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Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

rajnandan.com

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Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#151

Post by anonyfox »

wavemode wrote: post #21
rvz wrote: post #15

Well, nope. There are three real moats left in software: Distribution, Data (Proprietary) and Iteration Speed. Very successful companies have all three: Stripe, Meta, Google, Amazon.

The moat of all four of those companies is simply infrastructure, partnerships, and plain-old name recognition. Data and iteration speed aren't moats. I don't know what you mean by "distribution".

In fact proprietary data IS a moat in certain circumstances. Example: German law, in order to create anything proper a lawyer NEEDS to read up specific commentary („Beck“) that requires a paid access and the data never was party of any LLM corpus since it only exists behind a paywall and otherwise is defended by lawyers. Therefore any german legal advice given from chatbots always (>80%) is flat out wrong even harmful at times if things would go to court.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#152

Post by crystal_revenge »

lamasery wrote: post #83
crystal_revenge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... for AI to be used effectively. I'm continually fascinated by the huge differences in individual ability to produce successful results with AI. I always assumed that one of the benefits of AI was "anyone can do this". Then I realized a lot of people I interact with don't really understand the problem they're trying to solve all that well, and have some irrational belief that they can get AI to brute force their…

"AI" tools I've got at work (and am mandated to use, complete with usage tracking) aren't a wide-open field of options like what someone experimenting on their own time might have, so I'm stuck with whatever they give me. The projects are brown-field, integrate with obscure industry-specific systems, are heavy with access-control blockers, are already in-flight with near-term feature completion expectations that leav…

> The projects are brown-field, integrate with obscure industry-specific systems, are heavy with access-control blockers

These are cases where I've seen agentic solutions perform the best. My most successful and high impact projects have been at work, getting multiple "obscure industry-specific systems" talking to each other in ways that unblocks an incredible amount of project work.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#153

Post by koe123 »

andai wrote: post #52
danielvaughn wrote: post #34

Disagree with the overall argument. Human effort is still a moat. I've been spending the past couple of months creating a codebase that is almost entirely AI-generated. I've gotten way further than I would have otherwise at this pace, but it was still a lot of effort, and I still wasted time going down rabbit holes on features that didn't work out. There's some truth in there that judgement is as important as ever, t…

I think you're missing the point. Effort is a moat now because centaurs (human+AI) still beat AIs, but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed). The goal is to replicate human labor, and they're closing that gap. Once they do (maybe decades, but probably will happen), then only that "special something" will remain. Taste, vision... We shall all become Rick Rubins. Until 2045, when they ship Ru…

I imagine that the gap with current work can largely be closed, but are we really confident that this will hold with the new work that pops up? Increasingly I think we’re lacking imagination as to what work can be in a post AI world. I.e. could an abacus wielder imagine all the post computer jobs?

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#154

Post by crystal_revenge »

pegasus wrote: post #84
crystal_revenge wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... for AI to be used effectively. I'm continually fascinated by the huge differences in individual ability to produce successful results with AI. I always assumed that one of the benefits of AI was "anyone can do this". Then I realized a lot of people I interact with don't really understand the problem they're trying to solve all that well, and have some irrational belief that they can get AI to brute force their…

> graded live coding examples for interviews Yeah, for those you can just relax and trust the vibes. It's for complex software projects you need those software engineering chops, otherwise you end up with a intractable mess.

If it's for a complex software project the first question you need to ask is "does this really need to be software at all?"

Honestly this is where most traditional engineers get stuck. They keep attacking the old problem with new tools and being frustrated. I agree that agents are not a great way to build "complex software projects" but I think the problem space that is best solved by a "complex software project" is rapidly shrinking.

I've had multiple vendors try to sell my team a product that we can build the core functionality of ourselves in an afternoon. We don't need that functionality to scale to multiple users, server a variety of needs, be adaptable to new use cases: we're not planning to build a SaaS company with it, we just need a simple problem solved.

But these comments are a treasure trove of anecdotes proving exactly my point.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#156

Post by pegasus »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #103
pegasus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that gap gets smaller every year (and will ostensibly be closed) As long as you build software for humans (and all software we build is for humans, ultimately), you'll need humans at the helm to steer the ship towards a human-friendly solution.

The thing is, do humans _need_ most software? The less surfaces that need to interact with humans, the less you need humans in the loop to design those surfaces. In a hypothetical world where maybe some AI agents or assistants do the vast majority of random tasks for you, does it matter how pleasing the doordash website looks to you? If anything, it should look "good" to an ai agent so that its easier to navigate. An…

> do humans _need_ most software?

Yes, if it's not redundant software. The ultimate utility is to a human. Sure, at some point humans stopped writing assembly language and employed a compiler instead, so the abstraction level and interfaces change, but it's all still there to serve humans.

To use your example, do you think humans will want to interact with AI agents using a chat interface only? For most tasks humans use computers today, that would be very unwieldy. So the UI will migrate from the website to the AI agent interface. It all transforms, becoming more powerful (hopefully!), but won't go away. And just how the advent of compilers led to an increase of programmers in the world, so will AI agents. This is connected with Javon's paradox as well.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#158

Post by jryio »

No one was discussing 'taste' until pg's article.

After a decade with tech people I can confidently say that most of them have zero taste because they have little to no exposure to the world outside of their bubble.

It's frankly pathetic to see how techno-optimists think that innovations like driverless cars will simply be happy pills to be swallowed by the masses who make a fractional amount of money to them.

As a species we have quite literally killed each other for less.

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#159

Post by BeetleB »

everybodyknows wrote: post #125
johnfn wrote: post #49

It is profoundly ironic that this article is AI generated.

Trying to bring my nose for AI up to standard -- care to share what you're smelling? For me it's: - Short, declarative sentences, stating grandiose yet vague claims, in a high school vocabulary: "Taste becomes useful when it moves from vibe to diagnosis." - Absence of references (let alone web links) to real-world examples. - Em-dashes, gone. No semicolons, but 23 full colons. As instructed by prompt?

I almost never use semicolons, and heavily use colons and hyphens (AKA em-dashes - not hyphenated words).

TIL I'm an AI :-)

Re: Taste in the age of AI and LLMs

#160

Post by Shog9 »

theowaway213456 wrote: post #142
Jensson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still need effort, its not only taste. "Only" means you can do it with no effort.

In other words, it requires a tremendous amount of effort to fully communicate your tastes to the AI. Not everybody wants to expend the time or mental effort doing this! (Once we have more direct brain/computer interfaces, this effort will go down, but I expect it will not be eliminated fully)

This is the second time in two days I've seen a subthread here with folks seemingly debating whether or not defining and communicating requirements counts as work if the target of those requirements is an LLM system.

I'm confused as to why this is even a question. We used to call this "systems analysis" and it was like... a whole-ass career. LLMs seem to be remarkably capable of using the output, but they're not even close to the first software systems sold as being able to take requirements and turn them into working code (for various definitions of "requirements" and "working").

I'm also skeptical that direct brain interfaces would make this any less work; I don't think "typing" or "english" are the major barriers here, anymore than "drafting" is the major barrier to folks designing their own cars and houses... Any fool thinks they know what they need!

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