The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing • Hacker News Board

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#131

Post by lelanthran » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #62

roenxi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't sound like much of an issue. Bob was already going to encounter problems that are too large and complex for him to solve, agents or otherwise. Life throws us hard problems. I don't recall if we even assumed Bob was unusually capable, he might be one of life's flounderers. I'd give good odds that if he got through a program with the help of agents he'll get through life achieving at least a normal level o…

The authors point went a little over your head. It doesn't matter if Bob can be normal. There was no point to him being paid to be on the program. From the article: If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.

> It doesn't matter if Bob can be normal. There was no point to him being paid to be on the program.

Yeah, I'm surprised at the number of people who read the article and came away with the conclusion that the program was designed to churn deliverables, and then they conclude that it doesn't matter if Bob can only function with an AI holding his hand, because he can still deliver.

That isn't the output of the program; the output is an Alice. That's the point of the program. They don't want the results generated by Alice, they want the final Alice.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#132

Post by throwanem » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

sd9 wrote: post #83

throwanem wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So recent? I've been on sabbatical (the real kind, self-funded) for eighteen months, and while my sense has been things have not stopped heading downhill since I stepped off the ride back in 2024, to hear of such a sudden step change is somewhat novel. "Very different" just how, if you don't mind my asking? (I'm also looking for local, personally satisfying work, in exchange for a pay cut. Early days, and I am findin…

I feel like the models and harnesses had a step change in capability around December, as somebody who’s been using them daily since early/mid 2025. It’s gone from me doing the majority of the programming, to me doing essentially none, since December. And that change felt quite sudden. The more recent shift after December is mostly explained by people at my company catching up with the events that happened in December…

Uh, don't come into it expecting to know exactly what you're going to be up to, might be the best advice I could give. Oh, do plan! But loosely: especially early on, as you get out from under the crushing burden of constant stress and misery, there will be surprises. I haven't been doing a lot of hobby programming, for example, not much more than a few faces for my Amazfit wristwatch - but my diary's grown by about a thousand pages, well above the usual rate, and I've begun a new series of crappy-camera snapshot albums, this latter especially being a real surprise despite that I have been a photographer for many years now. (My daily driver since 2021 has been a Nikon D850 with three SB-R200 flashes on a ring mount, mostly chasing wild wasps to get their portraits from six inches away. Shooting a total piece of shit for a change has been a hilarious revelation!)

Imagination operates more freely and foolishness is less heavily ballasted, and any kind of emotional crap you've been keeping shoved to the side with the force of pressing obligations is likely to come out and start rearranging the metaphorical furniture. If you've got stuff like that, this will be a good opportunity to get to grips with it, whether you mean to or not. Prepare accordingly.

And finally, there's not too many more appealing social presentations in my experience than that deriving from the confident knowledge that, within reason at least, one has earned and is now deploying the privilege to do more or less whatever the hell one likes: not the confidence contingent on a fat wallet, but that inherent in having only those scheduled obligations one chooses, and also in understanding precisely the difference underlying that distinction. Very few people in this world have the skill to behave as if their time were entirely their own to command, and this makes a difference in deportment that others will notice and attend without necessarily knowing why. It is more subtle and far less brash than the confidence in wielding the name of an employer that everyone knows, but for like reasons it also has worth and durability which the other does not. Whether or not you keep it, the experience of having had it is about as unforgettable and as indescribable as the trick to riding a bike.

Thanks for the info! My last direct exposure to a frontier model was now almost twelve months ago, so I suppose I'll have to dedicate a few hours pretty soon.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#133

Post by qsera » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

samusiam wrote: post #116

qsera wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The thing is, agents aren’t going away... Aren't they currently propped up by investor money? What happens when the investors realize the scam that it is and stop investing or start investing less...

> Aren't they currently propped up by investor money? Are Chinese model shops propped up by investor money? Is Google? Open weights models are only 6 months behind SOTA. If new model development suddenly stopped, and today's SOTA models suddenly disappeared, we would still have access to capable agents.

>we would still have access to capable agents.

But they would be outdated, right?

Would an agent that can only code in COBOL would be as useful today?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#134

Post by duskdozer » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:11 PM UTC

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #85

gbro3n wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a good analogy is people not being able to work on modern cars because they are too complex or require specialised tools. True I can still go places with my car, but when it goes wrong I'm less likely to be able to resolve the problem without (paid for) specialised help.

And just like modern vehicles rob the user of autonomy, so too for coding agents. Modern tech moves further and further away from empowering normal people and increasingly serves to grow the influence of corporations and governments over our day to day lives. It's not inherent, but it is reality unless folks stop giving up agency for convenience. I'm not holding my breath.

Soon enough we'll have ads playing in our cars at stoplights.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#135

Post by throwthrowuknow » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:12 PM UTC

ernst_klim wrote: post #96

tonfa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end. Even if inference was subsidized (afaik it isn't when paying through API calls, subscription plans indeed might have losses for heavy users, but that's how any subscription model typically work, it can still be profitable overall). Models are still improving/getting cheaper, so that seems unlikely.

It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.

Then we’ll likely know by the end of this year.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#136

Post by swiftcoder » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

hgo wrote: post #106

I like this article and it reads well, but I have to say, that to me it really reads as something written by an LLM. Probably under supervision by a human that knew what it should say. I don't know if I mind. Example. This paragraph, to me, has a eerily perfect rhythm. The ending sentence perfectly delivers the twist. Like, why would you write in perfect prose an argument piece in the science realm? > Unlike Alice, w…

> why would you write in perfect prose

If you could, why wouldn't you? LLM witch-hunts over every halfway competent writer are becoming quite tiresome

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#137

Post by lelanthran » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

> The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things.

"Being able to deliver using AI" wasn't the point of the article. If it was the point, your comment would make sense.

The point of the program referred to in the article is not to deliver results, but to deliver an Alice. Delivering a Bob is a failure of the program.

Whether you think that a Bob+AI delivers the same results is not relevant to the point of the article, because the goal is not to deliver the results, it's to deliver an Alice.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#138

Post by CuriouslyC » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #44

djaro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade…

Worse, soon fewer and fewer people will taste good food, including even higher and higher scale restaurants just using pre-made. As fewer know what good food tastes like, the entire market will enshitify towards lower and lower calibre food. We already see this with, for example, fruits in cold climates. I've known people who have only ever bought them from the supermarket, then tried them at a farmers when they're i…

Ironically, apples are one of the fruits where tree ripening isn't a big deal for a lot of varietals. You should have used tomato as the example, the difference there is night and day pretty much across the board.

If humans can prove that bespoke human code brings value, it'll stick around. I expect that the cases where this will be true will just gradually erode over time.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#139

Post by JackSlateur » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:14 PM UTC

hgo wrote: post #106

I like this article and it reads well, but I have to say, that to me it really reads as something written by an LLM. Probably under supervision by a human that knew what it should say. I don't know if I mind. Example. This paragraph, to me, has a eerily perfect rhythm. The ending sentence perfectly delivers the twist. Like, why would you write in perfect prose an argument piece in the science realm? > Unlike Alice, w…

It sure is

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#140

Post by mrugge » Sun, Apr 05, 2026, 1:14 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #114

simianwords wrote: post #54

> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small. The author is a bit naive here: 1. Soc…

Current civilization is very complex. And it’s also fragile in some parts. When you build systems around instant communication and the availability of stuff built in the other side of the world on a fixed schedule, it’s very easy to disrupt. > 4. People will eventually get the hang of using AI to do the optimum amount of delegation such that they still retain what is necessary and delegate what is not necessary. Peop…

I have been able to produce 20x the amount of useful outputs both in my day job and in my free time using a popular coding agent in 2026. Part of me is uncomfortable at having from some perspective my hard won knowledge of how to write English, code and to design systems partly commoditized. Part of me is amazed and grateful for being in this timeline. I am now learning and building things I only dreamed about for years. Sky is the limit.