31–40 of 334 posts
> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming…
These machines are doing some crazy things to get to the result. That said, I can't help but feel like this is the compilers argument all over again. Are the methods used to get to the result good? No. Is the code that it generates good? No. Does it achieve the goal. Yes. Is it likely to get better with time. Also yes. In my use cases, jobs that would have taken weeks to months are being done in minutes to hours. Inv…
I use the tools with this "risk analysis":
- If performance doesn't improve I can just always switch back to whatever I've done for the past 10 years, so it's not really a risk to start exploring.
- If performance does improve, then I'm already familiar with it.
These machines are doing some crazy things to get to the result. That said, I can't help but feel like this is the compilers argument all over again. Are the methods used to get to the result good? No. Is the code that it generates good? No. Does it achieve the goal. Yes. Is it likely to get better with time. Also yes. In my use cases, jobs that would have taken weeks to months are being done in minutes to hours. Inv…
What is the "compilers argument"?
Astra is indeed the pinnacle of "black box slop". It is overall a smarter software development agent for many things I do, but the code sometimes is indistinguishable from Brainfuck when writing things like GPU shaders. It doesn't even attempt to make it remotely formatted or readable.
I had GTP-5.6 write some shader code recently and it wasn't very clear to me. I spent about an hour chatting with the until I understood the concepts and was able to express them back to the AI using math formulas and variables named in a way that made sense to me. The AI then rendered the code using the formula and variables I was familiar with and it was clear to me.
The quirks in fallbacks, defaults and ludicrous gold plating seems to get more and more intrusive with every model upgrade.
> I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The English term for Neijuan is “Involution” from the book Agricultural Involution. Agricultural involution describes the intensification of farming…
https://xkcd.com/1319/
I've observed the same thing where the new models want to run obscene bash commands or python scripts which are completely unreadable and utilise every option flag that exists. It's impossible to review. These commands are less readable than regex.
I noticed that too so I appended to Claude Code’s system prompt a reminder to use the standard read/write tools, but since Claude Code switched to default auto-mode, I’ve seen it imply that the auto-mode tooling encourages the use of bash-only commands (sed, python, etc) which has a whole slew of negative side affects.
I can only assume that's because their safety verification model is better at such snippets or something, but it means that the whole write tool they have which actually shows you the changes as they happen is just unused and it makes it more annoying to follow along.
gpt-6-astra is a bitch, it constantly scope creeps itself with "yet another thing" to give it that darn polished lick. the results are eventually a little bit better but at what cost? let's do the math. gpt-5.6-sol: 1x base gpt-6-astra 2.5x base in subscription then gpt-6-astra tends to spawn subagents a lot, often with all kinds of models such as gpt-5.6, 5.3-codex etc., which is neat. it's a good coordinator but ev…
These machines are doing some crazy things to get to the result. That said, I can't help but feel like this is the compilers argument all over again. Are the methods used to get to the result good? No. Is the code that it generates good? No. Does it achieve the goal. Yes. Is it likely to get better with time. Also yes. In my use cases, jobs that would have taken weeks to months are being done in minutes to hours. Inv…
To create professional products, compilers are great, when used by professionals or passionate and technical amateurs. They're useless if you're neither.
LLMs are the next step up. They are quite useful if you are neither, and you can get a lot farther with them, which means that low quality software is much easier to create. But if, for whatever reason, you need to create higher quality software (like most software that's actually sold directly or through subscriptions or ads), you're back to the "be a professional or passionate and technical amateur".