I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…
> AI is only as good as the person using it
I think it might be even worse than that. It seems to be a multiplier for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Possibly because being trained to exhibit positive demeanor means that it will always tell you you're the best, no matter what.
AI should be subservient in the same way a hammer is subservient.
Which is to say, not at all? A hammer isn’t subservient, it doesn’t have the capacity to be. Saying a hammer is subservient is stretching the definition for literary flourish, but it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. The definition that came up for subservient when I checked was “prepared to obey others unquestioningly“.
You took it too literally. It means, the f*ing tool should do one thing well and f*off with its crappy "suggestions". Why is my washing machine trying to do talk to me nowadays? Once its done washing my clothes, it should just shut the f*up and turn itself off. I"ll tend to the clothes when I have time. Not when the machine tells me to. We are overwhelmed with the machines designed by morons in product management who think they are designing futuristic tech when they ask engineers to build a beeping washing machine.
I've seen internet comments similar: "put on a yellow vest and carry a clipboard and you can enter any building, anywhere." Confidence is scary, and often misleading.
This is a dumb meme that has been in so many movies and reposted so many times since I first saw it on 1980s BBSes that it has become true in the imaginations of people who love reading The Anarchist Cookbook and fantasize about this kind of thing, but would never actually do it. Confidence is a spectrum and security is situational. In some places, a yellow vest adds to the con. In others, everyone has to be signed i…
Yesterday there were people poking around my neighbors yard for a few hours with yellow vests on. The neighbor was nowhere to be seen and I didn’t call the cops. It was probably above board but the phenomena being discussed is obviously real. Projecting authority often grants it.
> They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. Presumably that's better than no game at all. > It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "acceptable" level and it was still awful as the whole design was simply flawed. Doing 2 weeks of fixing might have been hell, but this sounds like it was…
No the game failed because of these non stop issues, it lost all hype and the "fixed" version couldn't sustain itself anymore as it took around a month to fix the remaining issues. At the 2nd company it wasted thousands of dollars of advertisement because the server could not withstand the load and obviously data loss issues tained the image forever and will likely end up the same way. Also please don't take this as…
What particularly gets me is if you use AI with a bit of engineering rigor, especially around design and testing my experience is the latest models are great to work with. They can structure performance and stability tests, implement 90%. Humans have to do the hardest and critical 10% of the design. The current tools are good enough to do virtually all of the implementation now if your quality gates are right and your design is good enough, but you absolutely have to design the right things for your scale and reliability needs or very bad things are in store.
Accountability is the biggest unaddressed challenge for AI implementation. When one person is able to do too much too quickly, they can create more liability than they can accommodate if something fails. It is essential that a human is responsible for the utilization of any AI output in the real world, but that is not enough. For our own sakes, we must find ways to minimize the tech-debt bankruptcy blast-radius of th…
This is the whole point. “Sorry, the AI said that you are not approved for this cancer treatment, it’s not going to be covered.” “Sorry, the AI said that you were at the scene when the crime took place.” “Sorry, the AI has flagged your account for inappropriate content.” “Sorry, the AI says that you are too risky to lend to.” …
I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…
> AI is only as good as the person using it Nailed it. That said, it couldn't have possibly been that bad if you got it to "acceptable" in 2 weeks.
I used AI too and acceptable means "you can play it without losing your progress".
> It’s not lying. It’s not even wrong, necessarily. It’s just incapable of the thing that makes a real architect valuable: saying “no.”
In my workflows Claude does pushbacks all the time and justifies why. There is back and forth just like a colleague. It’s not perfect but the results are usually good
I have a good story to share that I came across recently. Around 2 years ago I had to clean up a mess because someone who doesn't really know what they're doing designed an instancing system for a game. They heavily used AI to design every part of it and it was awful. Data corruption, performance problems, lost items, race conditions everything you can think of was an issue. It took me 2 weeks just to get it to an "a…
> Ask it if a microservices architecture makes sense for your three-person team and it’ll explain why microservices are an excellent choice
If you ask it to be fair and non-biased and provide pros and cons and give possible alternatives - it will. The catch - you might understand the explanation if you don't know the domain good enough.