41–50 of 154 posts
All details are not created equal. Some details are boring. My AI dream (that I’m living happily) is getting to focus on the details that I find interesting and ignoring all the boilerplate details that modern software requires.
I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…
Not talking about prompting Claude "please write me a philosophical dialogue". It has no skin in the game. If it writes 20 paragraphs of slop and is factually wrong and costs other people labor, is there any correction mechanism?
We can correct it explicitly via training I guess, but it's debatable to what extent accountability applies to AI.
We like to pretend that we have our nice epistemology, separated into a priori and a posteroi and all that, but at the end of the day, accountability is what underpins social relations and keeps things going (even if you're libertarian, you have to accept this - even if you don't agree some state should centralize it, it's still just true in terms of basic human social relations).
Of course, another possibility is utter domination - I am so much better than you (for some definition of better) that none of your puny responses matter. OK. Then don't claim both that, and that you're weird for disliking AI and that AI has no problems when integrating with society - too many people have these basic cognitive dissonances.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort." It's also what we see in the wild. There are so many things going on, so many news about "AI". Are things getting better in any meaningful way? Why are we getting so much from "AI" yet things keep getting worse? The only real, objective and ve…
> The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort." For me, it's "I can do this now; yesterday I could not." I am not a developer - I am a hack with some experience in a smattering of languages who hits very real obstacles very quickly. AI has allowed me to overcome those obstacles and build…
I do IT, I can’t make any kind of art to save my own life. The art the AI generates is neat to me because I get to feel in control of making something beyond my own skills.
The flip side is equally true, though. The things I make are derivative, and not particularly neat to other people (and actively irritate actual artists).
AI software is a lot like that. I’m happy people who aren’t software engineers can make their own thing and be totally in control of that. I’ve also yet to see much AI software that blows existing stuff out of the water. Most of is derivative of something that already exists, if not an outright clone with a slightly different emphasis (think Jira but for a very specific workflow).
> to become good at the thing in the first place requires a complete reversal of the mindset that would lead one to having wanted to hand it off Is this true? I can be good at something and be happy to not have to do it anymore I feel
Outsourcing critical thinking is seductive and a slippery slope. LLM lures juniors into feeling productive, and molds them into ineffectual middle managers to be readily replaced when there's a bad quarter.
The details are what separates the slop from the craft.
Every word of this seems objectively false. AI is more than capable of handling the details. I have generated countless tools for myself without needing to know or care about the details.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pro argument is always quantity based, yet we never get to see the actual gain in quality. It's always "I'm doing SO MUCH more". Never "I'm doing better, with less effort." It's also what we see in the wild. There are so many things going on, so many news about "AI". Are things getting better in any meaningful way? Why are we getting so much from "AI" yet things keep getting worse? The only real, objective and ve…
I'm doing better, with less effort. I mostly work on UI (for an internal, science-focused app) and it used be that features would take a sprint or two to grind out, and would always be an MVP to meet just the most essential user requirements, because that's all we could afford, time-wise, to do. And if I figured out while implementing there could be a nicer UI approach to something, it was often too late to change th…
My point exactly
> But the features I'm building are _better_, and the effort is less.
Can we cash that check or is it gonna trade heavily discounted like all grand claims on AI since all software all around us together with the economy and the Earth's life supporting systems keep degrading every year? We keep getting promised the better, but we only get to see the more.
I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They'…
> as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat This... quite describes what the current AI feels like to me. So I really don't see a problem. If AI does too much for you, you should, uh, just prompt it to do less. Everyone talks about how their AI escapes sandbox and virtualization or delete their entire repos or something. Perhaps they're using a skynet I'm not aware of. Fr…
I use the almost the same addendum as you ("do not make, commit, or push any changes without my approval") and it broadly seems to work in my day-to-day dev. However, I also set up some agents that trigger on incoming requests from my dev teams to automate things that used to be rote/manual tasks. _That_ is where I see the issues, I suspect simply because it has so many more opportunities to go off script.
The most common failure mode is that it will, despite all directives to not make changes without approval, start writing unit tests. (I do find this equal parts head-shaking and amusing; At least it chooses something relatively 'benevolent' vs. the aforementioned skynet.)