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Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

mariozechner.at

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Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#451

Post by sanderjd »

Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

I'm beginning to develop the opinion that the next step in this process will (or at least should) be local and/or self-hosted inference.

The latest qwen models are already very useful, and the smaller ones can be run locally on my laptop. These are obviously not as good as the latest frontier models, and that's extremely noticeable for the development workflow, but maybe in a year or two, they will be competitive with the proprietary models we have today, which are incredibly capable. I also expect compute for inference to continue getting cheaper.

The current lock in for me is the UX of Claude Code / codex cli, but this is a very small moat that will definitely be commoditized soon.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#452

Post by nfgrep »

mojosam wrote: post #420
Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

> Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it What exactly do we mean this? Because it is obviously common for human coders to tackle learning how an unfamiliar and complex codebase works so that they can modify it (new hires do it all the time). I can think this means one of two things: * The code and architecture being produced by agents takes approaches that are abnorm…

Folks are reviewing the code, but the standard shape of a review is a PR. This diff assumes you have an underlying knowledge of the system, one that is most realistically gained by having written the code. Could you “just remember” every diff you’ve seen? Maybe, but I don’t think it’s realistic; we learn far better from doing than from reading.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#453

Post by jafitc »

sublinear wrote: post #352
badlibrarian wrote: post #5

I suppose everyone on HN reaches a certain point with these kind of thought pieces and I just reached mine. What are you building? Does the tool help or hurt? People answered this wrong in the Ruby era, they answered it wrong in the PHP era, they answered it wrong in the Lotus Notes and Visual BASIC era. After five or six cycles it does become a bit fatiguing. Use the tool sanely. Work at a pace where your understand…

Perhaps this is the wrong place to plant this thought. Maybe nobody will read it. These comments are now many hours old and HN has a way of walking away once they have had their turn shouting into the void. I once received a "bonsai" seed kit from a former boss during a holiday dinner. I think it was meant as a joke, but even now I'm not so sure. I planted those seeds anyway. I told some people about it and they imme…

that's a great story!

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#454

Post by jafitc »

rglover wrote: post #60

Nature will handle this in time. Just expect to see a "Bear Stearns moment" in the software world if this spirals completely out of control (and companies don't take a hint from recent outages).

subprime mortgages sprinkled on top of prime ones, treated as prime ones. because they were printing money. subprime code sprinkled on the backbone of software we use everyday. because they are printing code. reckoning

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#455

Post by 52-6F-62 »

xivzgrev wrote: post #450

There's currently a billboard up in San Francisco that basically says "use AI to reduce your saas costs". And I'm thinking - has anyone actually done that for something meaningful? Replacing salesforce as your crm or replacing Shopify as your e-commerce platform? I get the hype but AI doesn't remove accountability, it just moves it up. Oh you can do with 1 person what 3 people used to do? Great, that 1 person is now…

tick tock tick tock...

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#456

Post by AndrianV »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #2

> it sure feels like software has become a brittle mess, with 98% uptime becoming the norm instead of the exception, including for big services As somebody who has been running systems like these for two decades: the software has not changed. What's changed is that before, nobody trusted anything, so a human had to manually do everything. That slowed down the process, which made flaws happen less frequently. But it w…

[dead]

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#457

Post by furyofantares »

mojosam wrote: post #420
Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

> Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it What exactly do we mean this? Because it is obviously common for human coders to tackle learning how an unfamiliar and complex codebase works so that they can modify it (new hires do it all the time). I can think this means one of two things: * The code and architecture being produced by agents takes approaches that are abnorm…

> What exactly do we mean this? Because it is obviously common for human coders to tackle learning how an unfamiliar and complex codebase works so that they can modify it (new hires do it all the time).

I agree with you, BUT: I find it much harder to get my head around a medium sized vibe coded project than a medium size bespoke coded project. It's not even close.

I don't know what codebases will look like if/when they become "fully agentic". Right now, LLM-agents get worse, not better, as a codebase grows, and as more if it is coded (or worse architected) by LLM.

Humans get better over time in a project and LLMs get worse, and this seems fundamental to the LLM architecture really. The only real way I see for codebases to become fully agentic right now is if they're small enough. That size grows as context sizes that new models can deal with grows.

If that's how this plays out - context windows get large enough that LLM-agents can work fine in perpetuity in medium or large size projects - I wonder if the resulting projects will be extremely difficult for humans to wrap their heads around. That is, if the LLM relies on looking at massive chunks of the codebase all at once, we could get to the point of fully agentic codebases without having to tackle the problem of LLMs being terrible at architecture, because they don't need it.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#458

Post by hbarka »

xivzgrev wrote: post #450

There's currently a billboard up in San Francisco that basically says "use AI to reduce your saas costs". And I'm thinking - has anyone actually done that for something meaningful? Replacing salesforce as your crm or replacing Shopify as your e-commerce platform? I get the hype but AI doesn't remove accountability, it just moves it up. Oh you can do with 1 person what 3 people used to do? Great, that 1 person is now…

Vendor lock-in is real and it’s scary. You are helpless to the constant price increases and each passing renewal you get deeper and deeper into the lock-in. Here’s to the day when someone clever with AI can disintermediate this situation. You don’t have to vibecode your own CRM but imagine a deterministic harness that lets you lego-block CRM functions like lead management, opportunity tracking, contact list, campaigns. There shouldn’t be a moat anymore.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#459

Post by dahart »

Towaway69 wrote: post #124

What the article doesn't touch on is the vendor lock-in that is currently underway. Many corps are now moving to an AI-based development process that is reliant on the big AI providers. Once the codebase has become fully agentic, i.e., only agents fundamentally understand it and can modify it, the prices will start rising. After all, these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup on their investments.…

What do you mean about vendor lock-in? I haven’t yet seen any meaningful barriers to switching between different companies’ coding agents. Are you talking about AI market lock-in and not vendor-specific lock-in?

> these loss making AI companies will eventually need to recoup

This is true, and while AI spend continues to rise, I’m starting to think once the dust settles and the true costs emerge and stable profits are achieved, that it may be expensive enough that it’s a limiting force.

Re: Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

#460

Post by anthk »

petr25102018 wrote: post #173
anthk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe they are. Call yourself an Engineer without a degree and your company and you will be sued with a big fine, because here you must be legally accountable on disasters and ofc there are hard constraints .

No, that's plain wrong (I am from Czech Republic). You can even get an "engineering degree" (Ing.) by studying economics.

Not in Spain, Germany, France...
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