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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

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

#431

Post by achierius »

benreesman wrote: post #203
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

I'm rounding the corner on a ground's up reimplementation of `nix` in what is now about 34 hours of wall clock time, I have almost all of it on `wf-record`, I'll post a stream, but you can see the commit logs here: https://github.com/straylight-software/nix/tree/b7r6/correct... Everyone has the same ability to use OpenRouter, I have a new event loop based on `io_uring` with deterministic playbook modeled on the Trini…

I mean, have you tried getting `ca-derivations` to work with `ssh-ng`? That sounds like a good way to answer your own question.

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

#434

Post by benreesman »

achierius wrote: post #431
benreesman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rounding the corner on a ground's up reimplementation of `nix` in what is now about 34 hours of wall clock time, I have almost all of it on `wf-record`, I'll post a stream, but you can see the commit logs here: https://github.com/straylight-software/nix/tree/b7r6/correct... Everyone has the same ability to use OpenRouter, I have a new event loop based on `io_uring` with deterministic playbook modeled on the Trini…

I mean, have you tried getting `ca-derivations` to work with `ssh-ng`? That sounds like a good way to answer your own question.

I have ca-derivations working with ssh-ng.

It's a fairly hairy patch and now the broken ass eval cache breaks more.

I'm fixing it all. Read the fucking repo friend, it's biblical.

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

#435

Post by rush86999 »

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…

Funny you described everything I worked on for this project: https://github.com/rush86999/atom

Cats out of the bag. Everyone knows the issue and I bet a lot of people are trying to deliver the same thing.

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

#436

Post by toss1 »

mossTechnician wrote: post #326
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence. - Jensen Huang, February 2024 https://www.techradar.com/pro/nvidia-ceo-predicts-the-death-...

This looks like the same problem as when the first page layout software came out.

It looked to everyone like a huge leap into a new world word processing applications could basically move around blocks of text to be output later, maybe with a few font tags, then this software came out that wow actually showed the different fonts, sizes, and colors on the screen as you worked! With apps like "Pagemaker" everyone would become their own page designers!

It turned out that everyone just turned out floods of massively ugly documents and marketing pieces that looked like ransom notes pasted together from bits of magazines. Years of awfulness.

The same is happening now as we are doomed to endure years AI slop in everything from writing to apps to products to vending machines an entire companies — everyone and their cousin is trying to fully automate it.

Ultimately it does create an advance and allows more and better work to be done, but only for people who have a clue about what they are doing, and eventually things settle at a higher level where the experts in each field take the lead.

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

#437

Post by horsawlarway »

Frieren wrote: post #375

100% exoskeleton is a great analogy. An exoskeleton is something really cool in movies that has zero reason to be build in reality because there are way more practical approaches. That is why we have all kind of vehicles, or programmable robot arm that do the job for themselves or if you need a human at the helm one just adds a remote controller with levers and buttons. But making a human shaped gigantic robot with a…

> An exoskeleton is something really cool in movies that has zero reason to be build in reality because there are way more practical approaches.

Sort of strange comment given that there are a large number of companies pursuing commercial exoskeletons literally right now.

SuitX

hypershell

Herowear

DNSYS

Moveo

Hell, even big companies like Hilti

I can buy a ton of different models of exoskeletons for anywhere from low hundreds to low thousands online right now...

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

#438

Post by loudmax »

GuB-42 wrote: post #408
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. And unless the user is a competent programmer, at least in spirit, it will look like the creation of the 3-year-old next door, not like Wallace and Gromit. It may be fine, but the difference is that one is only loved by their parents, the other gets millions of people to go to the theater. Play-Doh gave the power of sculpting to everyone, includ…

It really depends what kind of time frame we're talking about.

As far as today's models, these are best understood as tools to be used as humans. They're only replacements for humans insofar as individual developers can accomplish more with the help of an AI than they could alone, so a smaller team can accomplish what used to require a bigger team. Due to Jevon's paradox this is probably a good thing for developer salaries: their skills are now that much more in demand.

But you have to consider the trajectory we're on. GPT went from an interesting curiosity to absolutely groundbreaking in less than five years. What will the next five years bring? Do you expect development to speed up, slow down, stay the course, or go off in an entirely different direction?

Obviously, the correct answer to that question is "Nobody knows for sure." We could be approaching the top of a sigmoid type curve where progress slows down after all the easy parts are worked out. Or maybe we're just approaching the base of the real inflection point where all white collar work can be accomplished better and more cheaply by a pile of GPUs.

Since the future is uncertain, a reasonable course of action is probably to keep your own coding skills up to date, but also get comfortable leveraging AI and learning its (current) strengths and weaknesses.

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

#439

Post by deadbabe »

famouswaffles wrote: post #196
deadbabe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Beating chess is more about searching a probability space, not reasoning. Reasoning would be more like the car wash question.

It's not entirely clear how LLMs that can play chess do so, but it is clearly very different from the way other machines do so. The construct a board, they can estimate a players skill and adjust accordingly, and unlike other machines and similarly to humans, they are sensitive to how a certain position came to be when predicting the next move. Regardless, there's plenty of reasoning in chess.

It’s very clear how, chess moves and positions are vector encoded into their training data, when they are prompted with a certain board state, they respond with the most probable response to that. There is no reason.

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

#440

Post by runarberg »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #164
runarberg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, I may be missing something here. These benchmarks are gathered by having models play each other, and the second illegal move forfeits the game. This seems like a flawed method as the models who are more prone to illegal moves are going to bump the ratings of the models who are less likely. Additionally, how do we know the model isn’t benchmaxxed to eliminate illegal moves. For example, here is the list of games…

The LLMs do play rated engines (maia and eubos). They provide the baselines. Gemini e.g. consistently beats the different maia versions. The rest is taken care of by elo. That is they then play each other as well, but it is not really possible for Gemini to have a higher elo than maia with such a small sample size (and such weak other LLMs). Elo doesn't let you inflate your score by playing low ranked opponents if th…

I did indeed miss something. I learned after posting (but before my EDIT) that there are anchor engines that they play.

However these benchmarks still have flaws. The two illegal moves = forfeit is an odd rule which the authors of the benchmarks (which in this case was Claude Code) added[1] for mysterious reasons. In competitive play if you play an illegal move you forfeit the game.

Second (and this is a minor one) Maia 1900 is currently rated at 1774 on lichess[2], but is 1816 on the leaderboard, to the author’s credit they do admit this in their methodology section.

Third, and this is a curiosity, gemini-3-pro-preview seems to have played the same game twice against Maia 1900[3][4] and in both cases Maia 1900 blundered (quite suspiciously might I add) mate in one when in a winning position with Qa3?? Another curiosity about this game. Gemini consistently played the top 2 moves on lichess. Until 16. ...O-O! (which has never been played on lichess) Gemini had played 14 most popular lichess moves, and 2 second most popular. That said I’m not gonna rule out that the fact that this game is listed twice might stem from an innocent data entry error.

And finally, apart from Gemini (and Survival bot for some reason?), LLMs seem unable to pass Maia-1100 (rated 1635 on lichess). The only anchor bot before that is random bot. And predictably LLMs cluster on both sides of it, meaning they play as well as random (apart from the illegal moves). This smells like benchmaxxing from Gemini. I would guess that the entire lichess repertoire features prominently in Gemini’s training data, and the model has memorized it really well. And is able to play extremely well if it only has to play 5-6 novel moves (especially when their opponent blunders checkmate in 1).

1: https://github.com/lightnesscaster/Chess-LLM-Benchmark/commi...

2: https://lichess.org/@/maia9

3: https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/game/6574c5d6-c85a-4cb3-b...

4: https://chessbenchllm.onrender.com/game/4af82d60-8ef4-47d8-8...

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