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My AI Adoption Journey

mitchellh.com

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Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#261

Post by dbtablesorrows »

LiamPowell wrote: post #126
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…

> Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. In my experience this isn't true. People just assume their code is wrong and mess with it until they inadvertently do something that works around the bug. I've personally reported 17 bugs in GCC over the last 2 years and there are currently 1241 open wrong-code bugs. Here's an example of a simple to understand bug (not…

the fact that the bug tracker exists is proving GP's point.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#262

Post by ubercow13 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #149
ianm218 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there something off about calling predictions about the future, that aren’t possible with current tech, hype? Like people predicted AI agents would be this huge change, they were called hype since earlier models were so unreliable, and now they are mostly right as ai agents work like a mid level engineer. And clearly super human in some areas.

> ai agents work like a mid level engineer They do not. > And clearly super human in some areas. Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology". Lay off the hype pills.

>Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology".

Uh, yes they are? That's why they were revolutionary technologies!

It's hard to see why a bike that isn't superhuman would even make sense? Being superhuman in at least some aspect really seems like the bare minimum for a technology to be worth adopting.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#263

Post by rootnod3 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #116
keyle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Architects went from drawing everything on paper, to using CAD products over a generation. That's a lot of years! They're still called architects. Our tooling just had a refresh in less than 3 years and it leaves heads spinning. People are confused, fighting for or against it. Torn even between 2025 to 2026. I know I was. People need a way to describe it from 'agentic coding' to 'vibe coding' to 'modern AI assisted s…

"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…

Absolutely this. I am tired of that trope.

Or the argument that "well, at some point we can come up with a prompt language that does exactly what you want and you just give it a detailed spec." A detailed spec is called code. It's the most round-about way to make a programming language that even then is still not deterministic at best.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#264

Post by lebuin »

jen729w wrote: post #153
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?" Compilers will produce working output given working input literally 100% of my time in my career. I've never personally found a compiler bug. Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. That is to say, I would under no circumstances blindly follow the output of an LLM I asked to make soup. While I have, every day of…

> Meanwhile AI can't be trusted to give me a recipe for potato soup. Because there isn’t a canonical recipe for potato soup.

There's also no canonical way to write software, so in that sense generating code is more similar to coming up with a potato soup recipe than compiling code.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#265

Post by direwolf20 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #167
bandrami wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, still waiting for something to ship before I form a judgement on that

Claude Code is made with Anthropic's models and is very commercially successful.

Since they started doing that it's gained a lot of bugs.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#266

Post by blibble »

bilbo0s wrote: post #151
blibble wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where this analogy breaks down is that the work you’re describing is done by Professional Engineers that have strict licensing and are (criminally) liable for the end result of the plans they approve. there are plenty of software engineers that work in regulated industries, with individual licensing, criminal liability, and the ability to be struck off and banned from the industry by the regulator ... such as mysel…

Sure. But no one stops you from writing software again. It's not that PE's can't design or review buildings in whatever city the egregious failure happened. It's that PE's can't design or review buildings at all in any city after an egregious failure. It's not that PE's can't design or review hospital building designs because one of their hospital designs went so egregiously sideways. It's that PE's can't design or r…

> Consequences for me messing up are far less severe than the consequences for a PE messing up.

if I approve a bad release that leads to an egregious failure, for me it's a prison sentence and unlimited fines

in addition to being struck off and banned from the industry

> That's a whole different ball game.

if you say so

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#267

Post by direwolf20 »

pixl97 wrote: post #89
ricardobeat wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No harm meant, but your writing is very reminiscent of an LLM. It is great actually, there is just something about it - "it wasn't.. it was", "it stopped being.. and started". Claude and ChatGPT seem to love these juxtapositions. The triplets on every other sentence. I think you are a couple em-dashes away from being accused of being a bot. These patterns seem to be picking up speed in the general population; makes t…

>makes the human race seem quite easily hackable. If the human race were not hackable then society would not exist, we'd be the unchanging crocodiles of the last few hundred million years. Have you ever found yourself speaking a meme? Had a catchy toon repeating in your head? Started spouting nation state level propaganda? Found yourself in crowd trying to burn a witch at the stake? Hacking the flow of human thought…

How do I hack the human population to give me money, and simultaneously, hack law enforcement to not arrest me?

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#268

Post by lelanthran »

snayan wrote: post #257
lelanthran wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you suggesting that people should need to acquire some sort of credential to be allowed to code? No, I am saying that you are comparing professional $FOO practitioners to professional $BAR practitioners, but it's not a valid comparison because one of those has review and safety built into the process, and the other does not. You can't use the assertion "We currently allow $FOO practitioners to use every single…

Thanks brother. I flew half way around the world yesterday and am jetlagged as fuck from a 12 hour time change. I'm sorry, my brain apparently shut off, but I follow now. Was out to lunch.

> Thanks brother. I flew half way around the world yesterday and am jetlagged as fuck from a 12 hour time change. I'm sorry, my brain apparently shut off, but I follow now. Was out to lunch.

You know, this was a very civilised discussion; below I've got someone throwing snide remarks my way for some claims I made. You just factually reconfirmed and re-verified until I clarified my PoV.

You're a very pleasant person to argue with.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#269

Post by rootnod3 »

sampullman wrote: post #242
LiamPowell wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that LLMs are at a point today where we can blindly trust their outputs in most applications, I just don't think that 100% correct output is necessarily a requirement for that. What it needs to be is correct often enough that the cost of reviewing the output far outweighs the average cost of any errors in the output, just like with a compiler. This even applies to human written code and human mistakes…

If natural language is used to specify work to the LLM, how can the output ever be trusted? You'll always need to make sure the program does what you want, rather than what you said.

Just create a very specific and very detailed prompt that is so specific that it starts including instructions and you came up with the most expensive programming language.

Re: My AI Adoption Journey

#270

Post by butterNaN »

> having an agent running at all times

This gave me a physical flinch. Perhaps this is unfounded, but all this makes me think of is this becoming the norm, millions of people doing this, and us cooking our planet out much faster than predicted.

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