adamtaylor_13

I think you might be taking that number a bit too literally. What I mean is, it works enough that no one is complaining. But, all software has bugs. Some are logic/syntax bugs, and some are intent. "It should do this, but actually does that."

The sum of ALL of these classes of bugs is such that our clients haven't complained about the software being particularly faulty. It's impossible to tell if it's more or less buggy than it would've been written entirely by hand, but I suspect it's less buggy than it would be if written by hand.

Being generous in my assumptions, you may have missed that my intent by "recent sprawl" indicates, "things are getting worse, at a rapid rate". At no point did I mean malware didn't exist 15 years ago.

It is getting worse, faster. That's objectively true.

Real question here, as I'm struggling with this and I'm not finding a lot of evidence to support my inclination (that you are correct).

Why would this person be more skilled? And more importantly, what does it mean to be "skilled" in the era of AI?

I'm trying to be open-minded to both sides, but I have senior engineers on my team with a fleet of agents, shipping code they don't fully understand, and... everything is fine. Stuff still breaks, we fix it. Clients ask "How does XYZ work?" and we say, "Not sure, let us get back to you." And they're totally fine with that answer.

Everything within me screams that this is wrong and we should have intimate familiarity with the system, but I cannot find any evidence that the path of "running a team" instead of "building engineering skill" is not going to work out fine in the long-run. (Yes, my comparison between "team" and "engineering skill" is a bit rough but I'm not interested in the semantics.)

All the evidence that I'm seeing in my own business, with senior engineers meeting clients' needs with autonomous agentic teams is that it's all fine, and while there are gaps, it's actually okay. Clients are happy. Software works 80-90% of the team exactly as it should. Bugs are fixed quickly. We ship more in 3 months than we previously could've shipped in a year. I'm baffled and frankly not as advanced as my devs (I still ask questions one by one to my agent, like a Real Caveman!)

It makes me wildly uncomfortable so I'm trying to wrestle with this. I want your statement to be true, but I just don't see evidence of that.

But what is cheating in one context isn't in another. For example, using a calculator on a middle school math test may be morally wrong due to the parameters. But it would be foolish NOT to use the calculator in other contexts.

I am not convinced that "cheating", being a moral issue, is a solvable problem with LLMs.

As the old saying goes (especially in military training), "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'"

We've made the models really good at persistently trying.

Yes, recent. Oh dear indeed, it's gotten worse than it ever was before.

I have no problem with vibe coded software.

Yeah except you and every other commenter failed to even read the post. It's native.

It runs natively... did you even read the post at all?

Yes. I did trust the 22-year-old coffee junkies. There was a limit to how much damage they could code in an afternoon.

The recent sprawl of viruses, worms, and malware should give everyone pause when installing fresh software.

Reducing your whole life down to a "memory currency" is supposed to be a "superpower"? How? It gave excellent examples of other tools that gave us superpowers: GPS, Phone, Internet. But didn't provide a single shred of evidence that this app is also a superpower.

This is an app. Not a protocol, not a platform, an app.

It's just... a way to remember stuff? You're handing all this data to a company, relying on "trust me bro, we'll be responsible" as a promise to be ethical?

This is beyond perplexing.

Momentum + path of least resistance.

My company is still on GitHub... for now. But incidents like this are becoming more common and I'm becoming less tolerant of it. I suspect many feel the same, but it takes time to persuade the masses.

It's fascinating how people jump straight into their biases, making all sorts of inferences that were never mentioned.

Where did anyone advocate for "large scale code generation"? LLMs are a fantastic way to go from, "We thought this this feature" to "It's shipped and in people's hands". That could've been 100 lines or 1,000 lines but that's not the point.

No one is advocating for lines of code here.

If your developers aren't focusing on what's important to you, that's a leadership problem, not an AI problem.

This is a leadership problem, not an AI problem. I have the opposite situation: I don't think about code "messiness" anymore. I trust my developers to ship the right thing because we communicate constantly about what our goal is and why we're doing it.

Solve the leadership problem and the AI thing becomes an advantage instead of a problem.

In what context would generating code faster not be a desired outcome?

Assuming of course everything else stays the same (quality, etc.)

It's not clear to me what "the middle class" is supposed to be here. All engineers exist on some spectrum between "good" and "bad" and it's pointless to try to identify the exact markings, but we all know good engineers and bad engineers.

So AI isn't really doing anything but giving sharper tools to both groups.

So, as it was before, we simply need to set expectations and remove those who cannot adapt and meet expectations... You know, the way it's always been.

So why is AI the problem here?

I'm filled with joy and it has nothing to do with my "mindset", I appreciate your concern though!

While it is tempting view all of human progress as some heroic feat of raging against the machine, it seems much more likely to me that progress came from accepting reality, and then working within the bounds of physics.

Well... Sleep and death are natural. I'm not convinced you see people "defend" death so much as (rightly) acknowledging the inevitability of it.

The latter half of your comment is rather smug, but I wouldn't look down on people who have peacefully accepted reality. Time is fleeting and we are but flowers in a field—briefly brightly bloomed and then withered.

My intent is to highlight that unless you have evidence of corruption, accusing people of bribery is just slander by another name.

I hold our politicians in no high regard, but I do hold myself to some standard in that I won't accuse someone of corrupt conduct unless I actually have evidence.

The point being, it's laughable to slander someone else's morality while you lie to posture your own.

A bribe is in fact, so rare, that I'd assume one would have at least a bit of evidence to present that accusation.

Or is this one of those, "I don't like that person, so I'll just make stuff up" things?

Can you expound? I've heard nothing of any bribery around the Memphis data center.

Prison is where we put people who have broken laws. A zoo is primarily where we put animals who are incapable of surviving in the wild.

It is also a place where the next generation can learn the wonder and beauty of nature.

They also tend to work closely with conservation efforts worldwide.

So... yeahhh, no. Not at all the same.

They want it to look more full because no one likes watching the Titans suck wind year after year, so the old stadium was laughably empty when the cameras panned over the stands.

I'm not joking. This is the reason I heard for them making it smaller.

Do you have proof that people are bribing the federal government to ignore federal law?

That seems like quite the accusation and I haven't heard anything about that.

You can summarize this roughly by comparing art for its own sake versus art for a purpose. If I need software for a purpose, I don't care how it is crafted, only that it is crafted well. But if I care about the art of code done well, then obviously the means matter.

I find that a lot of "pro-AI" folks are very much doing software for the ends (myself included) and in the past, we were happy with the "means" primarily because there was no other way. The "anti-AI" folks are, as mentioned, mostly in the camp of caring about the means equally with the ends.

Lots of nuance here, but those buckets seem to generalize pretty well (so far) in my experience.

You literally did not read the article.

I'm glad to have found this site. Though it's obviously AI-generated, the research itself is solid (I've checked).

I'm using it to avoid enshittified brands in the future.

Why stop there? No true developer needs more than 32k!

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Jesting aside, I cannot think of a single session in recent memory that used less than ~70k tokens, so I presume you are joking.

Nature != Good

We miss that much of the time, and it causes all manner of suffering.

> That’s the entire point. They would have bought a cheaper phone

This kinda sounds like, "We should make it hard for people to make poor financial decisions." Which seems like an answer completely orthogonal to the problem at hand.