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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#411

Post by chrisjj »

fhub wrote: post #79
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents. Even with full context, wr…

> He is likely working on

... a laundry list phone app.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#412

Post by gilbetron »

xnorswap wrote: post #403
laichzeit0 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely nuts, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I could list several anecdotes here where Claude has solved issues for me in an autonomous way that (for someone with 17 years of software development, from embedded devices to enterprise software) would have taken me hours if not days. To the nay sayers... good luck. No group of people's opinions matter at all. The market will decide.

I wonder if the parent comments remark is a communication failure or pedantry gone wrong, because like you, claude-code is out there solving real problems and finding and fixing defects. A large quantity of bugs as raised are now fixed by claude automatically from just the reports as written. Everything is human reviewed and sometimes it fixes it in ways I don't approve, and it can be guided. It has an astonishing ca…

I can't control random internet people, but within my personal and professional life, I see the effective pattern of comparing prompts/contexts/harnesses to figure out why some are more effective than others (in fact tooling is being developed in the AI industry as a whole to do so, claude even added the "insights" command).

I feel that many people that don't find AI useful are doing things like, "Are there any bugs in this software?" rather than developing the appropriate harness to enable the AI to function effectively.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#413

Post by boca_honey »

ozgung wrote: post #388

For some reason AIs love to generate "Not X, but Y", "Not only X, but Y" sentences — It's as if they are template-based.

Yeah, as someone said before, that's the em dash of 2026. btw I also find em dashes very useful and now I can't use them because of that meme. It's good to see a person using one (asuming you're a person).

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#414

Post by qudat »

margorczynski wrote: post #341
qudat wrote: post #108

It’s a tool like a linter. It’s a fancy tool, but calling it anything more than a tool is hype

Did you ever you the newest LLMs with a harness? Because I usually hear this kind of talk from people whose most recent interaction was with GPT-4o copy-pasting code into the chat window. Maybe I'm biased but I don't buy someone truly thinking that "it's just a tool like a linter" after using it on non-trivial stuff.

I use it pretty extensively. The reason why it's a tool is because it cannot work without an SWE running it. You have to prompt it and re-prompt it. We are doing a lot of the heavy lifting with code agents that people hyping it are ignoring. Sure, as a non-swe, you can vibe a project from zero-to-proto, but that's not going to happen in an enterprise environment, certainly not without extensive QA/Code review.

Just take a look at the openclaw codebase and tell me you want to maintain that 500k loc project in the long-term. I predict that project will be dead within 6 months.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#415

Post by ottah »

doublerabbit wrote: post #338
ottah wrote: post #87

Make centaurs, not unicorns. The human is almost always going to be the strongest element in the loop, and the most efficient. Augmenting human skill will always outperform present day SOTA AI systems (assuming a competent human).

What about centaur unicorns? A cenintaunicorn?

You go figure out what that means.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#416

Post by ilaksh »

Who is actually trying to use a fully autonomous AI employee right now?

Isn't everyone using agentic copilots or workflows with agent loops in them?

It seems that they are arguing against doing something that almost no one is doing yet.

But actually the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the fully autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime.

Many people have been working on versions of these things for awhile. But again for actual work 99% are using copilots or workflows with well-defined agent loops nodes still. Far as I know.

As a side note I have found that a supervisor agent with a checklist can fire off subtasks and that works about as well as a workflow defined in code.

But anyway, what's holding back the AI Employee are things like really effective long term context and memory management and some level of interface generality like browser or computer use and voice. Computer use makes context management even more difficult. And another aspect is token cost.

But I assume within the next 9 months or so, more and more people will be figuring out how to build agents that write their own workflows, manage their own limited context and memory effectively across Zoom meetings desktops and ssh sessions, etc.

This will likely be a featureset from the model providers themselves. Actually it may leverage continual learning abilities baked into the model architecture itself. I doubt that is a full year away.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#417

Post by throwway120385 »

LoganDark wrote: post #301
nielsole wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> moreso than humans Citation needed.

Much of the space of artificial intelligence is based on a goal of a general reasoning machine comparable to the reasoning of a human. There are many subfields that are less concerned with this, but in practice, artificial intelligence is perceived to have that goal. I am sure the output of current frontier models is convincing enough to outperform the appearance of humans to some. There is still an ongoing outcry fr…

It's not enough for them to be "better" than a human. When they fail they also have to fail in a way that is legible to a human. I've seen ML systems fail in scenarios that are obvious to a human and succeed in scenarios where a human would have found it impossible. The opposite needs to be the case for them to be generally accepted as equivalent, and especially the failure modes need to be confined to cases where a human would have also failed. In the situations I've seen, customers have been upset about the performance of the ML model because the solution to the problem was patently obvious to them. They've been probably more upset about that than about situations where the ML model fails and the end customer also fails.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#418

Post by pousada »

windexh8er wrote: post #387
pousada wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are still stuck in the “stochastic parrot” phase and see everything regarding LLMs through that lense.

Current LLMs do not think. Just because all models anthropomorphize the repetitive actions a model is looping through does not mean they are truly thinking or reasoning. On the flip side the idea of this being true has been a very successful indirect marketing campaign.

What does “truly thinking or reasoning” even mean for you?

I don’t think we even have a coherent definition of human intelligence, let alone of non-human ones.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#419

Post by 0xcafefood »

ilaksh wrote: post #416

Who is actually trying to use a fully autonomous AI employee right now? Isn't everyone using agentic copilots or workflows with agent loops in them? It seems that they are arguing against doing something that almost no one is doing yet. But actually the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the fully autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime. Many people have been working on versions of these things for awhile. B…

> the AI Employee is coming by the end of 2026 and the fully autonomous AI Company in 2027 sometime

We'll see! I'm skeptical.

> what's holding back the AI Employee are things like really effective long term context and memory management and some level of interface generality like browser or computer use and voice

These are pretty big hurdles. Assuming they're solved by the end of this year is a big assumption to make.

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