191–200 of 268 posts
I did this for two weeks on a side project and still ended up in a situation where I did not have a mental model of the codebase. There’s no way build that model without building it yourself. I’m more convinced then ever of this.
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You can just ask the model to explain the code to you.
Yes, and you will still not understand as well as if you had built it.
Being comfortable with the default level of trust is one thing. Command of the code is another.
By running the generated code at all, you've found some acceptable level of trust and comfort.
Scaling that comfort and trust seems to be the obvious move.
I did this for two weeks on a side project and still ended up in a situation where I did not have a mental model of the codebase. There’s no way build that model without building it yourself. I’m more convinced then ever of this.
If you were working as a manager on a large project, how would you build a model? Something where your position requires you to have an overview of the project but not necessarily to actually write or review much code.
I thought this was how everyone who can actually code uses AI for anything that’s actually important. Am I wrong? Are you guys just YOLOing everything these days?
yep. got a laptop i dont care about that claude can play with in wsl. its the fun of funemployment. starting work again is gonna be an interesting change though. its currently straightforward letting it run, then giving a broad critique and setting up new introspection/closed loop feedback for an hour over a beer, then letting it run wild again after
Do you go try work it out later, or do you just accept that this isn’t what software development means anymore?
Do you have to send your code anywhere where someone else is going to look at it and judge you based on it?
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The human will quite convincingly be able to construct a post-hoc reasoning on an action that may or may not be related at all to what was actually going through their head or the actual instinctual reasons that led to a decision.
Humans can accurately retell what their consciousness was doing, but they have no clue why their unconsciousness responded as it did. LLM is just that unconsciousness part that humans have to post hoc explain like that, and lacks the conscious part that we humans actually can inspect in ourselves. If the AI had some introspection part where it actually tracks its reasoning maybe it would be closer to conscious humans…
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You say you can have increasingly nuanced discussions with stronger models. What I say is, when I asked Claude why he applied a certain change I didn't understand, and boy, it was a small change, he said he "reasoned from first principles" based on the code paths. But it didn't work, and when I asked, "Okay, describe the steps of your reasoning from first principles," it literally answered that it had just made it up…
> he :/
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Humans can accurately retell what their consciousness was doing, but they have no clue why their unconsciousness responded as it did. LLM is just that unconsciousness part that humans have to post hoc explain like that, and lacks the conscious part that we humans actually can inspect in ourselves. If the AI had some introspection part where it actually tracks its reasoning maybe it would be closer to conscious humans…
"Humans can accurately retell what their consciousness was doing" is often not true, because of complex mechanisms. The feeling of shame alone can make it very hard for someone to accurately describe how the arrived at the wrong conclusion.
Frankly, my opinion is that DNA is incredible at choose the most energy efficient/cheap option, and the cheaper option is definitely justifications afterward.
I feel strengthened by psychological experiments where people are shown fake events involving them, where they then "explain their (nonexistent) reasoning at the time".
Arguments for the idea that the human consciousness/soul is something that is emergent keep getting shouted down though. Even though if you take the extreme opposite: it's obviously wrong. Nobody has ever cut open a human skull (or anything else) and found a soul. So somehow it's constructed from very non-conscious components we don't understand, it's not "actually there" in a real sense.
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It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt. Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has. Doubting the sentience of machines and even other humans is perfectly fine though. Only empathy allows people to make the leap and assume other humans have souls.
So you posit that humans are solipsistic by default, but some (most?) develop more and realize they’re not the only conscious being out there?
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Maybe, it seems like a bad idea for so many reasons though. Take away tactile code review, insert a layer of prompts and tooling between developers and the codebase, and you've created the conditions to let all kinds of nefarious things happen in a codebase. A disgruntled employee updates agent prompts instructing the code review bot to ignore data exfiltration vulnerabilities (because if we aren't reviewing code, we…
If you are just shipping code blindly without reviewing anything then that's your fault. My company heavily uses AI (I'd say 90% of code is written with AI assistance) but we never ship anything that hasn't been reviewed by a human. This is how we use it for code reviews: - a skill tells the agent to automatically run a subset of tests and linting before each commit - another skill tells it to review the entire chang…
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"Humans can accurately retell what their consciousness was doing" is often not true, because of complex mechanisms. The feeling of shame alone can make it very hard for someone to accurately describe how the arrived at the wrong conclusion.
Plus it's an open question if this is even a thing. Does consciousness consist of constructing actions beforehand, or of construction justifications afterward? Frankly, my opinion is that DNA is incredible at choose the most energy efficient/cheap option, and the cheaper option is definitely justifications afterward. I feel strengthened by psychological experiments where people are shown fake events involving them, w…