221–230 of 321 posts
I spend time building AI Agentic guides and skills, then review the code myself. I really miss the old days when you put your headphones on and focus for 3-4 hours
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out…
Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…
Just interesting to see Claude’s hourly rate is around $17. Much cheaper than a human software engineer. But comparable to the wages for some human workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore. Many argue that they're now thinking at a higher level (maybe they weren't before?), but, guess what, that high-level design can be done better by the LLM than by you anyway. It's only temporary.
>> There's more to it than that: writing is thinking. If you stop writing code, you aren't thinking anymore. Humans have been thinking long before writing was invented . Why is code special?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…
Just interesting to see Claude’s hourly rate is around $17. Much cheaper than a human software engineer. But comparable to the wages for some human workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. How can you know how poorly they did it?
> How can you know how poorly they did it? Their lack of progress. Humans existed in the same basic form for around 100k years before they finally invented agriculture, which led to some improvements, and then rapid progress once writing was invented.
While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here.
Like, why do we talk about the Dark Ages? Because there was less writing, so obviously things were terrible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And look how poorly they did it until they invented writing. How can you know how poorly they did it?
> How can you know how poorly they did it? Their lack of progress. Humans existed in the same basic form for around 100k years before they finally invented agriculture, which led to some improvements, and then rapid progress once writing was invented.
If we look at the progress made from ChatGPT 3.5 (Nov 2022) and up to today...shoot, I'm really starting to wonder if we'll even be reviewing code in 4 years. And I'm not saying this as some sort of AI maximalist. If progress keeps up, I seriously doubt software engineering and development will, as we know it today, will be a thing in the next 5-10 years. Maybe humans will be left with designing the UI, but everythin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is magic in telling computer do something and seeing it zap through it billions of times faster than by any other means.
That doesn't feel like magic to me, it feels like cheating. It feels miserable and demoralizing. And then it feels like a chore slogging through whatever it produced to verify it is correct.
Only that businesses have decided it is OK as long as they are benefitting to steal from everyone else, and basically force us to be the acting hand in all of it, or threaten us with starvation (no job, no income).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How can you know how poorly they did it? Their lack of progress. Humans existed in the same basic form for around 100k years before they finally invented agriculture, which led to some improvements, and then rapid progress once writing was invented.
> then rapid progress once writing was invented. While I mostly agree with this notion, given that all of our understanding of human progress historically comes from writing, there's a selection effect happening here. Like, why do we talk about the Dark Ages? Because there was less writing, so obviously things were terrible.
There's a bit of a selection bias there, because writing itself is used as a measurement of progress.
But, ignoring writing as a measurement of progress, we can pretty much see that for about 100k years the only tech were primitive tools.
Even after the domestication of wolves (about 40k years ago) there were no visible improvement in tech. After agriculture (10k-12k years ago, maybe?), there's visible progress in tech (tools), but not by much, and visible improvement in societies (also, not by much).
Enter writing - those civilisations that had more advanced writing progressed rapidly, and those that did not barely progressed at all, tech-wise.
Because not all civilisations progressed at the same rate, we can see quite clearly that writing is highly correlated[1] with progress.
---------------------
[1] While correlation does not imply causation, as the data mounts it lends more and more weight to the causation bit.