We are developing software with a slot-machine
mortenvistisen.com
mortenvistisen.com
I don’t work on things wildly outside my skill set (tried one big data project a month ago, got stuck for weeks just shy of completion — senior guy spotted the problem in 30sec, still worth it, but embarrassing and humbling)
With slot machines the house always wins. They’re a dummy’s game. Maybe I’m experiencing the gambler’s high but I’m pretty sure my results over the last 3 months are 5x productivity measured in tasks completed, projects shipped, difficult things accomplished.
And I don’t give a shit if you believe because my results are good enough for me.
They work well for some problem sets. But, 3 months are not a long time. This post is a reflection of me using these things heavily over 1+ year and problems keeps creeping up.
And good, you shouldn't give a shit about what I believe. I'm just a random guy on the internet. But, I'm not the only one to start noticing these problems.
Why is it an illusion of productivity if you work faster with it than without it?
> It has never been a competitive advantage to write code fast but writing the right code. If you could also do that fast you are golden.
Who decides whether or not the code is right? You, no?
> The same foundamentals that makes software stable, robust and good haven't changed. Writing software has always been constrained by thinking, design, trade-offs and understanding/mapping real world problems into proper systems.
I don't believe this to be true at all. I believe a significant portion of what writing software has been constrained by is the priority of the work in proportion to the amount of effort to perform the work. Yes, systems thinking also has a place in programming, but it has never been the constraint.
> It's very tempting to replace that flow with automation so you can get some hard earned sleep. But what happens when the agent(s) can't figure out what's wrong. What happens when you have to dig through an ungodly amount of unfamiliar code because you are the one responsible.
Hasn't this always been a possibility when using dependencies that you didn't write. And if anything, AI's "Build It In House" attitude has made debugging deep in the stack a much easier stack than it was when you were debugging someone else's code that's been published on some dependency registry.
> Add to this that these tools are nondeterministic. It was likely the tool that introduced the bug in the first place, how confident are you that it will actually fix the bug.
How confident are you in yourself fixing the bug if you wrote the buggy code? About the same, no?
> He might be an extreme case of this. But it happens if you are not consistently monitoring/watching these things to a point where you might as well write it yourself. The productivity gain is gone, atleast in the form that I read the commonly made arguments from Big AI.
> if you are not consistently monitoring/watching these things to a point where you might as well write it yourself
Why get any help with anything if you could take the full burden on yourself? Probably because with code it's much faster to verify than to produce.
> Add to this, that it seems like these models are performing worse after their initial release suggesting that we can't trust we get the same quality output for the same amount of money, since the providers are incentivised to make it cheaper to run them, i.e. slow use a less quantized version.
Well, you could just stop paying and write the code yourself, that seems to be the main alternative in this situation. But I don't hear of anyone doing that.
> You might still prefer the role of being an agent manager compared to being a developer but I thin the discourse around it making you automatically faster needs to change. Faster to what end? 92-95% uptime?
This has turned pretty quickly into an AI Bad post.
Also,
ridiculas => ridiculous
foundamentals => fundamentals
thatI => that (also double win because the font looks like an L not an I until copied into HN)
"and is lobster project" => and his* lobster project
incentivised => incentivized
Did people stop checking their writing for typos? Just throw the text into google docs, it's really not that hard.
You don't work faster if you're just slipping out the wrong code.
>Who decides whether or not the code is right? You, no?
When was the last time you just LGTM'd code you couldn't be arsed to read through? The point is, you need to building an intuition around the actual solution to the problem. If you don't have the blueprint in your mind, how the hell do you think you have a good spot to validate it from?
>I don't believe this to be true at all. I believe a significant portion of what writing software has been constrained by is the priority of the work in proportion to the amount of effort to perform the work. Yes, systems thinking also has a place in programming, but it has never been the constraint.
No, the constraint is, can I maintain and reason about this, while not blowing out the machine with the implementation details or having to rewrite it 10000 times. If you think priority and effort to do are the major constraints, oooo boy. That's manager talk right there. No wonder you're seeming so gung ho on it.
>Hasn't this always been a possibility when using dependencies that you didn't write. And if anything, AI's "Build It In House" attitude has made debugging deep in the stack a much easier stack than it was when you were debugging someone else's code that's been published on some dependency registry.
When was the last time you really audited a dependency? Like really. I do it before importing something new. I don't trust people. So my calculus is to defend myself and my employers from unwarranted trust.
>How confident are you in yourself fixing the bug if you wrote the buggy code? About the same, no?
Fairly confident, actually. I hate clever code. Whenever I see something makes me go "that was slick", I tear it down, refactor, or do everything I can to thoroughly document it. Admittedly, I'm more of a software verification guy in my normal modality of work, but I also have been on the development side as well and there is no one I hate more than my inner developer who just yeets whatever works in the moment in front of me to have to unscrew later, but at least I've managed to beat into him that he isn't to ever write his most clever code, or we're both going to be stuck in the chair for a while.
>Why get any help with anything if you could take the full burden on yourself? Probably because with code it's much faster to verify than to produce.
WRONG. Objectively so. Want proof? Give your AI model a set of requirements. Ask it to generate you code to implement it. Time the forward pass. Clear the context after putting aside the code you just generated. Toss your cleaned context session the previously generated artifact. Tell it to work backwards and tell you what the requirements were. It'll take at a minimum from my testing about 20x as long to come back, and the answer will be lossy. By the way, we're not even constraining it by insisting the code works. Verification is always way more work than producing. I can make 10 prototypes that don't meet the spec fully in the time it takes me to verify and fully trace one arbitrary chunk of code to whether or not it satisfied all requirements. What you just asserted right there, is a common prejudice amongst developers. One that is generally grown out of with maturity.
>Well, you could just stop paying and write the code yourself, that seems to be the main alternative in this situation. But I don't hear of anyone doing that.
You mean like I always have done?
If all you're doing is chasing the dopamine high of a mostly okay software artifact you aren't serious about having anyone else rely on, then you go on and keep on vibe coding my man, but don't try to handwave perfectly valid criticisms. If you really understood these machines, and how they work, and the peril of bridging the gap from a PHB's feature request in the real world to a reliable, maintainable implementation in the digital, you'd not be so comfortable with the cavalier attitude of "The AI spit it out".
If by the end you can't why it works the way it does, and why it doesn't work one way or another, you aren't crafting, you're playing slots. I don't trust my safety to gamblers. You shouldn't either. But that's all your personal risk tolerance, and I can't do anything about that.