "handle every malformed case." ... [LLMs] will still attempt to handle now impossible errors. This is the number one code smell from LLMs and I don't know why they are so obsessed with it. In python, it often comes as `hasattr` checks on types that are defined to have that attribute, in a code base that is fully type-checked. Why do they do that? Is it from pre-training or re-enforcement? If th…

Because the vast majority of the codebases in its training set aren't fully type-checked, or very clean at all. Or it's just snippets from Stack Overflow, so there's no existing context to not assume null-checking is valid.

Re: The Coming Loop

#155
I have had some success with /goal for long tasks that can be set up in a way that the agent can do good work for an extended period of time.

A lot of tasks aren't amenable to that, and the ones that are still need a lot of care to be set up correctly. The default vibe coded codebase won't be.

I've come to think of the activity of choosing the right technology, the right architecture, the right testing setup, the right context, and the right /goals to use as programming the agent.

Re: The Coming Loop

#156

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 w…

> back tracking constraint solver

We'd need a LLM back tracking constraint solver and I think the bottleneck will be good grading rules on whether a direction is actually architecturally clean or extensible. I'm not sure how one would approach that problem

Re: The Coming Loop

#157
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…

It's tough if you're somewhere that isn't very meaningful to you beyond the technology. I think there will be an existential shift soon towards more fulfilling work. Maybe I'm naive or that's just what I feel I need for myself.

Re: The Coming Loop

#158
I just tell it "you have until morning to work on this, be careful not to use too much ram and don't burn the cpu"

and then it goes off to do its thing and hopefully rngesus is with us.

Re: The Coming Loop

#160
What does any of that mean in practice? it's just rambling about abstract concepts that seem to be designed to hint at a bigger picture, when it's just getting AI to write code for you.

Is this where it's going? Having to mystify our roles so it seems like we're still the thought leaders when actually we're just becoming pseudo-teachers that try and herd our group of AI idiots to the right conclusion for us so we don't have to, without ever giving away that it's just all techno-babble?

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