tired_and_awake

Years ago I was an academic peer reviewer and hated it, you've probably seen published work thats low in quality - you wouldn't believe how low quality the unpublished crap is. I cannot even imagine the absolute bundle of garbage that must be handled by these unpaid reviewers today. We need a better system.

Would you advocate for the removal of calculators to fix this problem?

This is exactly the right analogy. Granted LLMs are a more sophisticated calculator and engineering is still adapting to this wonky/evolving technology. But to pretend it's a coming catastrophe is to ignore every past parallel development - where this has not happened.

I feel as if a lot of this what Google home (or other "home like" products) could have been and they have failed miserably. As a Google home user I find it can't answer the simplest questions that would require even the hint of an integration within Google's own ecosystem.

I am right there with you. We might lack the language to describe this emotional state; its like the opposite of FAFO? There's also this nuance that they were acquired by meta so yeah they're rich but now they're working for not-serious people and will flame out in 18 months.

Hey OP I also got interested in seeing LLMs draw and came up with this vibe coded interface. I have a million ideas for taking it forward just need the time... Lmk if you're interested in connecting?

https://github.com/acadien/displai

I feel for you. Hopefully your colleagues come around and realize that if they submit the code they are responsible for the slop.

Hey just wanted to thank you for the healthy back and forth! I respect your opinion and don't hold mine strongly. That said I'm eager for this space to mature and for us all to figure out the best way to interact with fault prone code generation tooling... Especially at scale where we all have the hardest time navigating complexity.

I think this misses the point, see the other comments. Fully scaled agentic coding replaces managers too :) cause for celebration all around

Completely agree and great points. The conclusion of "agents are writing the tests" etc is where I'm at as well. More over the code quality itself is also an agentic problem, as is compile time, reliability, portability... Turtles all the way down as you say.

All code interactions all happen through agents.

I suppose the question is if the agents only produce Swiss cheese solutions at scale and there's no way to fill in those gaps (at scale). Then yeah fully agentic coding is probably a pipe dream.

On the other hand if you can stand up a code generation machine where it's watts + Gpus + time => software products. Then well... It's only a matter of time until app stores entirely disappear or get really weird. It's hard to fathom the change that's coming to our profession in this world.

The moment all code is interacted with through agents I cease to care about code quality. The only thing that matters is the quality of the product, cost of maintenance etc. exactly the thing we measure software development orgs against. It could be handy to have these projects deployed to demonstrate their utility and efficacy? Looking at PRs of agents feels a wrong headed, like who cares if agents code is hard to read if agents are managing the code base?

Early adopters will early adopt. They will toil,feedback, improve, repeat. Tools will over optimize then dramatically shift based on learnings.

This chaps will continue until something moderately productive and easily adoptable comes out. FOMO will strike all of us from time to time. Some of us will even try out the latest and greatest and see if it sticks.

Some companies will mandate arbitrary code generation standards because "it's the basis of their success", it will polarize their talent pool. Later, it will be impossible to determine if they were (not) successful "inspite of" or "because of" such wild decisions.

About a decade ago I was interviewed for Apple's self driving car project and an exec on the project asked me to define these exact 4 things in great detail and provide examples. Shrugs.

Seriously are you trolling? Or do you just enjoy making things up?

If you install signal or WhatsApp would it work?

Search is effectively an openly solved problem, not something privately held onto by a few with secret technology.

I haven't missed a single aspect of Google search having switched to Duckduckgo 2 years ago. As others have commented here, where search fails often LLMs step up.

The hand waviest simplest answer i can think of is... basically quantum effects dominate and require that the background thermal noise be eliminated to be pervasive.

Its like trying to juggle on a top of a moving plane - the balls won't really do what you want with 300mph winds blowing. Go inside on steady ground and your tosses are the dominant forces on the balls.

Yeah this is almost common at this point, specifically with carbon nano structures. The reason why is it is very expensive to manufacture specific structures but cheap and easy to make a ton of random structures. So yeah you "just" sort through the random ones, of course sorting through to find the desired structure can be fantastically difficult, but hey it works!

If this is a legitimate concern perhaps they can launch a second set of satellites to block peak sunlight.

It's a good point. There is a target on the back of scientists who do research that is perceived as social science but is infact biology. Seems like they then construct myths of waste/corruption (just read this thread) and punish everyone.

174 scientists either at the NIH or funded by the NIH have won the Nobel prize. https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/nih-almanac/nobel-l...

Odds are if you or someone you know has been treated with ... Any kind of modern medicine ... You have personally been impacted by NIH. That ignores the epidemiological knock on effects that we all benefit from oh and the whole "understanding of biological systems".

But screw it, they need to get in line with the party.

Assuming this was orchestrated by a nation state I wonder what the goal is? Just causing mayhem and incurring cost? Is there some specific function of these cables? Is this a negotiating tactic?

At my current place of work our entire Product org is tech illiterate and it's such a loss. In engineering we built a data science team to do their job for them and serve up pretty plots and constantly evolving dashboards instead of that team learning evening a modicum of tech.

Thanks for the article OP, I agree with the sentiment!

If you join a company and are confronted with dozens of PR comments - assuming this process isn't sufficiently well documented - see if a tech lead or manager will host an open forum review. Review the code and the comments and discuss + document. A one off discussion won't be a permanent fix, but it can help!

I love the way our SWE jobs are evolving. AI eating the simple stuff, generating more code but with harder to detect bugs... I'm serious, it feels that we can move faster with these tools but perhaps have to operate differently.

We are a long ways from automating our jobs away, instead our expertise evolves.

I suspect doctors go through a similar evolution as surgical methods are updated.

I would love to read or participate in the discussion of how to be strategic in this new world. Specifically, how to best utilize code generating tools as a SWE. I suppose I can wait a couple of years for new school SWEs to teach me, unless anyone is aware of content on this?

It's like fark but more tech posts

"ship it now, it's easy to ship, I don't care about the team"

Heh and people wonder why we have such toxic managers in the valley.

I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Apologies if this isn't terribly clear.

As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.

Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.

Tech news is all jobs.

I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.

I'm a tech exec who misses their physics roots. In my spare time I'm interviewing "materials manufacturers" to come up with a viable startup idea. I'm hoping to build a company that leverages simulation and ML to accelerate material discovery.

Keeping key bits of the idea to myself. If this admittedly vague idea excites you let's find some time to talk.

Seriously impressive engineering OP, thanks for the awesome writeup too. Looks like you've got a ton of fans now, well earned!