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What it feels like to work with Mythos

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Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#191
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need LLM for that. You make _all_ projects low-stakes by working on green field project using (insert buzzword soup of the day) and leaving for a new green field opportunity (that requires experience with buzzword soup of the day) before the project ships.

In the LLM world you never get a chance to get paid to work on those greenfield projects because the person with the idea is churning the prototyping and discovery work themselves. If you want to get paid to work on software, you get involved after its found success and the stakes get higher. (Which assumes there are still significant areas where economies of scale reward that vs everybody just having their own DIY v…

Or economies of liability and buck passing. I suspect managers and businesses will still want to be in the game of "not my fault, supplier is working on it, we can sue them if they don't meet SLA".

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the quality of produced code and the medium A thought I have been tossing around in my head as the models get better is that it really may not matter what the code looks like. If the observed behavior of the software is good, then the software is good. If a bug, of whatever kind, can be fixed by a model on a vibe-coded codebase, then that's a fixable bug. If there are no exploitable vulnerabilities, then the code is…

The thing is that a lot of code rely on multiple layers of abstractions with their own correctness and failure states. And then you overlay the domain correctness and failure cases on top of that. But all of those correctness are imaginary. The hardware only enforce a few (and it may be buggy). The OS adds some more (and it’s buggy). The compiler/interpreter may have bugs (but that’s rarely a nuisance) and the librar…

> There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

That is so real. Brilliant !

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#193
Desperate to know what the prompt for the poem is. The idea of it felt familiar so I went down the rabbit hole and found: 14 years ago, a poem on reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditDayOf/comments/tjjw2/may_12_a...] . Nowhere near the length of the one the author shared but the same idea.

> This is from "The Cyberiad", a collection of science-fiction fairy tales by Polish author Stanislaw Lem ... In one of the stories, a robot constructor named Trurl creates a machine that writes poetry. A jealous rival named Klapaucian challenges the machine to compose "...a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism and in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

And the computer responds with:

"Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking

Some savage, spectacular suicide"

The author had to be referencing this moment in their challenge to Fable/Mythos. I'm curious to know what their exact prompt was.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#194
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they even need coders to fix these bugs? It would be an order of magnitude (at least) to ask Claude to find and fix them, and it will likely be successful. Building in the physical world has physical and time constraints that cannot be overcome, which is one of the reasons architecture (and engineering) are so important in this domain. In software development these constraints were only inherent when people we…

> I think the entire definition of technical debt has changed. I’ve been sceptical of these tools and still approach their output with caution. This very well summarizes my current thinking on the subject as well. And most of my career has been playing the role of technical debt nazi. Much to the detriment of my earning potential. Does AI make incredibly inefficient code most of the time? Yup. But it does it at light…

> I think many software engineers forget they exist to get real things done (in many cases at least) and they are a cost center for most businesses. If your end product is not selling software, very few people actually Doing the Thing(tm) will give a single solitary care about code quality or maintainability when they can just spend 30 minutes and $15 worth of tokens to fix it.

I am suprised to hear people so naive they expect their token usage to stay flat if code quality and maintainability starts falling exponentially?

What if to fix 2 bugs your LLM starts adding 50 new ones? Will you tell your customers in supports channel "sorry software is finished, if we try fixing anything, everything else might break, not worth it". Or "we can probably fix it, but our AI usage will raise so much we need to up the subscription 3 fold, you choose".

The speed at which LLM codes is only comparable to the speed at which they add garbage to your repo. If you stop caring about maintainability, you also stops caring about your AI/LLM related bills and the viability of your project past the PoC stage.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are very expensive, so the equation almost always falls against them. It's not just salary, but also safety/labor regulation, legal risk, vacations, sick time, personal conflicts, HR, benefits. Even when automation is more expensive on paper, it's generally still cheaper

That's the beauty of these AI advancements. You, a human, will have to compete against a model for the same job. If you get $100,000 per year as a SWE, and Anthropic offers a coding model for $100,000 per year (but working 24/7), then you'll have to give up all of those addons that make the fully burdened cost of the employee. Say goodbye to vacation, sick time, benefits, etc.

They will do it for far less. Once manufacturing catches up and they have the data centers built out tokens are going to be dirt cheap.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#196
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Claude's defense (and I cannot believe I'm defending it), I know no single dev who could create what it did (Concord), from a 19-page design document, in 9.5 working hours. We're gonna go back to the days where our bosses ask why we're just sitting around, but instead of saying "compiling," we'll just say, "waiting for Claude."

This. I get told things like "you can't build all that on your own?" I've had Claude poop out full feature web apps in under 30 minutes, to a spec. Was it perfect? No, but sometimes even in a simple setup phase you can burn 15 minutes to some obscure setup step that's failing. I cannot just code nonstop at 900WPM or whatever ridiculous speed, and poop out an entire full feature web app, with maybe a few bugs here or…

And honestly, it will get you the rest of the 10-20% with a little bit of yelling at it once it’s done

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#198
post #38

What I find fascinating that there is so little substance in this article about the quality of produced code and the medium. Is the code documented and tested? Is it understandable and extendable? Is it secure? What language, framework, database was used? Author mentions judgement and taste - well, is the code tasteful? Will the model rearchitecture the entire thing if I ask it to add new functionality, spending anot…

Less fascinating when you consider that this is a non-coders perspective.

It's still fascinating, but for a different reason. The "Concord" tool that got created bills itself as "Instrument-grade measurement of qualitative text. Explore in minutes, publish with honest statistics." Instrument-grade! How wonderful! That presumably means its accuracy has been ensured, and it's been carefully calibrated, right? What, nobody's ever measured or even examined the code? Well, no matter, let's go ahead and publish it and advertise it as "honest" "instrument-grade measurements."

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#199
post #123
post #61

Man, that poem it made is terrible. Like just incredibly bad. Sure it's neat that software can make an incredibly bad poem but there is enough bad poetry in the world that we don't need it.

How good can a rhyming poem about a haircut where every word starts with S be?

A whole lot better when written by a human, such as Michael Kandel. This was one of the tests of the electrobard in a story from the Cyberiad ("fables for the cybernetic age"). The key point about Samson was his suicide, which despite the obvious isn't mentioned in the six pages of this rubbish. Perhaps guardrails are throttling this corporate "fable"s ability to comment on the human condition.

The poem Kandel translated from the original Polish was, for artistic reasons, completely different. I will be impressed when machine translation can duplicate that!

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#200
post #186
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. But if I'm paying for the road (even as a taxpayer) I get angry that after a year it's full of potholes and that there are unnecessary signs warning about penguin crossing, making it cost 2 times more than it should have (and dont get me started why this road is really a highway leading to my house). I'd want certain qualities. And this article is basically = you will get a road, built quickly But yes, you a…

> And this article is basically = you will get a road, built quickly That's not how I am reading it. You will get a road built exactly to your spec , quickly. So no penguin crossings unless you ask for them. I am also not entirely sure how the pothole argument translates.

The road will be built to some specs, including features nobody asked for. If the corpus was trained for roads built in Arctic, you will get penguin crossings.
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