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You can't unit test for taste

dev.karltryggvason.com

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Re: You can't unit test for taste

#141

Post by usef- »

vkou wrote: post #127
sscaryterry wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I'm sure Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.

Steve Jobs was also responsible for brilliant bits of usability like puck mice, and the need to have two functioning hands in order to right-click.

.... and ensuring the entire UI did not require right click to function. Everything was visible to click.

The usability of iPhones and iPads is a great example of how he was right. They're very easy to use and no functionality was hidden in a right click menu: it had to be visible somewhere.

Right click was still always available as a shortcut for advanced users.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#143

Post by InsideOutSanta »

usef- wrote: post #141
vkou wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs was also responsible for brilliant bits of usability like puck mice, and the need to have two functioning hands in order to right-click.

.... and ensuring the entire UI did not require right click to function. Everything was visible to click. The usability of iPhones and iPads is a great example of how he was right. They're very easy to use and no functionality was hidden in a right click menu: it had to be visible somewhere. Right click was still always available as a shortcut for advanced users.

Yeah, I think people who didn't use Macs at the time misunderstand the whole "second mouse button"/"context menu" thing. If you were on Windows, you literally couldn't use the computer without context menus. But Mac OS at the time was designed such that every action the user could access was visible in the regular UI, either through a button or through the menubar.

When the context menu was introduced, it was initially designed as a shortcut to actions that were already available elsewhere in the UI.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#145

Post by playorizaya »

trjordan wrote: post #4

You can't unit test for taste if you haven't written down what you mean by taste. If you can externalize it, then you can. Follow this line of thinking, and the AI-friendly answer is easy: we just have to externalize everything we know, so Claude can implement what I want. Except that I can't fully externalize myself. Debugging a system takes more resources than running the system. If I could write down everything I…

[dead]

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#146

Post by monknomo »

trjordan wrote: post #28
paytonjjones wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, in short, the big current problem with AI. LLMs are built for scale so they've given up on the kind of online learning / "long term memory" processes that would individualize them. The LLM is permanently locked to being a really cracked engineer on their first day at your company, looking at your codebase for the first time. You can scaffold a bit with .md files, but at the moment they lack the ability to do…

100%. The problem with them isn't making sure they're doing the right thing, it's making sure they're not making bad assumptions. IMHO this is where code review goes until we fix the individualized model thing: you need to review the decisions the agent made, where you didn't steer. Most will be right. A few will be disastrously wrong. But decision-by-decision is a lot less to review than line-by-line of code.

how are you getting some reviewable artifact with the decisions in it?

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#147

Post by vkou »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #143
usef- wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.... and ensuring the entire UI did not require right click to function. Everything was visible to click. The usability of iPhones and iPads is a great example of how he was right. They're very easy to use and no functionality was hidden in a right click menu: it had to be visible somewhere. Right click was still always available as a shortcut for advanced users.

Yeah, I think people who didn't use Macs at the time misunderstand the whole "second mouse button"/"context menu" thing. If you were on Windows, you literally couldn't use the computer without context menus. But Mac OS at the time was designed such that every action the user could access was visible in the regular UI, either through a button or through the menubar. When the context menu was introduced, it was initial…

By the time the context menu was ubiquitous, their mice still did not have two buttons.

Just because the feature is available somewhere else in the UI doesn't mean that the shortcut for it must be a two-handed one.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#148

Post by Chris2048 »

Chris2048 wrote: post #13
bonzini wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can't be written down as code, that's the point. I am more familiar with taste in coding and it can at best be described—that the resulting code is too subtly different from something else in the codebase, that you're masking a different bug, that you're not following what the code tells you. The good part is that while this cannot be unit tested, you can write documentation and code comments about it that tell pe…

Technically, AI is code, just very complex code. I'd say there are "simple" simple things you can do though, like take automated screenshots and detect colours for jarring colourschemes.

Must have hit some nerves.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#149

Post by usef- »

vkou wrote: post #147
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think people who didn't use Macs at the time misunderstand the whole "second mouse button"/"context menu" thing. If you were on Windows, you literally couldn't use the computer without context menus. But Mac OS at the time was designed such that every action the user could access was visible in the regular UI, either through a button or through the menubar. When the context menu was introduced, it was initial…

By the time the context menu was ubiquitous, their mice still did not have two buttons. Just because the feature is available somewhere else in the UI doesn't mean that the shortcut for it must be a two-handed one.

I've been able to plug in any two buttoned mouse for the 22 years since I first used a Mac. Their own trackpads and mice allow two finger tap to be enabled for advanced users (but on a laptop one finger can press ctrl while the other taps). I don't know how far back you're talking about when you imply no support for them.

But I remember noticing years ago a large room of tech professionals and 100% of the Windows users had mice plugged into their laptops, and zero percent of Mac users did. It was a failure of the Windows ecosystem that people needed those imho.

Re: You can't unit test for taste

#150

Post by AnthonBerg »

kalli wrote: post #107
dirkc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing out the footnote, I did not get that far. And like you say, I agree it's interesting. The footnote however does re-enforce my concern - in what other ways do we alter our behavior when it feels like we're interacting with another human?

That's fair, we can disagree. I don't think I'm personally anthropomorphising llms (I think my mental model of how they work is rough but fairly accurate), but at a population level it might be something to be concerned about (see all the ai-psychosis talk) What I was getting at with the "we" in the post is more how we talk and think about work like this. I think it is different in kind to previous projects I've done…

There's the very nice precedent of using "we" in academic literature. You wrote that piece well. (You singular wrote we plural?, haha)
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