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Comment by ex-aws-dude | Hacker News Reader

Its so silly everyone being dependent on a black box like this

It’s a really cool shade of black though.

You will literally build nothing but the most primitive of devices unless you accept black boxes. In fact I'd argue its one of humanities great strengths that we can build on top of the tools others have built, without having to understand them at the same level it took to develop them.

not really. Most of the technology is not black box but something of a grey box. You usually choose to treat it as a black box because you want to focus on your problems/your customers but you can always focus on underlying technologies and improve them. Eg postgresql for me is a black box but if I really wanted or had need I could investigate how it works.

True, you can understand an ICE engine all the way down to the chemistry if you so chose. An LLM isn't even understood by its inventors so users have no chance to understand it even if they wanted to.

I'm not just talking about the user

Its not like anthropic can just set a breakpoint in the model and debug

I have been able to build plenty of stuff with a pretty plain emacs + ghci for years...neither are black boxes. Except maybe my brain driving them.

They run on an operating system you probably don't know all the inner workings of.

And that runs on a chip with trillions of transistors.

Yeah so? Claude isn't an OS. It's the thing making my code. I don't want my codebase to be some bytecode adjacent thing that LLMs operate on.

So you stand upon a big pile of black boxes.

Black boxes aren't inherently bad. But if they don't have well defined mappings of inputs to outputs, they aren't good black boxes. That's the problem with Claude Code imo.

Those black boxes are usually deterministic.

Yeah someone should’ve told that to Donald (Knuth)

For those who don’t know, Knuth implemented the typesetting system TeX just to make sure his book’s typesetting was correct.

You can pretty much only innovate when you reject the blackbox and decide to make a better one.

Otherwise you’re likely implementing something you could probably get off-the-shelf, which is ok, but also something that you could just… not implement.

It could actually be a health problem. Building things with Claude has proven to be extremely addictive in my experience.

Nah opencode / kimi is still satisfying. My feeling is Claude has been downhill since November / December.

It’s not so much the black box that’s the issue here, but the fact you can’t even make sure doesn’t change. I’d be fine with downloading the black box and running it on my servers until I decide to update it.

Opencode w/ kimi. Problem solved.

We are surrounded by black boxes we depend on - have been for at least a century.

Arguably political systems have generated similar convolution and lack of complete insight or oversight for much longer, and sometimes I wonder if markets are composed of complex, emergent components which no one truly understands as well.

That's the nature of abstraction. Everything you create on a computer is built on a towering stack of black boxes.

yet some abstractions are more deterministic than others

and all are wrong, but some are more useful than others

> Its so silly everyone being dependent on a black box like this

It's the logical result of "You will own nothing and you will be happy"... You are getting to the point where you won't even own thoughts (because they'll come from the LLM), but you'll be happy that you only have to wait 5 hours to have thoughts gain.

and yet we're black box too

Everything in our life is a black box, but I agree that depending on non-deterministic and sporadic quality black boxes is a huge red flag.

No, most systems in daily life can be understood if you are willing to take the time.

That doesn’t mean you personally are required to, but some people do and your interaction with the system of social trust determines how much of that remains opaque to you.

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