My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

There's the old quote from Babbage:

> On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

This has been an obviously absurd question for two centuries now. Turns out the people asking that question were just visionaries ahead of their time.

It is kind of impressive how I'll ask for some code in the dumbest, vaguest, sometimes even wrong way, but so long as I have the proper context built up, I can get something pretty close to what I actually wanted. Though I still have problems where I can ask as precisely as possible and get things not even close to what I'm looking for.

To anyone else who was going to protest that the name _is_ at the top, apparently it depends on one's browser window width and zoom level. I was a bit surprised to find that increasing the zoom level even affects the order when reading with a screen reader.

I love LLMs, and I really like programming with Cursor, but I never managed to get the "agents with tons of stuff in their context" mode to work for me. I use Cursor like a glorified code completer, 4-5 lines at a time, because otherwise the LLM just makes too many mistakes that compound.

If you let it run in the "write my code for me" mode, and ask it to fix some mistake it made, it will always add more code, never remove any. In my experience, in the end the code just ends up so brittle that the LLM will soon get stuck at a point that it never manages to overcome some mistake, no matter how many times it tries.

Has anyone managed to solve this?

I think the key premise here is that one can effectively and efficiently audit code that the LLM is producing.

I doubt that. First, human attention and speed is very limited. Second, when I see something, I am already predisposed to assume that it is right (or at the very least, my subsequent inquiries are extremely narrow and anchored around the solution I have seen presented to me.)

The premise of “lol, I’m just a dumb developer and just wait until the smart developers catch on” falls extremely flat coming from Thomas.

It kinda invalidates the entire premise because it builds on this false foundation of “look how useful it is to a mere plebeian” and the skills actually required to sift through LLM garbage are what puts you in the top 5% of programmers.

Most senior developers cannot conduct useful code review and spot errors. In every company I’ve been at, there were only 1 in 20 people that would give the useful in-depth reviews required to pick up LLM bullshit.

This style of engagement bait is brutal and it severely overshadows other nuggets of wisdom of how LLMs can be useful.