unknownfuture

> If they exclusively work on open source stuff where are they getting money from to survive?

These are orthogonal. One can have a paid job while contributing to open source for entirely altruistic reasons.

> Follow the money trail… even a donation… eventually it leads to an incentive based source or action.

BS. Humans do things for altruistic reasons devoid of individual reward all the time.

I, myself, maintain multiple OSS projects entirely for fun and with the hope that others will find it useful. That's it, that's all. I also donate entirely anonymously to charities simply because I believe others deserve support and dignity.

This form of cold, American libertarianism you espouse is pure poison in the body politic, both in this US and globally. It degrades all of human interaction to transactions. Its no wonder that the US is where sociopaths like Zuck were birthed.

Then take her to court for libel and prove it. Facebook execs have absolutely not earned the benefit of the doubt, here.

I... use them all the time: plan with a more advanced model, build with a cheaper one. Anthropic literally packages a metamodel (opusplan) for that pattern.

Also: calling the SV blitzscaling strategy of using VC money to fund loss leader products with the goal of building a monopoly via dumping a conspiracy is quite the position given there's entire books written in the topic...

Is... this comment also satire?

Cognitive surrender evidencing itself en masse? :D

It... really couldn't? Step 3 in this fictional chain would never happen with a HITL.

I honestly can't tell with comments like this whether folks have too much respect for AI, or to little respect for people...

You're absolutely right!

(In all seriousness it seems this is the dream of a huge number of AI pilled execs dreaming of infinite velocity at a fraction of the cost... velocity pointed where, you ask? Well stop asking or you'll be next.)

It says a lot about the industry today that this post is somehow running afoul of Poe's Law...

You're ignoring threat modelling.

If I keep a KeepassXC database on a set of devices, sync'd using syncthing, then for a large range of threats I'd need to be a target of interest.

This is in contrast to LastPass which is going to attract a ton of blackhat attention.

Yes, supply chain attacks are possible but they're equally possible for lastpass.

Switching to a self-hosted solution isn't perfect. Nothing is, and pointing that out isn't particularly useful.

What it does do is eliminate whole class of threats: large scale, broad based attacks against a single, high value target.

In fact I'd argue writing passwords down in a notebook or putting them in a naked text file on your computer is better than trusting a centralized service like LP.

Of course, if you are a target of interest, the calculus changes entirely.

Right. Because Fox was fair and balanced before Obama came along...

So then what's your experience in your current place of work?

You're being uncharitable. I don't read it as intentionally FOMO inducing. I read it as the exhausted sigh of resignation from someone who sees where the wind is blowing whether they like it or not. I see it as someone watching tech management and execs listening rapt as Boris pours the poison of AI maximalism in their ears. I read it as someone who sees developers around them either drinking from that same poisoned well or bowing under the pressure from those leaders to adopt AI or lose their livelihoods.

It is true that the author is incorrect: you can certainly opt out, but you won't be opting out of AI, you'll be opting out of the industry.

> The industry will realize that while getting LLMs to write code is easy, getting LLMs to write good, production ready code is a skill all on its own, which simply must be done by a human and is not automatable to an LLM in any sense effectively.

I don't agree.

Here's the thing about poorly written code: it can work for a surprisingly long time.

And by the time it stops working, the people who built it or the leaders who drove it or the execs who insisted on it have probably moved on.

So no. I would in fact argue that, by and large, as long as the software appears to work, most business don't care about code quality, and slinging high quality, AI written code slower than another guy who spitting out garbage will lose in this new normal.

Yeah that's just the FOMO I'm talking about. Frankly, if your product is driven primarily by marketing you're already screwed.

Anyway, we're in this sh.t together so stay strong, keep your head up, and try not to compromise your ethics. The industry is seriously f.cked right now and it's going to be a rough ride for a while...

Do you? Is shipping features faster really going to make or break a business?

I know that's not your call but IME it's simply not true: rarely do products win by simply being faster than their competition at delivering more features to market.

But the AI age has led to a panic among leaders as FOMO has taken over the industry. I can only hope one day that fever breaks.

I'm not optimistic.

As someone with 20+ years of experience as well, can we agree that, if you're doing this for any code that really matters, that this is fundamentally irresponsible and, in some circumstances, unethical?

Suppose you were legally liable for your code misbehaving in a way that led to harm. Would you behave differently?

And do you do this by choice? Or is this the case of an employer forcing you to vibecoded while skipping your due diligence as the author of that code?

Kinda fascinating watching a fairly reasonable response get downvoted. The AI psychosis really is catching...

Incidentally I also don't understand the drive to scale up. Show me a successful tech company and I'll show you a company that won, not by delivering code the fastest, but by delivering the right product with the right features at the right time.

Hell, Anthropic itself is the perfect example: they're doing well because unlike their competitors they realized the real revenues come from enterprise not consumer. They're winning by identifying the right market and giving them the right product.

So then your response has nothing to do with the post.

The thesis of the post is (paraphrasing): "if an AI wrote it, and I don't immediately grok it or if the code quality is low, I throw it away, even if on the surface it seems to work, because simply 'working' isn't enough to say a piece of code is acceptable."

I'd add as a corollary "and therefore I would never want to be accountable for that code."

If you're reviewing every line then it sounds like you have no argument with the writer and I don't understand what your point is.

Your very first paragraph says:

> If you reject AI code that works then your mindset is still too hands on. Put another way - you still have some loops to work on taking yourself out of.

But if you do indeed "review every line" then you seem pretty damn in the loop yourself and I don't understand what you think taking oneself out of the loop is.

I mean, the reality is a ton of folks in the industry, myself included, are writing glorified CRUD apps in their day jobs. We're building into existing an codebase with established infrastructure and ways of working. What we're building isn't inherently complex or very interesting.

Meanwhile, those codebases often require a ton of boilerplate and drudgery to get anything done.

In these spaces it's very easy to read and comprehend AI generated output and review it fairly quickly. So the time savings from dealing with all that boilerplate and conforming with all that existing infrastructure are potentially substantial.

Frankly, if that's truly your flow, then you cannot possibly know if the code really does what you expect it to do.

"TDD" isn't some magic trick. The tests codify the expected behavior. But if you don't review them for correctness, if you let the LLM build them blindly, then you have no idea what those tests assert and can make no claims about whether the code then does what you expect.

That's fine. That's your choice.

But you have to acknowledge you've chosen to accept that you personally cannot vouch for the quality or correctness of that code.

I fully expect this to be the direction the industry goes, where increasingly complex systems exist that no human actually understands or can reason about.

I think it's bad for the industry. Very bad.

But I'm not making those decisions, so... it is what it is, I guess.

It's called "mileage". This new codebase doesn't have any. Who knows what gremlins lurk in some of its darker corners.

> The idea that AI companies scaremonger to sell models is a silly meme.

> Both OpenAI and Anthropic were founded by people who sincerely believed in the risk of out-of-control superintelligence.

This is not a contradiction.

These things can all be true:

1. That they were afraid of ASI

2. That they continue to be afraid of ASI

3. That they recognize that LLMs aren't in fact a path to ASI

4. That the current models aren't the existential danger they'd have us believe

5. That they're claiming they are because it makes for good marketing

I wouldn't understate advances in Melanoma treatment. Immunotherapies have absolutely changed the game in that space. It's not a curable cancer (few are) but it's far more treatable.

The same could be said for hard drugs.

It can be simultaneously true that a large part of the public objects to a thing while the market generates profits from that very thing.

Of course the answer is for governments to step in as, as you point out, the AI-related companies are behaving as rational actors given their incentive structure.

This is basically an argument about revealed preference, and these things are always more complicated than that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

I'd prefer they use cheap and available renewables rather than accelerating climate change. But to each their own I guess.

(And to head it off at the pass: if that can't be done then this should be done at all)

And my CTO insists that PR count isn't a performance metric. But guess what number gets used the minute people are forced to stack rank (of course they don't call it that, but... that's basically what it is)?

You get what you measure.

For junior developers, I absolutely agree that's a major risk, and it's something I'm deeply worried about as these tools take over the industry, as understanding those details helps inform why a given architecture is needed.

For someone who's been around the block a few times, there's little new under the sun. Coming up with good architecture for a problem space and having the LLM fill in the details is incredibly effective as a pattern.

That said, tbh I'm not sure why we keep exchanging messages. Your other comment about coding with AI assistance as being akin to buying a statue tells me you have either never coded with an agent, and so think it's a simple matter of saying "build me a to-do app" and then calling it a day, or you're experienced with these tools and deliberately misrepresenting the process.

If it's the former, then we don't share enough understanding to have a healthy conversation, and if it's the latter then there's little point in arguing with someone who insists in doing so in bad faith.

What, that my personal project quality was low?

Yes! It absolutely was (and in many cases still is)! Both projects I've originated and projects I've inherited. I'm not ashamed to admit that. I build in my spare time to create things people (in particular myself) want to use, not to construct ivory towers of architectural purity.

Hell, I inherited maintainership of one gem that barely had a functioning test suite at all and is now at north of 85% coverage and is something I can now change with far greater confidence, and I recently forked a repo to work on another project that was a damned disaster that I massively refactored to make it clean and maintainable.

The world is absolutely full of janky side projects. Is that surprising to you? They're side projects, ffs, not five-nines planetary scale platforms.

> Indeed, however I would also point out that senior engineers have already been expected to be good at reading code: they were expected to evaluate the code quality of other contributors, so they had to be able to do that.

Yeah, but the frequency, volume, and complexity of that activity, and its ratio versus all the other work that a developer was previously expected to do, has shifted dramatically, not least because now we're having to review the output of our own coding agents as well as that of other developers on our teams.

As a consequence, folks who were marginal but capable at that skill now likely find themselves working beyond their ability.

> So, really, I think that for juniors it's actually much harder because if they want to do due dilligence they have to do the same evaluation but without the years of experience working with that code base. I can understand, even if I don't like it, that they just submit the output of the LLM for the senior to review.

Yup, couldn't agree more.