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AI Tribalism

nolanlawson.com

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Re: AI Tribalism

#51

Post by mirsadm »

simonw wrote: post #36
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…

> I do think there's a bit of an experience divide here, where people more experienced have been down the path of a codebase degrading until it's just too much to salvage – so I think that's part of why you see so much pushback. When I look back over my career to date there are so many examples of nightmare degraded codebases that I would love to have hit with a bunch of coding agents. I remember the pain of upgradin…

I've used Claude Code to do the same (large refactor). It has worked fairly well but it tends to introduce really subtle changes in behaviour (almost always negative) which are very difficult to identify. Even worse if you use it to fix those issues it can get stuck in a loop of constantly reintroducing issues which are slightly different leading to fixing things over and over again.

Overall I like using it still but I can also see my mental model of the codebase has significantly degraded which means I am no longer as effective in stopping it from doing silly things. That in itself is a serious problem I think.

Re: AI Tribalism

#52

Post by eichin »

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…

The engineers using svn were the ones who were pushing for git - I was the one saying "we can't, because none of the conversion tools competently preserve branch history, and it's even worse on repos that started in CVS". Noone responsible for repos was pushing for git, it was end-users pulling for it (and shutting up when they learned how much work it would cause :-) That looked nothing like the drug-dealer-esque LLM push I've been seeing for the last 3 years.

(Likewise with CVS to svn: "you can rename files now? and branches aren't horrible? Great, how fast can we switch?" - no "pushing" because literally everyone could see how much better it was in very concrete cases, it was mostly just a matter of resource allocation.)

In the context of this discussion, it feels more like ipv6 :-)

Re: AI Tribalism

#53

Post by ronsor »

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.

Ironically the massive organizations are the ones that try to pay the least amount of federal taxes.

Re: AI Tribalism

#54

Post by crazygringo »

oytis wrote: post #46
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.

If you think it's going to replace you, then it's going to replace you regardless of whether you personally are feeding it data or not.

If it produces value for you, you should use it. If not, don't.

Re: AI Tribalism

#55

Post by crazygringo »

Sharlin wrote: post #16
XenophileJKO wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I think he means using a refactor tool in the IDE. Though really all we need to do is expose an API for the agent, which we should do.

Yeah. Lots of talk about agents and whatever, but then you lack minimal integration with the most basic of tools?

They're building all this stuff. Be patient. There's a large backlog. And it takes time and experimentation to figure out.

Re: AI Tribalism

#56

Post by tom_ »

I am happy to play my small part in helping fuel the supply of essays about what I can only describe as: This Stuff.

Re: AI Tribalism

#57

Post by eichin »

sodapopcan wrote: post #38
yibers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did the same as devopers before Claude. We would copy paste from stack overflow. Now this process is heavily automated.

...from answers that were publicly shared without license. It's not the same thing, even though every LOVES to make this argument. Also: Over the past 20 years, I could count the number of times on one hand that I was been able to get away with out-right copy/paste from SO.

Stackoverflow code has a license (not per post, but a blanket one depending on which year - https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing it's mostly CC BY-SA.) I've written corporate policies that emphasize that you can learn from SO answers, but (as you point out) they basically never fit exactly - and you should include a link to the original so when the next Ubuntu LTS breaks your clever hack, we can see if someone has already posted a fix :-)

Re: AI Tribalism

#58

Post by shantara »

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…

I've seen a lot of developer tooling change and evolve over the course of my career, but with AI it was the first time I've seen people in non-technical managerial positions trying to force the engineers to make a switch. It was extremely bizarre.

Re: AI Tribalism

#59

Post by lins1909 »

nlawalker wrote: post #34
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…

You don’t have to! Enjoy it! Just don’t bank on getting paid for it indefinitely. That’s the aspect of it that’s causing so much consternation.

And don't bank on getting economic benefits out of being able to use Claude Code too!

Re: AI Tribalism

#60

Post by wvenable »

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?

We are still massively lacking in software. We're not at the stage of making websites faster, we're at the stage of making more of them. We haven't come close to hitting the point where we have enough software and now the job is to refine it.
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