41–50 of 1001 posts
"they’re smarter than me" feels like false humility and an attempt to make the medicine go down better. 1. Thomas is obviously very smart. 2. To be what we think of as "smart" is to be in touch with reality, which includes testing AI systems for yourself and recognizing their incredible power.
Thomas is the smartest at other things.
What this boils down to is an argument for slop. Yeah, who cares about the quality, the mediocrity, the craft... get the slop, push it in, call it done. It mostly works in the golden path, it's about 6 or 7 orders of magnitude slower than hand-written software but that's ok, just buy more AWS resources, bill the client, whatever. I can maybe even see that point in some niches, like outsourcing or contracting where yo…
Can someone explain to me what this means? > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. ... Is this what people are really doing? Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit? If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do? I've bee…
Depending on the task it works really well.
But if you're actively avoiding everything related to it, you might find yourself in a position where you're suddenly being left in the dust. Maybe not now, not next month, not next year, but who some time in the future. The models really are improving fast!
I've talked with devs that (claim they) haven't touched a model since ChatGPT was released - because it didn't live up to their expectations, and they just concluded it was a big nothingburger.
Even though I don't follow the development religiously anymore, I do try to get acquainted with new releases every 3 months or so.
I hate the term "vibe coding", but I personally know non-tech people that have vibe coded products / apps, shipped them, and make more money in sales than what most "legit" coders are making. These would be the same "idea people" that previously were looking for a coder to do all the heavy lifting. Something is changing, that's for sure.
So, yeah, don't sleepwalk through it.
Can someone explain to me what this means? > People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results. ... Is this what people are really doing? Who is just turning AI loose to modify things as it sees fit? If I'm not directing the work, how does it even know what to do? I've bee…
I think it's really hard to undersell how important agents are.
We have an intuition for LLMs as a function blob -> blob (really, token -> token, but whatever), and the limitations of such a function, ping-ponging around in its own state space, like a billion monkeys writing plays.
But you can also get go blob -> json, and json -> tool-call -> blob. The json->tool interaction isn't stochastic; it's simple systems code (the LLM could indeed screw up the JSON, since that process is stochastic --- but it doesn't matter, because the agent isn't stochastic and won't accept it, and the LLM will just do it over). The json->tool-call->blob process is entirely fixed system code --- and simple code, at that.
Doing this grounds the code generation process. It has a directed stochastic structure, and a closed loop.
Damn. Well I'll spend a few bucks trying it out and I'll ask my employer if they're okay with me using agents on company time, but But I'm not thrilled about centralized, paid tools. I came into software during a huge FOSS boom. Like a huge do it yourself, host it yourself, Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, all the power to all the people, borderline anarchist communist boom. I don't want it to be like other ind…
How far away are we from that? How many RYX 50s do I need?
This is a serious question btw.
....for the vast majority of my career, anyone who suggested doing this - much less letting code that no one in the world (much less the company) truly understands the logic flow of do this - would be fired.
tptacek, curious question: what agent / stack do you currently use?