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Building Pi with Pi

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Re: Building Pi with Pi

#141

Post by CharlesW »

happimess wrote: post #125
burakemir wrote: post #119

Since nobody mentioned it, there was a lovely children's book called the clanker. It was about some creature that made metallic noises unlike the other creatures. The moral of the story was one of diversity and inclusion, making space for differences. My aversion with the word is that I don't want to be reminded of that clanker creature, which had feelings it wanted to express. The weights don't have feelings. My wor…

My objection to 'clanker' is simpler: LLMs don't clank.

Etymology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#142

Post by C-x_C-f »

> All these models see a local failure and try to locally defend against it. As maintainers we have to keep pulling the conversation back to the global invariant, which is harder than it should be, and it’s laborious.

This has been by far the biggest and costliest failure mode I've experienced using these tools. I've tried to mitigate it in more ways than I can count but it almost feels structurally impossible for LLMs to get this right.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#143

Post by pegasus »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #140
pegasus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else?? Not to mention that pi has other advantages over Claude and Codex, read up on it. Also, improvements to the agent itself will pay more dividends the earlier they are applied. The tone of this message is waaaay off.

> Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else?? You're using the same finite pool of time and tokens. Why waste your time with the perfect gear instead of focusing on just getting really good at running? Just go run and when you've pushed the limits and the gear becomes the difference, then optimize the gear to get to the next leve…

What are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit.

Everyone's waking up to this simple truth: vibe coding like there's not tomorrow accumulates conceptual and technical debt at a unsustainable rate. Then when the "magical factory" gets mired in its own mess, it's back to the drawing board. This is the also what the makers of pi have discovered, if you listen to their talks about how pi came about. I don't believe there are any justification for the assumptions you make about their approach, nor am I seeing you presenting any either. As it is, you take just feels peevish and unfair, to be honest.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#144

Post by CharlieDigital »

pegasus wrote: post #143
CharlieDigital wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would taking the more open, minimalist, configurable and ultimately diligent route means you won't be working on anything else?? You're using the same finite pool of time and tokens. Why waste your time with the perfect gear instead of focusing on just getting really good at running? Just go run and when you've pushed the limits and the gear becomes the difference, then optimize the gear to get to the next leve…

What are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit. Everyone's waking up to this simple truth: vibe coding like there's not tomorrow accumulates conceptual and technical debt…

A story to share: friend vibe coded absolute slop with Replit starting late 2024 (!!). Absolute trash code. Hacked multiple times because his login code exposed the full user list on the FE (!!!). Hacker found a way to exploit his account confirmation email because it was all front-end and sent an email to every customer telling them he was hacked. One time called me up in a panic asking why his web page was randomly refreshing (turns out, he was serving it in dev mode via Vite with HMR). It was mistake after mistake after mistake.

But he started to get customers. First a handful, then a dozen, then enough to get legal threats from other vendors, and this year, his first "enterprise" deal providing software in a space that was long dominated by a duopoly of legacy providers.

Guess what he did? Just rewrote it with the latest models and hired one engineer to ensure agents followed better practices. It's a legit business now built by a tiny team using a magical software factory to produce absolute trash code, but in shipping it, he found a market and customers willing to pay him for an alternative to the duopoly.

See, at the end of the day, it's cute that you have the perfectly tuned harness, but that also means whatever time you spent tuning your harness, reading up on Pi, spending tokens on your custom plugins -- all of that time and resources could have been used just building something useful.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#145

Post by threecheese »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #110
aryehof wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me “clanker” is a derogatory word that just sounds ugly. I recoil when I hear them use it. Perhaps it my anglo background, and it sounds different/better to German speakers.

I also strongly dislike when people are trying to forcefully push those kinds of terms onto broader public. Last one I disliked was "grok", at least this one was killed by existence of Elon's "clanker" in a similar way that "Adolf" stopped being a popular name.

Grok is great, it carries a lot of useful signal: either you are self-important, or you are enamored by what’s-his-name; either way, I can choose to care less about your words. For me though, it’s a reserved word per RFC-Michael-from-Mars, held in a special inside place, and so maybe this is just a Me problem.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#146

Post by pegasus »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #144
pegasus wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are these "others" shipping, slopware? Agents are not a "magical software factory", they are a tool with a lot of limitations, but which can speed up development in a sustainable way, when used wisely. And that includes configuring it in a way that complements the other tools in our toolkit. Everyone's waking up to this simple truth: vibe coding like there's not tomorrow accumulates conceptual and technical debt…

A story to share: friend vibe coded absolute slop with Replit starting late 2024 (!!). Absolute trash code. Hacked multiple times because his login code exposed the full user list on the FE (!!!). Hacker found a way to exploit his account confirmation email because it was all front-end and sent an email to every customer telling them he was hacked. One time called me up in a panic asking why his web page was randomly…

People use Replit to build websites too, and some of them might scratch enough of a need to make money this way. So what? Is this what I should be mightily impressed with? That some random dude vibe coded some slopware which he was able to convince some random others to pay him for? I'm personally more interested and impressed by brilliant technical achievements, even if less monetizable, than some hustle or another in some industry niche which only ever attracted the interest of two legacy players. This is Hacker News, not Hustler News after all.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#147

Post by [deleted] »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #128
skinfaxi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a company you work for tells you to do something, and you do it, did you have agency? Was it their goal you were accomplishing? Or was it your goal to make money? You have agency because you can refuse. Your car can't refuse your command.

Sometimes it can refuse. It can refuse to let you put the shifter into park from drive without applying the brake petal. It can refuse to shift into a gear at an unsafe speed. It can refuse to speed up if your wheels lose traction. It can refuse to apply full brake potential if the brakes lock up. You, the human, are the one without agency in those situations.

[deleted]

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#148

Post by whattheheckheck »

burakemir wrote: post #119

Since nobody mentioned it, there was a lovely children's book called the clanker. It was about some creature that made metallic noises unlike the other creatures. The moral of the story was one of diversity and inclusion, making space for differences. My aversion with the word is that I don't want to be reminded of that clanker creature, which had feelings it wanted to express. The weights don't have feelings. My wor…

[dead]

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#149

Post by rstuart4133 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #113
meowface wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codex and Claude Code store all this too. Lately I've started having each agent regularly read each other's chat transcripts as well as their own, including even the very same session I'm in. (With big contexts they increasingly forget a few things that they re-learn by just looking at the verbatim transcript.) I don't think it's worth writing my own harness or switching to Pi and writing a plugin, but I definitely n…

It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist. Something that is overlooked: the mainstream harnesses have a huge advantage in telemetry and datapoints to use to improve the harness. They have internal teams building the tooling. They have tight integration built-in with their own backends (e.g. optimizing for caching). Are you tinkering? Or trying to build something useful? If you're trying to build something…

> It is not worth switching to Pi except as a hobbyist.

Permit me to paraphrase slightly. "It is not worth switching to Linux except as a hobbyist. Something that is overlooked: the mainstream OSs have a huge advantage ....".

You are in good company. In 1999, Bill Gates confidently dismissed Linux as a threat, arguing it lacked the central control, features, and graphical interface needed to compete in the commercial market.

Back to the article, quoting:

> Pi might be built with Pi, but we’re quite far off today from where Bun and OpenClaw already are: fully detached, automated software engineering.

Please don't call it software engineering. I've been programming for 40 years, and most of that time had to put up with the derision from the other engineering disciplines: "If civil engineering built things like software engineers, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation". It hurt because it was true. It's still often true for things like web pages, but for the things I use like Linux and vim, it hasn't been true for a long, long while. We have finally mastered how to repeatedly build solid, reliable software.

Which is why I'm an Anthropic refugee. Opus is definitely the best for coding, but claude-cli + bun is the most unreliable piece of crap I've had the misfortune to come across in a while. Sadly I can't afford their API pricing, so either my principles or Opus had to give. I went to pi and an open-source model. The difference between the top open-source models and Opus are noticeable, but not drastic, unlike the difference between pi and claude-cli.

pi has proved to be solid, fast, have a transparent design, and be customisable in the old Linux way ("do one thing, and do it well"). I pray that will never change.

Re: Building Pi with Pi

#150

Post by voidUpdate »

nchmy wrote: post #87
voidUpdate wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, "clanker" was a term created in star wars for people to refer to droids in a deliberately derogatory way. It is quite literally a racial slur created in a fictional universe, which people are now using against AI programs. Even I don't like it, and I'm pretty heavily anti-LLM

Can you help me understand what about this original usage is racial, and how it then extends to black people?

"Droids" could be considered a race in star wars, and it doesnt directly apply to black people, its used in a similar way
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