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AI Tribalism

nolanlawson.com

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Re: AI Tribalism

#41

Post by mediaman »

ta12345678910 wrote: post #31

The whole "it's turned political so it's bad" brush off that this article anchors itself on is crazy. I understand many Americans can't understand what it's like to be under threat, but I'm not pumping money into massive organizations that pay federal American taxes. And seriously, f*ck you for insinuating I should.

It is, in fact, not crazy, because none of this is predicated on using a specific vendor.

Many of these techniques can also work with Chinese LLMs like Qwen served by your inference provider of choice. It's about the harness that they work in, gated by a certain quality bar of LLM.

Taking a discussion about harnesses and stochastic token generators and forcing it into a discussion of American imperialism is making a topic political that is not inherently political, and is exactly the sort of aggressive, cussing tribalistic attitude the article is about.

Re: AI Tribalism

#42

Post by mycall »

mkozlows wrote: post #23
lins1909 wrote: post #20

What if I just enjoy how I work at the moment and don't really care about this stuff? Why do I _have_ to give it a go? Why don't LLM evangelists accept this as an option? Choosing not to use AI agents is maybe the only tool position I feel I've had to defend or justify in over a decade of doing this, and it's so bizarre to me. It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and…

Nobody pushed you to use git when you were comfortable with svn? Nobody pushed you to use Docker when you were comfortable running bare metal? Nobody pushed you to write unit tests when you were comfortable not? Nobody pushed you to use CSS for layout when you were happy using tables? Some of those are before your time, but: The only time you don't get pushed to use new technologies is when a) nothing is changing and…

> Otherwise, everyone always gets pushed into using the new thing when it's good.

and then there is AS/400 and all the COBOL still in use which AI doesn't want to touch.

Re: AI Tribalism

#43

Post by Aeolun »

nateburke wrote: post #22

where are the productivity gains in GDP? where are the websites that are lightning fast, where speed and features and ads have been magically optimized by ai, and things feel fast like 2001 google.com fast why does customer service still SUCK?

Because companies now develop shitty websites faster, they don’t magically get better.

Re: AI Tribalism

#44

Post by mkozlows »

AstroBen wrote: post #29
mkozlows wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, your employer will pay it. $1K/month is cheap for your employer. But there is an interesting point about what it does to hobby dev. If it takes real money just to screw around for fun on your own, it's kinda like going back to the old days when you needed to have an account on a big university system to do anything with Unix.

Open source software Small bootstrapped startups Are more what I had in mind. Of course an established company can pay it. I don't like the idea of a world where all software is backed by big companies

I'm not too worried about startups: We used to have startups when they had to buy expensive physical servers and pay for business-class T1 connections and rent offices and all that. The idea that you can start a company with $20 and a dream is relatively new, and honestly a little bit of friction might be good.

But yeah, I share your concern about open source and hobby projects. My hope would be that you get free tiers that are aimed at hobby/non-profit/etc stuff, but who knows.

Re: AI Tribalism

#45

Post by akomtu »

rudedogg wrote: post #7

This is kind of where I'm at. I don't think everything is for certain though. I think it's 50/50 on whether Anthropic/whoever figures out how to turn them into more than a boilerplate generator. The imprecision of LLMs is real, and a serious problem. And I think a lot of the engineering improvements (little s-curve gains or whatever) have caused more and more of these. Every step or improvement has some randomness/lo…

LLM is like a chef that cooks amazing meals in no time, but his meals often contain small pieces of broken glass.

Re: AI Tribalism

#46

Post by oytis »

badsectoracula wrote: post #35

> “What about security?” [..] “What about performance?” [..] “What about accessibility?” TBH i'm fine with AI but my main concern isn't any of these issues (even if they suck now -though supposedly Claude Code doesn't- they can get better in the future). My main concern, by far , is control and availability. I do not mind using some AI, but i do mind using AI that runs on someone else's computer and isn't under my co…

Absolutely. I'm gonna go full agentic coding the day I can do it with open-weight models on my machine. Until then feeding someone else's models with more data on how to replace me in particular sounds insane to me.

Re: AI Tribalism

#47

Post by AstroBen »

onion2k wrote: post #39
AstroBen wrote: post #8

> The models don’t have to get better, the costs don’t have to come down (heck, they could even double and it’d still be worth it) What worries me about this is that it might end up putting up a barrier for those that can't afford it. What do things look like if models cost $1000 or more a month and genuinely provide 3x productivity improvements?

$1000 a month to make someone whose being $10,000 a month even 1.5x more productive is well worth the price.

Today we have open source projects that can compete with proprietary ones just because people without initial funding had the ability to make it competitive

You can bootstrap something with yourself and a friend with some hard work and intelligence

This is available to people all over the world, even those in countries where $1000 is a months salary

Microsoft and their employees will be fine, yeah. That's not who I'm thinking about

Re: AI Tribalism

#48

Post by danaris »

mkozlows wrote: post #23
lins1909 wrote: post #20

What if I just enjoy how I work at the moment and don't really care about this stuff? Why do I _have_ to give it a go? Why don't LLM evangelists accept this as an option? Choosing not to use AI agents is maybe the only tool position I feel I've had to defend or justify in over a decade of doing this, and it's so bizarre to me. It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and…

Nobody pushed you to use git when you were comfortable with svn? Nobody pushed you to use Docker when you were comfortable running bare metal? Nobody pushed you to write unit tests when you were comfortable not? Nobody pushed you to use CSS for layout when you were happy using tables? Some of those are before your time, but: The only time you don't get pushed to use new technologies is when a) nothing is changing and…

Git had obvious benefits over svn.

Docker has obvious benefits over bare metal.

Etc.

My own experiences with LLMs have shown them to be entertaining, and often entertainingly wrong. I haven't been working on a project I've felt comfortable handing over to Microsoft for them to train Copilot on, and the testimonials I've seen from people who've used it are mixed enough that I don't feel like it's worth the drawbacks to take that risk.

And...sure, some people have to be pushed into using new things. Some people still like using vim to write C code, and that's fine for them. But I never saw this level of resistance to git, Docker, unit tests, or CSS.

Re: AI Tribalism

#49

Post by mkozlows »

danaris wrote: post #48
mkozlows wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody pushed you to use git when you were comfortable with svn? Nobody pushed you to use Docker when you were comfortable running bare metal? Nobody pushed you to write unit tests when you were comfortable not? Nobody pushed you to use CSS for layout when you were happy using tables? Some of those are before your time, but: The only time you don't get pushed to use new technologies is when a) nothing is changing and…

Git had obvious benefits over svn. Docker has obvious benefits over bare metal. Etc. My own experiences with LLMs have shown them to be entertaining, and often entertainingly wrong. I haven't been working on a project I've felt comfortable handing over to Microsoft for them to train Copilot on, and the testimonials I've seen from people who've used it are mixed enough that I don't feel like it's worth the drawbacks t…

The resistance to those things was less angry, but it was there. giveupandusetables dot com no longer exists, but you can find plenty of chin-stroking blog posts about it. It was a big argument in the late aughts!

Re: AI Tribalism

#50

Post by Yodel0914 »

cdata wrote: post #27

AI has pushed me to arrive at an epiphany: new technology is good if it helps me spend more time doing things that I enjoy doing; it's bad if it doesn't; it's worse if I end up spending more time doing things that I don't enjoy. AI has increased the sheer volume of code we are producing per hour (and probably also the amount of energy spent per unit of code). But, it hasn't spared me or anyone I know the cost of test…

I agree. I’m using copilot more and more as it gets better and better, but it is getting better at the fun stuff and leaves me to do the less fun stuff. I’m in a role where I need to review code across multiple teams, and as their output is increasing, so is my review load. The biggest issue is that the people who lean on copilot the most are the least skilled at writing/reviewing code in the first place, so not only do I have more to review, it’s worse(1).

My medium term concern is that the tasks where we want a human in the loop (esp review) are predicated on skills that come from actually writing code. If LLMs stagnate, in a generation we’re not going to have anyone who grew up writing code.

1: not that LLMs write objectively bad code, but it doesn’t follow our standards and patterns. Like, we have an internal library of common UI components and CSS, but the LLM will pump out custom stuff.

There is some stuff that we can pick up with analysers and fail the build, but a lot of things just come down to taste and corporate knowledge.

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