I've had to rip out a lot of pretty terrible code made by engineers who have tried this.
I don't disagree that eventually, "loops" when combined with unlimited tokens and amazing models in the hands of people who know how to set them up right will be amazing. But for the typical Claude Code user, it's disaster.
The problem is not that loops write bad code once. Humans do that too. The problem is that loops apply local pressure repeatedly: add a fallback, add a guard, special-case the failing input, quiet the exception, satisfy the test. Over time that selects for code that is more survivable in the short term but less intelligible in the long term.
The situation is more like: Altman & co are predicting their new car will replace all vehicles: horses, trains, planes, motorcycles, there’s a real possibility the concept of vehicles will not exist other than cars, in the future. Meanwhile it hasn’t really done highway speeds yet. It does some impressive runs on curated tracks, and people use it around their farms (it seems to work ok for some of them).
We’ll see, I guess.
As I mentioned to OP, applying future aspirations to the current space is incorrect. Some people are able to understand the progression of industrial automation, some people aren't. But if you look at the current batch of frontier models and say, "I just don't see how this is going to be useful", then you're in the camp of those in the 80's who didn't understand personal computers, or in the 90's who didn't understand the web. In hindsight, the technologies evolved massively and found routine use cases that no one initially predicted.
Saying that the person you replied to was looking for the former when they really wanted the latter seems uncharitable. Especially given that replacing most of the engineering department doesn’t seem to be too outside the scope of what some in the space are promising(?).
I know Sam Altman peddled this concept, but he's not representative of the culture and principles of the entire AI/ML space. So it was wrong of OP to attempt to use his words against the entire idea of neural models.
I think this is like pointing out that we lowered the speed of sound as technology developed, so a Mach 1 car doesn’t mean the same thing anymore, if we want the analogies to line up. Of course I’ve stretched the analogy well past any hope of making sense at this point, haha.
yes, it's just bad thinking. It's a malformed comparison that misunderstands the conversation.
Delegating thinking to mediocrity machines:
Based on the statistical nature of their underlying math, LLMs are by definition mediocrity-producing machines, especially if you understand the etymology of mediocre.
Previously smart people:
Cognitive atrophy in people overrelying on LLMs and agents seems to be inevitable: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
Maybe my understanding of the word is limited and malformed, or maybe you could try to develop one that takes into consideration the humanities, art, the sublime, love, emotions, and everything that makes humans human, instead of looking at the world through the small, mechanistic lens of the hyperengineerization of everything.
I invite you to explain how, instead of just making unsubstantiated claims.
> Based on the statistical nature of their underlying math, LLMs are by definition mediocrity-producing mac
You're demonstrating a fundamental failure to understand the mathematics behind these models, by claiming that they produce an average result by nature. You fundamentally misunderstand reasoning manifolds, and how training teaches models new behaviors.
Phrases like "Based on the statistical nature of their underlying math" sure make you sound smart to someone who doesn't know better, but in truth the phrase is completely void of substance: What statistical nature? What underlying math? What about them prove your naive hypothesis that they can only produce "mediocrity", itself an extremely subjective term that leaves you a massive amount of slack with which you can retreat from your claims after someone asks for proof and clarification.
> Cognitive atrophy in people overrelying on LLMs and agents seems to be inevitable
I can pull studies that show reading and writing reduce some cognitive faculties, compared to oral tradition. Or how the use of calculators atrophies basic arithmetic skills: that's not going to stop astrophysicists from using number-crunching simulations instead of doing things by hand.
> maybe you could try to develop one that takes into consideration the humanities, art, the sublime, love, emotions, and everything that makes humans human, instead of looking at the world through the small, mechanistic lens of the hyperengineerization of everything.
Hey, so you're projecting again here. Massively. Nothing about this conversation has given you any information regarding my opinions on the list of extremely subjective and debatable concepts you've provided. You seem to harbor a belief that anyone who extracts meaningful value from these machines is actually a "terrible thinker" who is inconsiderate of the world and only sees things through a "small, mechanistic lens". Besides being considerably insulting, all this projection does is reveal things about how you view the world, how you view those who think differently than you, and how close-minded you can be, prejudiciously writing off someone as a caricatured personal bias in order to avoid critically engaging with their argument.
Honestly, this is a really sad and negative way to talk with others on the internet and you need to stop and review your approach to discourse. There is no value in considering to waste time talking to you until you change your attitude, so I'm going to end the conversation.
However, your "tasteless high level wanking" is not a quote from Altman, it's a vague and directionless insult that manages to sweep quite a lot of legitimate discussion about the future of automation and professional work under its thumb.
It's wrong because you're saying, "where are the billion-dollar one-man startups?" in the same way that I might look at a Benz Velo and go, "But it's so slow! Horses can go faster than that! Everyone saying cars are going to change the fabric of society are just tasteless wankers!"
The point is that you are applying future aspirations on the present-day relatively brand-new model space and getting upset that we aren't there yet.
Do you actually have something substantial to say?
Also:
> Now there is obviously a question if this desire to understand the code is one that I will still have a few years from now.
I do not think we should be having doubts like this. Either you consider understanding the code you ship and allowing your future self to be able to work on the system you're building to be a value, or you don't. I, for one, do, and I do not think using LLMs and coding agents will affect my point of view on that.
https://gist.github.com/rcarmo/4922b550ab48bf0b4246c77e606a5...
I don’t know if I like the current world without it though.
80% of different teams code the code is poorly tested. The code doesn’t handle data consistency or asynchronous code properly because the engineers don’t know better (and frankly don’t care enough).
Dependency handling is poorly managed leading to low quality operations with improper dashboards, alarms, and ops.
Badly managed processes leads to people doing monkey work signing off checklists rather than automation.
Frankly… why is keeping any of that good? It really pisses me off seeing people accept any of that low quality but that standard is the default and not the outlier.
> I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.
This is going to be a net negative on software quality for people who take this up, in my opinion.
I call out Boris but I also don't think he's being malicious. He's at the center of an important technological revolution and it would be hard not to get excited. I just wished he advocated for a more balanced and a realistic perspective.
However, I think I once was a pretty good dev, and AI use is slowly turning me into a slop cannon. The temptation to use AI in place of real understanding is too strong.
I'm sure you'll say I was always dead weight, but I just want you to consider the possibility that AI might erode the capacity for good devs to handle discomfort, turning them into bad devs.
Previously, everyone was limited in their blast radius but now AI has levelled the playing field where even a single slop cannon be the bottleneck of PR reviews or even the company itself if not right now, then later, as the codebase turns sloppified which will have its ramifications later on.
Everyone might suggest with the diagram to be the turbo brains but I believe that we also need to reduce the metrics that slop cannon is achieving (surprisingly LOC which is a pretty bad indicator) and to be more reasonable throughout in realizing such bottlenecks and to follow good security practices throughout.
I feel like this is the actual problem, but it's not being talked about enough.
Logically, it shouldn't matter how a piece of code was written. It either meets our engineering standards or it doesn't. That's what code review is for.
But what has actually happened is that, because we have AI now, many organizations have normalized practices that weren't normal before, like submitting 10000-line PRs. And just, in general, submitting code that you yourself don't seem to fully understand.
If management doesn't push back on such things (or will even push back against people who try to do so), then reviewers have basically no incentive to push back either. Before I left my last job (for unrelated reasons), I had entered this mode, wherein I decided I couldn't really carefully review these monstrous AI PRs, while also getting my own work done, while also not burning out. So I chose the latter two.
I fully agree with what you say regarding Boris, but I would emphasize that I don't think he has malicious intention either. He still is doing his job, to showcase the features their product offers.
I don't like the framing of this, but I suppose it's inevitable given how every other political issue has been framed to date.
There are many camps in between the two being described. There are those who use maybe $20 worth of unsubsidized tokens per month to accelerate their work. Full-time human in the loop, every LOC still reviewed by hand. Also, the developer who still does copy-paste in and out of ChatGPT. Those tribes exist too and are way more typical than these extremes.
The sad part is that this technology is incredible. It’s us choosing to turn it into a slop cannon (and the labs sure seem to encourage this).
I want to leave the industry as soon as I can.
The worst part is that I'm not exhausted from my work, I've been through a heavy burnout before and had to adapt my ways of working to not fall into that kind of exhaustion again. This is different, it's not a pressure to deliver anything specifically, no stupid deadlines, it's so much more vague than any other kind of work pressure I've been through in the past 20+ years that it makes it much harder to find ways to keep my head straight.
It's exhausting to be reviewing boatloads of PRs of very varied quality. I have relegated myself to block merges at the first sign of a bad/weird design instead of trying to understand why it might have needed a compromise in the design, many times people couldn't even explain to me why something was written the way it was... After many "it was Claude that decided this way" it became so tiring that I don't even ask anymore, I just leave a comment on the first blocker I find and reject the PR. If people are not putting any effort to review it before throwing it at me I will just return the favour.
The journey was as important as the destination if not more because it gave confidence in oneself, it made us grow. I mean to suggest, coding for the sake of coding
"I wish to code for myself, nothing else": (I had written this somewhere else on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609962
If I may ask you and others, I assume that you are at a relatively decent position within your company and have somewhat say in it. Why aren't employees more honest about AI and concerns regarding it? I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.
It is my opinion that there's more hidden power in engineers that even we fail to realize and instead some of us like you are wanting to leave the industry, what a sad tail of tragic events, when the tech behind AI is good and could be helpful but oh holy, we are butchering it up so badly in some/so many regards perhaps even under the influence of AI companies and their messaging surrounding it.
We've tried it where I work at. People put effort to compile studies, to collect testimonials, catalog and organise the strengths and weaknesses based on engineers' experiences with the tooling.
The result was the person driving this effort getting asked by HR, their manager, and their skip manager to stop with the anti-AI rhetoric, that AI is the future of the industry and if not rolled out in this way we will be left behind.
> I'd imagine that people must chalk it up as saying that there is push from investor side into using AI and management is forcing it but couldn't more effort be also redirected towards the fact that agents are still finnicky sometimes and that the sustainability of projects moving forward is going to be a major issue to investors given that they want sustainable growth.
The C-level doesn't seem to care, they believe to be in an existential risk where any price paid to rollout these tools as wide and broadly as possible across the whole org is small compared to being left behind.
It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.
Heh, maybe that’s the actual strength of AI: convincing people with C-suite personalities to propagate it at any cost. A purely digital zombie virus.
Although I get the overall statement more now as well.
> It's all fueled by executives and investors anxieties, there's very little left for reason when fear takes over.
This perhaps seems to be the greatest reason and I imagine that because all growth within economy is shown to be floating within AI related sector, they want piece of that pie. Do note that most of the issues with it is that the frothy evaluations and how much actual growth is happening downstream rather than just money shaking hands and the bubble nature of things.
but theoretically one can see that there is no winner in all of this no matter how deep one can fall down in layers of. Perhaps something at the layer of DRAM and chip production seem to be the one actually the most profitable at the moment and even they are just witnessing some temporary growth as nobody expects the prices to stay at this ceiling including said companies and yet they have incredibly floaty (but comparatively less so) valuations as compared to other AI things.
On one hand, I expect money to be rational yet on the other hand I am actively witnessing money to be irrational. Yet the whole industry is so muddled up now with so many people wanting the piece of cake of that investor's dollar that I imagine the market somewhat saturated.
Could something rationally not happen because if so, it seems that the thing might be that the burst of the bubble might make the only rational sense of adding realism in the market, but I imagine that it might spook the investors too much too and it might cost too much blood-shed in the markets.
Am I able to explain myself and do any of you believe that there is a rational course of action which can be taken to help stabilize the economy in some aspects?
Because it’s being pushed by the c-suite and board, so most people aren’t in a position to push back. And it’s a quasi-religion now, so even pushing back at all can result in being branded as a “skeptic”.
People do raise concerns, though. And the responses aren’t very satisfactory. For example, the biggest concern that has been raised thus far is open PRs, and the answer has always been that all we need is AI code review.
Oh, AI is so good but it is so bad!
You guys got some severe personality split you'd better hurry up fixing.
We can however change our opinions on AI and the culture surrounding it but as witnessed from my comment and other people replying to it, the question is becoming as of if we engineers even have the necessary power capable to bring so the change within how or if we use AI.
That is why, I believe that we might need some nuance rather than a complete acceptation or complete rejection of it.
AI is like a double edged sword, something which is fundamentally both good and bad[0] It is my opinion that currently, the bad outweighs the good and I have been vocal about it, but the control of the matter is strictly beyond one or even one good/bad binary.
The primary issue of the matter is the fact that some people (mainly the C-suite/investor class) believe in so much of the goodness of AI that they are willing to think that anyone pointing out anything bad of AI is the one who hasn't used it and how there are all these anecdotal evidences of people being impressed by model's quality and its evolvement, so surely, if AI must have grown so much and is so good as everyone says online it is (within an internet thought bubble), the fault must be lying on the engineer and he must be one of those luddites who has failed to accept technology and must be replaced.
I suppose some people genuinely believe the above paragraph that I wrote. I have heard some of such sentiments on Hackernews itself...
My point is probably that AI should be treated as a double-edged sword really, that's about it. We can go into the details of it if you so prefer and I think that you are right that its within the nitty gritty details that there is ambiguity and how this discussion leads to that ambiguity, so in that sense I concede but that there should be a better more skeptical discussion regarding the use of AI and it should be up to the organization at first for them to decide how they use AI and be flexible with it but not at the sake of the sanctity of code and coding practices.
I feel like it would be hard to gain a worldwide consensus on the use of AI within software development, we can certainly try but it would be more effective to do so at an organizational level and to slowly level up and I do hope that the world eventually figures out a somewhat consensus of it.
Hope I am able to explain some parts of the severe personality split, this did get long but that's probably because I have just watched some somewhat thought provoking media which used some great vocabulary and I am somewhat copying it as my brain thinks about your comment.
But yea, in all honesty, that's about it. got a bit long so sorry about it but have a nice day and thanks for reading if you did and if not, thats fine as well and I hope you and everyone else including me navigating this somewhat shit hole that has become internet discussion about AI and AI in general, things are getting exhausting and there is some negativity in life at times but I hope that we overcome it and I am optimistic in some sense and I wish nothing but good for all of you within your future as we all navigate the uncertainties of future together :-D
[0]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263521/word-phra...
I can't speak for all orgs but at the end of the day, the only metric that my org cares about is how AI is improving our work. Holding the line for quality is definitely a good thing, but when your org doesn't care about the pressure on PR reviewers, and the effort it took to fix those PR mistakes or their repeat, those reviews are only helping the loop case and that AI is without flaws. I am not saying AI is a bad thing all together, but when the org ignores those metrics, I am only contributing and helping to prove that the other side is right.
From a market perspective, he's acting completely rationally in his own interests. Bottom line is that these companies need to do whatever they can to keep growing token consumption because that's their goal.
If the nation's drinking skyrocketed, we wouldn't be sitting here wondering why the CEO of Budweiser isn't advocating for temperance. His job is to move kegs, just like Boris' job is to move tokens.
That is, in fact, an important thing to do. It turns those externalities into public perception, which turns into market forces that adjust the behavior, if you want to think purely in market terms.
The analogy with Budweiser is not a good one. This would be the CEO of Budweiser actively pushing more drinking while the nation's drinking was increasing. And yes, people would be right, and effective, to oppose this (see Oxycontin).
As soon as you open up the externalities discussion, the wider question of increasing electricity prices and turbocharging global warming comes up, not to mention RAM prices. AI is a machine for turning negative externalities into stock prices.
The point is, blaming them is pointless, if it wasn't them it would be someone else. How do we react?
[Edit: was thinking of the ‘CEO’. This doesn’t apply as cleanly to Boris.]
I suspect that the reason Anthropic is generating such developer-negative, toxic, insensitive influencer sentiments like these from Boris has to do with Dario being a fantasy-fiction-reading quasi-mascot who thinks it's his job to tell scary stories, who is being allowed to do just that by a sibling who perhaps prefers he's not involved in the day-to-day.
But we would start to wonder if the CEO of Budweiser started advocating binge drinking.
The silver lining appears to be that long term most people won't be able to afford producing slop at current rates.
Mostly nobody now worry about binaries or instructions because those are for the compilers, even undefined behavior are mostly ignored.
You can either tailor the development pattern for LLM, or have LLM come write for the same old development pattern. I think there is going to be a difference.
Burnout can be so all-encompassing that it can ruin your life. It can make you feel like you are losing your mind and your basic abilities. A lot of that is coming for a lot of people who are currently stressed but excited.
It’s almost as though these models were trained on a vast corpus of largely mediocre code. They will never outperform the median Github user - it is all they know, it is all they can do.
I think a big issue with a lot of AI enabled coding is that tokens are currently heavily subsidized, and that refusing to learn how to write psudocode and pound out bugs in shell scripts is a fundamental step a lot of programmers are skipping... a stance that I find ironic considering that when I was being told as a preteen to "read the fucking manual" by the 90s internet, I was led to believe if I'm not churning out zero days in C by senior year of high school I might as well abandon all hope of ever understanding anything about computers.
(Flash forward, and the immortal words of the rapper Jay-Z: "I ain't passed the bar, but know a little bit... enough you won't be illegally searching my shit.")