Posted by kcorbitt 4 days ago
But there’s an insurgent class of developers who insist on letting the AI rewrite its own code, which is terrible news in the grand scheme of things.
For those who don't know: there's an old movie titled "Terminator", and in this movie a military AI (Artificial Intelligence) takes over the world and wages a war against humanity. The name of this AI in the movie is "SkyNet", so this is what the parent comment is referring to :D
With computer use, we first learned that Claude sometimes takes breaks to browse pictures of Yosemite, and now this:
> Claude really likes Firefox. It will use other browsers if it absolutely has to, but will behave so much better if you just install Firefox and let it go to its happy place.
I don't mind being reigned over by AI overlords that'll choose FOSS over proprietary.
It's hard to ignore the glimpse into the future of engineering that we're seeing here. Deterministic processes are out the door, no specs, no tolerances, no design. When did undefined behaviour become a cute thing that we're bragging about and compensating for, something to work around rather than something to understand and to fix?
It's not a big deal until you realize that software always gets stacked on software, and the only thing that ever made that complexity manageable was the fundamental assumption that it was all pretty deterministic. Of course users will sacrifice the strategic (good engineering) for the tactical (mere convenience) all day long, but the fact that so many engineers are all-in on the same short-sighted POV has been surprising to me.
We learned what now?
From the Anthropic tweet (X post?):
"Even while recording these demos, we encountered some amusing moments. In one, Claude accidentally stopped a long-running screen recording, causing all footage to be lost.
Later, Claude took a break from our coding demo and began to peruse photos of Yellowstone National Park."
If it had stopped the coding task to browse hackernews, I would have to start to march for AI rights.
Good boy!
Never happened when I tried Firefox
Today: "Sure, I'll give the AI full control over my computer. WCGW?"
20 years ago: "Don't meet strangers from the Internet. Don't get into strangers' cars."
Today: Literally summon strangers from the Internet to get into their cars