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I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

blog.silennai.com

71–80 of 236 posts

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers are tired of getting piles of shit, look at the Windows situation

Or don't sell the solution. When you have monopolies, regulatory capture, and endless mountains of money, you can more or less do what you'd like.

That's a lie, people will eventually find a way out, it was always like that, being it open source or by innovating and eventually leave the unable to innovate tech giants dying. We have Linux and this year will be the most exciting for the Linux desktop given how bad the Windows situation is

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#72
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For this to work, you'd have to fully specify the behavior of your program in the tests. Put another way, at that point your tests are the program. So the question is, which is a more convenient way to specify the behavior of a program: a traditional programming language, or tests written in that language. I think the answer should be fairly obvious.

Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run. We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development. What is a bird but the output of a random walk algorithm selected by constraints bound by so many latent factors we might never fully grasp?

> Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run.

This doesn't work when the software in question is written by competent humans, let alone the sort of random process you describe. A run of the software only tells you the behavior of the software for a given input, it doesn't tell you all possible behaviors of the software. "I ran the code and the output looked good" is no where near sufficient.

> We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development.

There is a vast chasm between "bioinspiration is sometimes a good technique" and "genetic algorithms are a viable replacement for writing code".

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#73
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying training set or present LLM. Truly random binary generator left to its own device. Lets evaluate what spits out from that iterated several trillion times over with the massive compute capability we will have. I am not thinking of this happening in the next couple years, but in the next couple of centuries.

> Truly random binary generator left to its own device. This has been tried. It tends to overfit to unseen test environment conditions. You will not produce what you intend to produce. > the massive compute capability we will have Just burn carbon in the hopes something magical will happen. This is the mentality of a cargo cult.

We also burn carbon to feed the brain. Compute is what is increasing in capability on the scale of orders of magnitudes just within our own lifetimes. Brainpower is not increasing in capability. If you want future capabilities and technological advancement to occur at the fastest pace possible, eventually we have to leave the slow ape brain behind in favor of sources of compute that can evaluate functions several orders of magnitude faster.

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#74
post #10

>> You no longer need to review the code. Or instruct the model at the level of files or functions. You can test behaviors instead. I think this is where things will ultimately head. You generate random code, purely random in raw machine readable binary, and simply evaluate a behavior. Most random generated code will not work. some, however, will work. and within that working code, some will be far faster and this is…

I can tell you why this won't go this way: Customers. When you sell them a technological solution to their problem, they expect it to work. When it doesn't, someone needs to be responsible for it. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't see any of the current AI leaders being like, "Yeah, you're right, this solution didn't meet your customer's needs, and we'll eat the resulting costs." They didn't get to be "thought leader…

You are thinking in terms of the next few years not the next few centuries. Plenty of software sold today fails to meet expectations and no one eats costs.

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#75
post #50
post #10

>> You no longer need to review the code. Or instruct the model at the level of files or functions. You can test behaviors instead. I think this is where things will ultimately head. You generate random code, purely random in raw machine readable binary, and simply evaluate a behavior. Most random generated code will not work. some, however, will work. and within that working code, some will be far faster and this is…

I can see a lot of negatives in relation to removing the human readable aspect of software development. Thorough testing would be virtually impossible because we’d be relying on fuzzing to iron out potential edge cases or bugs. In this situation, AI companies are incentivised to host the services their tooling generates. If we don't get source code, it is much easier for them to justify not sharing it. Plus, who is t…

All these questions are true for agriculture, yet you say "yes thank you, and please continue" for that industry I am sure, which seeks to improve product through random walk and unknown mechanisms. Maybe take a step back and examine your own biases.

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#76
post #32
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually the generation and evaluation will be quite fast where testing a million alternatives will be viable. Impressive you suggest that there might be a million alternatives but it would be faster to just read the code and settle on one. How might that be determined? Did the author who wrote the standard library really come up with the best way when writing those functions? Or did they come up with something tha…

If this were viable, we'd all be running Haiku ten times in the time it took to run Opus once, but nobody does.

We don't have the compute for this today. We will in several centuries, if compute growth continues.

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#77
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually the generation and evaluation will be quite fast where testing a million alternatives will be viable. Impressive you suggest that there might be a million alternatives but it would be faster to just read the code and settle on one. How might that be determined? Did the author who wrote the standard library really come up with the best way when writing those functions? Or did they come up with something tha…

This comment strikes me as not having a good intuition for how fast the space of possible programs can grow.

You don't think the space of possible problems can be parsed with increased compute?

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#78
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have selected an algorithm with a "good" flying trait already for making airplanes. Just with another avenue to get to it versus pure random generation. The evolution of the bird has came up with another algorithm for example, where they use flapping wings instead of thrust from engines. Even among airplane development, a lot was learned by studying birds, which are the result of a random walk algorithm.

No there is no selection and no traits to pick, it's the culmination of research and human engineering. An airplan is a complex system that needs serious engineering. You can study birs but up till a certain point, if you like it go doing bird watching, but it's everything except engineering

>it's the culmination of research and human engineering.

And how is this different than the process of natural selection? More fit ideas win out relative to less fit and are iterated upon.

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#79
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run. We've actually done this before in our own technology. We studied birds and their flight characteristics, and took lessons from that for airplane development. What is a bird but the output of a random walk algorithm selected by constraints bound by so many latent factors we might never fully grasp?

> Behavior does not need to be fully specified at the outset. It could be evaluated after the run. This doesn't work when the software in question is written by competent humans, let alone the sort of random process you describe. A run of the software only tells you the behavior of the software for a given input, it doesn't tell you all possible behaviors of the software. "I ran the code and the output looked good" i…

Genetic algorithms created our species, which are far more complex than anything we have written in computer science. I think they have stood up to the tests of creating a viable product for a given behavior.

And with future compute, you will be able to evaluate behavior across an entire range of inputs for countless putative functions. There will be a time when none of this is compute bound. It is today, but in three centuries or more?

Re: I was a top 0.01% Cursor user, then switched to Claude Code 2.0

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or don't sell the solution. When you have monopolies, regulatory capture, and endless mountains of money, you can more or less do what you'd like.

That's a lie, people will eventually find a way out, it was always like that, being it open source or by innovating and eventually leave the unable to innovate tech giants dying. We have Linux and this year will be the most exciting for the Linux desktop given how bad the Windows situation is

Only been hearing that for twenty years and these tech giants are bigger than they’ve ever been.

I remember when people said Open Office was going to be the default because it was open source, etc etc etc. It never happened. Got forked. Still irrelevant.

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