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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

#331

Post by rglullis »

locknitpicker wrote: post #327
shakna wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where exactly is the novelty? The compounding speed. Your devs might reach a point where they have to rewrite and refactor, in a decade. Your LLM, with its higher throughput, may put you in that game breaking situation next week.

> The compounding speed. Your devs might reach a point where they have to rewrite and refactor, in a decade. I think that this is exactly why this scaremongering breaks down. If you believe the compounding speed is that greater, wouldn't you be compelled to accept that refactoring and cleaning things up is just as fast and effortless? I mean, you have a tool that writes software for you following your commands. If yo…

> wouldn't you be compelled to accept that refactoring and cleaning things up is just as fast and effortless?

No. not at all. Imagine that each unit of work (a new PR for a feature, a bugfix) builds something that is 99% close to optimal and you can only get to bring it to 100% if you spend time to really review and rewrite the "not good" part. Also, for the sake of argument, let's just say that the overall quality of the system is geometric mean of the quality score of each unit of work. The only way to get an "ideal" system is by ensuring that work done on it follows the "ideal" architecture - for whatever "ideal" means for the developers/maintainers.

You are arguing that you are saving time because you only have to write the 1% that the AI got wrong, so you'd be getting a 100x speed up. My argument is that there is not so much time because if you want 100% quality, you will have to review 100% of the code. Understanding the produced code is the time-consuming part, not typing it out.

So, the only way to have these time savings by working with coding agents is if you accept that the code generated is good enough to not have careful review. But if you do that, then each unit of work that you tell yourself "not ideal but good enough. Ship it and we refactor later" ends up bringing the overall system quality. If you have 10 of these "99% good enough" PRs, and your overall system score is already at 90%. With 50 of these, the score dives down to 60%.

This is what OP and I are talking about "compounding" issues: unless we get to a point where generated code does not need review at all, your development speed will always be bottle-necked by the human in the loop. The only way to get speed benefits from the code generation is if we remove the human in the loop, but in doing so quality will drop faster than you can fix it.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#332

Post by michaelteter »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #329
michaelteter wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are exactly right. Regardless of whether AI is better than a human or not is irrelevant if the bad, unqualified corporate leaders are making rash silver bullet decisions that cost workers jobs. The problem is much broader though - consolidation of wealth and power have enabled, frankly, idiots to be able to control how the world works - from politics to business. Greed and stupidity is eating the world. I don't s…

Written like you read my mind, honestly. I have a mere 10y of experience, but also already looking for 1 year and also considering maybe I should become a teacher. Dealing with unruly children might be nerve wracking, and the tech level will be very basic, but I have always enjoyed enabling others to understand things and see them grow and having done my part in that. Also solid well taught foundations are very impor…

I started teaching 1-on-1 on Preply (computer science, programming, and even career guidance). I work with students from age 8 to 40. I've given over 200 hours of teaching there.

But recently I got my TEFL certification. Now I teach English in Bangkok. My students are high school, and they are fantastic people. Honestly I'm happier than I would have imagined. I only wish I had more time with each student, because they're all great in one way or another. To be more transparent, my school is one where students have to be top performers and compete to get in. So I'm not dealing with students who were like me when I was young ;).

I earn a fraction of what I earned in tech in the past, but it's enough to live with a modest buffer - and still actually enjoy life. I wish I had done this long ago.

Before I took this job, I spent a week teaching "computing" to grades 1-6. For various reason that wasn't a good situation and I left, but even those kids were pretty great. It's humbling to see what some motivated 6 year olds are capable of creating.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#333

Post by Anamon »

senordevnyc wrote: post #268
phil21 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 One billion percent. I think the vast majority of the anti-AI sentiments I hear from software engineers comes down to them caring more about playing with their tools than actually solving the problem.

Many software engineers have to get things done not just once, but ensure they keep getting done, reliably. That's what 100% of vibe coders don't understand when they brag about their one-shot toy projects.

The tools we "play" with, we developed and refined over decades, and we did so for good reason. They all emerged out of real problems that needed solving in the real world. Many are born out of experiences where things went terribly wrong.

AI bros and execs drinking the kool aid are gleefully dismissing the warning signs of millions of experienced developers, and don't think that maybe, just maybe, their billions of hours of experience may mean they know some things they don't.

The landing will be brutal, and I have my popcorn ready.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#334

Post by Anamon »

munksbeer wrote: post #248
crystal_revenge wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've lived in a software bubble for so long, most software engineers have completely forgotten that the purpose of (most) software is to solve a problem . If that problem solves the problem well and reliably it doesn't matter the quality of the code. In fact, that's the entire reason we care about "quality code", because we assume that quality code is code that does what you expect well and consistently. I say this…

Exactly. Quality of code is a programming invention to make it easier to write and maintain correctly functioning applications. That is the entire purpose of "quality of code". If the end user experiences a correctly performing application, now, and in the future, they don't care at all what the code looks like. AIs could resort to a single global array of primitives and forget all about functions, and just use gotos…

That is only true for one-shot applications, though, whether written by human or machine. The reason we care about code quality is because rarely we don't have to look at code again after we first wrote it. Poor code quality makes maintenance and extension more difficult and expensive -- again, regardless of the degree of LLM support.

At least for human-written code, there's usually a thought and concept to be discovered underneath. For LLMs, one-shotting is all they know, and getting them to consider months or years of expanding and changing requirements will quickly turn into an impossible game of Twister.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#335

Post by Anamon »

danlugo92 wrote: post #280
eithed wrote: 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…

You can either adapt or survive man, coping and negation dont help, AI is here to stay and yes it does require pilots but this map would have taken you weeks to do, the AI did it in 10 hours, you can still dedicate a week to refactor. Also this is easily solved by .md spec files, this whole "bad code" cope is just FUD'

I don't think that putting a text file saying "don't make mistakes" is going to get LLM output to the point where it doesn't need professional input, guidance, review and refinement anymore. They don't make these systems more deterministic. There have even been study results showing spec files reducing prompt adherence.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#336

Post by munksbeer »

Anamon wrote: post #334
munksbeer wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Quality of code is a programming invention to make it easier to write and maintain correctly functioning applications. That is the entire purpose of "quality of code". If the end user experiences a correctly performing application, now, and in the future, they don't care at all what the code looks like. AIs could resort to a single global array of primitives and forget all about functions, and just use gotos…

That is only true for one-shot applications, though, whether written by human or machine. The reason we care about code quality is because rarely we don't have to look at code again after we first wrote it. Poor code quality makes maintenance and extension more difficult and expensive -- again, regardless of the degree of LLM support. At least for human-written code, there's usually a thought and concept to be discov…

I doubt this will turn out to be true. That seems trivially easy to solve for with correct training.

Re: What it feels like to work with Mythos

#337

Post by nstart »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #233
nstart wrote: post #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 s…

> the author had to be referencing this moment in their challenge to Fable/Mythos. Or it just swept it up in the training data given Anthropic license Reddit comments.

Right. But this is why I want to know the prompt. My hunch is that the author knew this story. But likely prompted Fable without hinting at it. And if so, the fact that Fable defaulted to the story of Samson shows that while it can impressively extend that over so many "scrolls", it also could only generate the idea based on what it had gobbled up. I'm thinking of this because given to another human, I doubt they'd only ever go for Samson's story by default.
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