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Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

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Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#41

Post by h3lp »

gtowey wrote: post #5

LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture -- that the real work of good software is balancing a hundred different constraints in a way that produces the optimal result for the humans who use it. It's not all that different from the state of big corp software today! Large organizations with layers of management tend to lose all abiliy to keep a consistent strategy. They tend to go all in o…

Greg mentions discipline and vision as determinants of successful software, which is correct but I think he misses another aspect of vision: the ability to attract and crystallize a community around their project. Arguably, most successful softwares thrive in the long term because they have a team of people that inspire each other, fill in with complementary talents, and provide continuity.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#42

Post by bigstrat2003 »

pixl97 wrote: post #17
gtowey wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I do tend to believe you, what evidence based data do you have to prove this is true? IMO the onus is to prove that they can be strategic. Otherwise you're asking me to prove a negative.

Saying the tiger has to prove it can eat you is not a great strategy to survive a tiger attack.

Well so far the tiger faceplants in an embarrassing fashion every time it tries to eat someone. So I'm not really worried about that.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#43

Post by bigstrat2003 »

Terr_ wrote: post #28
pixl97 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs can't be strategic because they do not understand the big picture While I do tend to believe you, what evidence based data do you have to prove this is true?

Prompt-injection in all its forms. If the hyper-mad-libs machine doesn't reliably "understand" and model the difference between internal and external words, how can we trust them to model fancier stuff?

We can't even trust LLMs to get basic logic right, or even the language syntax sometimes. They reliably generate code worse than a human would write, and have zero reasoning ability. Anyone who thinks they can model something complicated is either uncritically absorbing hype or has a financial stake in convincing people of the hype.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#44

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

switchbak wrote: post #34
butILoveLife wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"Im not even sure we will need maintain software" (sic) - I'm not sure what your specific background is, but with a statement like that you lose all legitimacy to me.

Yes, I'd like to hear more of their background, because they seem very naive about writing software, adding to it, testing it, etc.

You can't just whip up a replacement for salesforce using claude code. Who's going to fix the bugs, who is going to have tests, manage performance testing? People will still pay for software that is tested and performant. I could get a replacement for an online spreadsheet, google docs like thing. Suppose you tell it to copy the google docs or whatever programming language. You won't know if it's buggy because you won't haev the same test coverage. You'll never know about bugs that took a long time to reveal in some combination of features.

You can create a new system with a few features together to do something. Again, not tested, not perf tested, isn't away of a compiler bug you had to work around.

But lots of simple things can be claude coded and replaced. Say something that took a photo of a person, centered it, then say put some kind of log on the pic. Something you paid $5 a month to do.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#45

Post by pixl97 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #42
pixl97 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying the tiger has to prove it can eat you is not a great strategy to survive a tiger attack.

Well so far the tiger faceplants in an embarrassing fashion every time it tries to eat someone. So I'm not really worried about that.

Gary Marcus: "LLMs will never be able to a..... wait, what do you mean they can already do that?"

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#46

Post by allreduce »

Honestly I feel like something important was yanked from under my feet. Computers were always an escape for me, then a starting career, something that helped me get started in life. Wow, those things I learned while spending nights making things move on the computer are actually worth something. And now a lot of it is just gone, worthless, right when I started having a bit of success. That wasn't supposed to happen.

Not that I can complain much, worse things have happened to better people bla bla. But it's disorienting. I still have non-automatable skills and enjoy learning, but who says they are not going to come up with Claude Opus 4.9 or something and turns out it can do that too, ha ha.

How is a young person supposed to establish themselves in this new world?

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#47

Post by vonneumannstan »

gtowey wrote: post #24
vonneumannstan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Task Time horizons are improving exponentially with doubling times around 4 months per METR. At what timescale would you accept that they "can be strategic"? Theres little reason to think they wont be at multi week or month time horizons very soon. Do you need to be strategic to complete multi month tasks?

Can an LLM give you an upfront estimate that a task will take multiple months? Can it decide intelligently what it would have to change if you said "do what you can to have it ready in half the time?"

>Can an LLM give you an upfront estimate that a task will take multiple months?

>Can it decide intelligently what it would have to change if you said "do what you can to have it ready in half the time?"

Do you think ChatGPT 5.2 Pro can't estimate how long a task might take? Do you think that estimate would necessarily be worse than the estimates, which are notoriously poor, coming from human engineers?

But you can still answer my question. When an LLM can complete a task that takes a person N months or years, is it capable of being strategic?

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#48

Post by toraway »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #40
switchbak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Im not even sure we will need maintain software" (sic) - I'm not sure what your specific background is, but with a statement like that you lose all legitimacy to me.

New account... singing the praises of how AI "changed everything" in the past few weeks... my money is on this being a shill.

They were a skeptic 3 weeks ago... fast forward today and they've oriented their company's strategy around Opus 4.6 agents and vibe-coding.

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#49

Post by cc-d »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #31
cc-d wrote: post #25

Are you the wallflower from the legendary fugg efnet rap video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evBderwVKKE

This song bangs, looping this all day. What a throwback. Reminds me of ytcracker/digitalgangster days. Also reminds me of Das Racist. Thanks for posting this lol. Love that grime-ish electro beat. Can you email me? Would love to chat/get more tunes from you.

Sure what is your email? Mine is ccarterdev@gmail.com I watch this comment more closely though :)

Mob currently controls my email

Re: Greg Knauss Is Losing Himself

#50

Post by layla5alive »

toraway wrote: post #48
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New account... singing the praises of how AI "changed everything" in the past few weeks... my money is on this being a shill.

They were a skeptic 3 weeks ago... fast forward today and they've oriented their company's strategy around Opus 4.6 agents and vibe-coding.

This would be funny if it were not exactly what appears to be happening where I work...
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