Great piece, well written and succinctly sums up my thoughts.
The bit I still don’t understand is how we all put up with the hallucinations. I was questioning Gemini last night about whether it could analyse a Fourtet song and give me a break down of the structure from beginning to end. “Sure!” it said with the endless enthusiasm you get from Gen tools, and then proceeded to spit out an absolute sack of fabricated shit. I pushed back, it apologised, and then generated more crap that had nothing to do with reality, I pushed back, we looped again, still just total fiction: “the drums don’t come in until bar 16” on a song that opens with a drum loop, that kind of crap.
We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.
I’m guessing it’s that humans don’t have capacity to deal with this kind of scenario - it’s like having a junior staff member who is utterly incredible 90% of the time - completely convincing in their certainty and skill level, and then 10% of the time you catch them doing a shit in their desk drawer because they couldn’t be arsed to walk to the toilet. AI’s are basically sociopaths.
> We’re so so far away from tools here that are anywhere near being trustworthy and accurate. And yet we (including myself) are chunking out code after code. It’s so bizarre.
I think one more thing this whole LLM charade in the last few years has revealed is that no-one really cares. As long as it "looks" like it works, turns out, its all fine.
Seems correct. Weird thing is, every single piece of software that I use feels like it got shittier in the last couple of years.
But I am not using more software. I mean their source codes might have gotten larger, but the count of tools/services I use is basically the same.
So this feels more like giving up nice handcrafted fountain pens for bic pens. But I am still using a couple pens overall. So no added convenience, just shittier quality.
Doesn’t the article make the argument that since you can write tests this is not as much of a problem for code gen ?
Its arguable whether it is a foolproof solution (I don’t think so) but it definitely makes it look like you can build a harness around the stochastic machine that will validate the correctness of the generated randomness.
Monkeys and typewriters when you can quickly validate whether it’s Shakespeare or not is a costly but theoretically feasible scenario. No?
Yeh I think you’re probably right. But in the wider use of these tools - less so. Yet the uptake for report writing and email sending and …whatever else - massive.
Back when I last used FB you could create an account tied to an email address. I don't know if things have changed since, but throwaway phone numbers are also a thing.
> On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier.
Wowzers this resonated with me. I’m an ideas person, and a pretty bad coder, at least compared to the normal HN crew. I’ve found Claude to be absolutely astonishing at creating amazing, working apps that I use all the time. But I’ve also been aware for a while that having no bottleneck on ideas isn’t 100% a happy situation.
I’ve spent years and years - 30, maybe - coming up with various (often web related) ideas and having to kick them into the “no time, not enough expertise” long grass. Claude removed this barrier - which is incredible - but also I’ve become aware about how damaging this is mentally, too.
My attention - already scattered - was totally, totally fucked for a while there, 5 windows with different agents all pumping out my latest, greatest idea, no guard rails, no buffer…
I’ve spent the last month being very deliberately not this - and it’s making a huge difference. I’m lucky because I noticed it, and I’m lucky because I’ve somehow got the wherewithal to do something about it, but it’s all been quite sobering.
15 years in running a tiny micro agency (me and my wife), working with non profits. Still looking ok right now, and I still love it and my clients who are ace. I’m mainly a PM though with hacker-developer tendencies. Hoping my sector hold together for another 10 years. I’m 53 so that’ll do it. We’ve been relatively sensible over the years, good work / life balance and our children (now adult and left home) know who we are. So that’s the main job done :-)
What strikes me a significant percentage of the time I see posts like this and the responses to it is how shit other people’s jobs seem and how unfair their employers appear to be. I don’t know if this is because it’s US centric or tech centric or just full of people under a particular HN-like duress. But, man, it sounds crappy out there. Is there anyone here who actually likes what they do, has a decent employer, has a nice life…?
I think it’s this but also that we all see the value in our own niche because it’s ours, and have more trouble seeing the values in other niches. So it becomes a self perpetuating positive reinforcement thing.
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