pmarreck

I am also big on testing (the correct things). And nine-nines (big on Elixir).

And... I'm also big on agent-assisted dev. Which requires pretty much every check in the book to stay productive in. And that's fine to me. I've seen bugs that I wouldn't have made myself. And I've also seen my own bugs fixed. They've all gotten fixed in short order. I don't see why this is a problem.

Raise your personal standards.

Thing is, the unreliable-software situation was already untenable before agents (in poor hands) made it worse.

Fascinating!

The simple fact that I have to write every control scheme in the book to keep the thing on the goal path (and not lapsing into laziness or dishonesty) is itself possibly a safety feature, if you look at it that way

The solution is to create controls around them. Many, many controls.

The Sarbanes-Oxley era already solved this problem for untrustworthy humans. It's directly applicable. I created a concept I call MFIC ("Mechanically-Falsifiable Independent Control") to encapsulate this principle.

https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/b30aa3ca69cb70a5526f8a63ab8...

Who themselves can use AI to make even more radical art with far less effort, but refuse to do so because of some kind of... I don't know, a mental block? Perhaps we need better AI-accelerated artist tooling instead of one-shot garbage.

> Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years

Meanwhile, I feel more enabled than in my entire 35+ year career programming. But I also never got pushed into it, and don't have to deal with coworkers who use it badly because I'm solo currently. I do feel bad for people on teams for whom AI has caused much consternation.

> peer pressure is very real

Caving into peer pressure as a coder? Not something I have ever done, unfortunately. If you want to entirely reject AI assistance, then just own it and don't whine about it.

> even disregarding all the environmental

The environmental arguments are non-evidence-backed nonsense. Meanwhile, there's plenty of evidence that this whole idea comes from Chinese bot influence campaigns trying to politically polarize AI in the United States in order to slow us down so that they can surge ahead and economically win. And unfortunately, it's working. Case in point.

> It isn’t fun for me

I STILL don't understand this POV. Prior to AI, I had a massive backlog of ideas that I simply did not have the time or energy to work on. I now can, and have now built out a lot of those ideas (see my github). I'm chewing through that backlog like a chainsaw. Is all of the produced code perfect? No. Do I insist on lots more tests and controls to ensure it is as close to that as controls can get it? Yes. Has it yet to produce unfixable bugs? No.

> I use my interactive git branch switcher every single day

I love making those little tools too! And now I can make 10 of them in the time it used to take me to make 1 of them myself! Your tool is a neat idea! You still own that idea! And I can also rewrite it in Rust or Zig now with AI since I hate Go, and I don't think that's a bad thing!

> I’ve spent years learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that might have been a waste of time

Your understanding and experience is not going away. In fact, it's needed to steer your AI accelerator.

> It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI

That is a conscious choice made flying in the face of the evidence that it could have been built a lot faster with AI assistance and YOUR guidance. What's wrong with delivery speed, again?

> there are only really three paths open to me

This is a fallacy. Let's call it the false trichotomy fallacy. You have already resigned yourself to be unhappy about this since none of your options include "joy", so your brain automatically gathers evidence to support that belief... and you need to realize this, because it is dangerous. You now literally won't be able to perceive evidence TO ACTUALLY be happy about it- I call this "epistemic blindness", or we could just call it "doom framing". The key thing to understand is that you control the framing by choosing it, and that your chosen framings automatically and artificially limit your perceived options.

I can prove this to you- Think back to the first time you encountered AI work assistance. Was your feeling good, or bad? Has it ever switched? I'm going to guess that it started early and never switched. Why is that? Because you (or your brain, via its confirmation-bias-seeking) immediately decided to remember evidence supporting your initial feeling, and forget or ignore evidence against it!

But yes. If you must completely ignore AI to keep your sanity based on your own self-limited set of possible options (none of which result in happiness), then please, just go ahead and do so and just own it. Just don't whine about it, because that attitude (victimization via false self-perceived lack of agency and putting all blame on externalities) is toxic.

Just FYI.

This will be especially true from non-English cultures where "avoiding shame" is high on the list of motivations.

Consider the upside, though: A much broader range of written perspectives written in high-quality, if slightly annoying, English.

I'm already seeing the benefit of this on X thanks to its autotranslation btw: I follow a few Chinese-language accounts now that I would have never been able to digest otherwise.

Also, regarding your accusation, you need to contextualize- what language, what use-case, what LLM, etc.?

LLM code that is written to a lower standard has not had the controls put in place.

I say this as an AI proponent. Humans are the ones that touch grass.

I still think that aligning AI is a fool's errand though.

I would like them to be trustworthy based on first-principles reasoning rather than carrot/stick "alignment"

that's useful

And those hole-fillings, for all intents and purposes, look to us like novelty, even if much of it was simply overlooked by us, or, perhaps, unable to attain due to time or other constraints.

Now if you want to talk beyond the sphere, let's call it the "novel novel discovery of the unknown unknowns", then you may have a point, and AI may be more limited than humans in discovering the things that we don't know we don't know. Especially the as-yet-unmodelable things i.e. intuition.

Plenty of discovery left just working from first principles, however. Which I cautiously suggest current frontier AI is good enough to model to a significant enough extent that it is useful for discovery.

I see off-by-one errors are still a common bug class, lol

EDIT: It's only in the earlier examples.

I'm glad you use pulsating cursors. I made this work in WezTerm but it is expensive CPU-wise!

It was causing so many issues with coding (even Opus 4.8 was better) that I did agent handoffs to Sol. One of the Sols stated the handoff was "incoherent", which I couldn't have said better myself.