lol well i guess you can turn the whole kitchen into an oven with needle :)
But for real usecases you are able to set explicit minimum and maximum values on the output range of numeric arguments, so that you can avoid situations like these. In this case it was hard for us to do that while keeping a broadly appealing demo since celsius and fahrenheit have different "reasonable" output ranges.
Glad my arbitrary failure to try them has worked out! For people seeking OS-native harnesses, I can recommend Factory's Droid. I know I'll be returning to it with my head hung low today, after I uninstall ZCode.
It does have a "mission" feature that's stuck in the strange, distant times of 2025 by way overdoing mandatory verification steps, which means they don't support swarms/workflows/crews/fleets yet -- that is, it's all done in sequence. But they have the boring, corporate engineering attitude that I think we're are all craving rn, and generally seem competent.
I can heartily dis-recommend Vix, even though they gamed themselves to the top of at least one ranking site that shall not be named; exactly like the quasi-bad-faith incompetence described with OpenCode above, but without even the "Open-" branding! Though perhaps that word has been so thoroughly burnt as a prefix by Sam Altman & Microsoft's criminal behavior that we should let it go...
Is this how "FLOSS" wins over "OSS"? Not with an ideological bang, but with a marketing issue?
This is kinda beside the point and this whole thread may be wiped when dang wakes up and notices the AI slop article we're commending under, but your reply is thought provoking so I'll attempt a response anyway;
I'm sure you're far more experienced than I with basically every aspect of this discussion, but I'd argue that's given you a blindspot, here. I'll hit some specifics below, but the headline is that you're effectively taking a stand against Eternal September II -- a goal that I hope we can all agree would be quixotically antisocial, given what followed the first one!
we arguably do not want FLOSS to "win" over OSS
I think(/hope) that fellow FLOSS proponents would passionately disagree. FLOSS isn't a brand of chatroom, nor even merely a community: it's an ethos regarding labor, property, and liberty. Demanding that all users of your software are also activists for your particular take on intellectual property is clearly a doomed undertaking for anything beyond a toy or library, anyway.
Didn't you get into this stuff to change the world? To liberate the oppressed, undereducated, and forgotten with the radical power of the information superhighway? Cause it reads here like you're more motivated by selfishness (not wanting to bother talking to people with less expertise than you) and resentment. On that note...
They want that. They do it themselves all the time.
Here you equate "non-hacker people" with software engineers you don't agree with, it seems. You're ofc welcome to think companies X Y & Z produce "miserable-ness", but as absurd as it sounds, it sure seems like you've forgotten the fact that some users are not developers. Many, in fact! Over 99%, even!
Less confrontationally; my mom is in her late 60s, and is pretty computer-literate for her age after decades of knowledge work. Surely you'd agree that she's not, like, evil for using OSX, iOS, GMail, Word, etc.? That she didn't chose those things because of a philosophical commitment to defending IP laws, but rather because of structural reasons? Even if she were pro-IP, wouldn't we want to win good, well-meaning people to our side?
So let them have the "Open" prefix. It's just words, anyway.
I do agree with this still, but as a philosopher I just have to say that everything is just words. It's language games, in fact! Which is why I simply had to reply.
I hope none of the above was rude; I'm trying hard to keep my passion for this topic from pushing me past HN guidelines :)
Well I personally think we can find a middle ground between single-handedly saving "everyone" from poverty and addiction and oppression as social workers, and not letting anyone into our exclusive philosophy-of-property clubhouse. I would invite you to join us on this pro-social mission, but you seem perfectly content as-is!
Some people are still on Usenet after all (?), so I suppose it's not a big deal if a few people want to cling to old communities. I hope you don't mind if we use the word for what it was coined for though in the meantime, back in the real world.
To be frank, I'm not really interested in "joining" your thing there, when joining your thing usually means me doing the work while others get to decide on how it should be done and feel good about that it is being done as if it was their own achievement.
That said, spite has served me well so far, so maybe it can also serve you?
This is after all a great opportunity to prove me and my worldview wrong by simply putting in the work and creating what you seem to believe is the correct form of existing.
I can only encourage bringing your ideas into reality. Seriously. That is that whole Foss spirit thing.
You don't need to invite anyone (including me) to that to make it happen.
I'm glad i'm not the only one that noticed w/opencode.. I tried it a few times, every single time... it immediately went bad, didn't work, can't do anything simple like simple file edits.. yet somehow, there are thousands on the internet ready to tell me how great it is!
Opencode looks good in the terminal but that's really the only good thing about it.
We use opencode with self hosted llm for privacy reasons. Good, right? Well, no, because opencode by default uses a "free" cloud model to summarize all chats even if a different model was configured as the main one.
I wonder how many opencode users upload their private secrets to the cloud, while thinking they're using a self hosted model.
Btw. I don't think this is malicious, just sloppy.
I found it kinda interesting, even if it could have been written by an AI with extensive prompting on how to sound human.
I've been pondering a conceptually similar approach for keeping slop out of important git repos. The agent has its own slop repo that it can slop up as much as it likes for R&D, and then I transcribe what works into my clean repo (ensuring I understand it, in the process).
Tbf this is just you - a decent human being that actually has something to say - filling in not just "the blanks" but "the blank". The post of that account trying to build up an identity (see other posts + 0 comments) has nothing to do with that.
One could probably also give you words sampled from /dev/urandom and it might spark an actually interesting thought, but that doesn't give urandom any merit.
FWIW, I've been using a similar workflow as you describe, though the lines have been blurry at times.
I think you're right, but I also think that some of the best ideas come out of urandom, and the rest is just curation. I didn't find it interesting enough to upvote, but I wouldn't downvote it either.
> And then there’s also this startling progress that A.I. has been making in solving math problems that no normal people understand, but that even mathematicians who do understand the problems find to be important.
Reading this sentence, I've wondered:
Were the reactions similar back when computers were new?
There's this new tech that greatly accelerates stuff. And through that, what was previously considered hard to solve got easier to solve.
Wasn't it always the case that technology suddenly did faster than experts limited to the technology of their time did?
And didn't those experts always think that the problems it could solve are important?
Why else build the technology? Is that not why we're building this in the first place?
__
The only real difference I see is this "sentience" stuff leading to the whole "omg it does things on its own", and that by now has been discussed, debunked and flamewared over ad-nauseam.
Can we please stop.
The only thing sentient, making decisions and - most importantly - being accountable is whoever prompts the thing.
If it prompts itself, then that's the person that built the loop software that does that.
It really is not that hard.
If whoever does that doesn't want to take accountability then we have solutions for that. They're called "a large stick".
There were a subset of problems in math that could only be brute-forced by computers because the number of possibilities are too much for humans to reliably calculate and then verify. An early example of this was Euler’s Sum of Powers Conjecture that was disproven (1966) and then The Boolean Pythagorean Triples Problem proven more recently (2016). A more practical example is prime number generation. These all were because of computer algorithms and I don't know why they are not discussed more in the context of AI solving math.
The number of decidable math problems that brute-force algorithms can solve have shrunken smaller and smaller every year because of the increases in processing capabilities. We could frame AI generated solutions to yet unsolved math problems as the next generation of these algorithms.
> Outside of a few vocal people trying to enforce the status hierarchy, most people don’t care who releases their jailbreak or PS5 exploit. They just want it. Whoever gets it to them first becomes the new king.
"Commodification" might be a relevant word here.
You can fight that by "building a personal brand", but then you're suddenly brand building instead of hacking, and hacking was what you actually wanted to do.
I guess it works best if you're not in it for clout but because you want something to exist. But even then it is difficult.
> There were also 3 people who found the same exploit independent and some large amount of money on the line for the first of them to report it.
> Hobby groups projects like this are less fun for a lot of people who used to enjoy interacting with smart people
It is insane just how miserable the experience of FOSS hardware hacking in public is.
The expectation does not even the slightest match reality.
You'd think "ah yes many eyes meaning all bugs get shallow", but instead you get worst of XDA-Developers and toxic wastelands where no sane person even answers anymore.
But this predates LLMs and was as miserable as it is now before as well.
In fact, I might even argue that LLMs made this _better_, because you can now avoid the "opening up in hopes of finding 1 helpful person below 99 annoying ones" through simple GPU compute.
Previously, you had to hope that through this self-inflicted horror, you'd find an expert that can augment you. Now that expert rests on huggingface.
It's still.. not perfect, of course. But it might be less miserable - provided that you adapt to the current state of things and stop with the "trawling for volunteers".
__
Of course, this does not help you against "skids let claude find bugs that you'd need and burn it for no reason" as per the twitter thread, but I wouldn't rule out that they would not have done that, if less information was public.
And.. that too was an issue before LLMs.
Information wants to be free, but so does your cat, and your cat gets run over by some crackhead in a 30 year old rusty pickup if you just put it outside without thinking.
So don't let it go out unattended.
That said, this "pep talk" is more directed at myself than at poor Andy.
This must all suck big time.
Isn't the problem just that open source, by it's very nature, is low quality since it comes from the unix-like ecosystem where everything is built atop everything else. So inevitably when the skid comes to you with a bug you can say "ah that's a bug in a specific build of your shell with these environment variables, myyyy code is clean as a whistle, minimal, and follows best practices" (if we ignore that in practice it depends on a billion different programs versions all of which are incorrect)
Complaining about the inevitable toxic noise when the same boneheaded development decisions are made over and over like everyone has gone insane. You don't have to build a death trap on the land your cat and children roam.
People are using AI to write code. But HN is the wrong place to try to figure out how much they are using it. This site is full of bots and shills and has become a wasteland since AI. You can tell by the way they make short super confident (even ridiculous) statements in order to try to bully the insecure into buying into the hype. It matches exactly the patterns you used to see with crypto. Even the more subtle comments are often lacking in any kind of specifics. Of course there are some genuine AI users also but the point is that the overall volume of comments is completely unrepresentative of reality.
The tradgedy is that HN used to be a great place to get honest and well argued opinion and anecdotes about new technologies and the different tradeoffs etc.
I think the combination of YC being “a place for founders” and the proliferation of useless AI startups, each with its own little weird AI-booster founder, probably has added to this phenomenon as well.
I recently saw a video where one of these founders showed their “programming” setup, and it was a cashier’s microphone wherein he whispers sweet nothings to the LLM, because of course he doesn’t write code anymore (who even reads code nowadays, am I right?!). I think this is the type of individual who’s lost in the bubble sauce that ends up writing the most absurd comments around here.
How do you know these are bots and not Redditors? There's an HN sub on Reddit, and one of the hallmarks of Reddit are the 'mic drop' big pivotal one liner comments that get upvoted or cause lots of replies or engagement.
But I do feel, to reply to you, that crypto was a lot more critically received on HN than AI is right now. We're too busy debating humanity's end rather than if this crap actually works.
For those of us who actually work with technology (not product managers, executives or salespeople, this stuff doesn't work well at scale. It might in a research department at Google or a hedge fund, less so in the messy corporate world.
I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections from my long career in the industry. Everyone else is using coding agents too.
I don't think I could find a job in my industry if I tried that didn't want me to write code using coding agents.
Obviously I can't prove any of this, so try emailing a recruiter and test it for yourself.
From what I can tell, a lot of newly registered users are equally as vehemently against AI as there are those that are pro. I guess we see things through our own personal filter.
That depends on how you see it. I started off studying physics, but transitioned to CS. I found I was good at CS and loved tinkering, but the tinkering was always for the exploration of problems. That was always the point, not typing characters on a screen.
I admit, there is/was a certain element of enjoying the zone during development sessions. But mostly, it was the problems, not the tool.
I happened to become good at coding, and good at doing it in a corporate setting, so I adapted my habits, learned to write the best sort of code that keeps a production system solid and fast. But as I say, typing the characters was never really the point. Now a very fast assistant helps me type the characters. I guide it very closely. A lot of the time I have to correct it. Often if I know it is going to probably take a wrong direction I'll write the skeleton of the code I want, write the skeleton of the tests to prove it, and give it this as a "spec". This gets fantastic results.
Yes, it is a waste of time right now not to use AI to write code.
It's the same category of "artisan code" like "artisan cheese": you can do it if you have a ton of free time as a hobby but other than a hobby? Not worth it.
I still have to remind Ai not to use the n+1 pattern in queries, and fight it to stop using inconsistent inline styles vs classes, even within a single page.
How are people getting this "waste of time not to use AI" and "generates 99% of my code" level of code quality?
I know people's response will likely be something, something, "add instructions to memory to not use n+1", etc. But if the Ai wants to generate code this bad, then it represents an overall quality risk that would require an infinite memory file.
I've been developing a suspicion that many people simply aren't looking at what their agents produce and can't speak to the quality of it in a fully informed way.
For context, I've set up harnesses with recursive automated review loops, spec driven development, explicit lists, better models, better harnesses, formal methods tooling, etc. All of it helps, but they don't eliminate output issues. Those become very apparent when I go through the slow, manual work of deeply comprehending / validating LLM code.
And that leads me to one of three conclusions. Either my standards are achievable only by hyperintelligent programming gods, I have a skill issue using LLMs, or others aren't applying the same level of attention.
The first is obviously untrue. I meet my own standards and I'm an idiot. The second seems unlikely because I can see my competent coworkers and well-regarded people in the community discussing the same issues. So that leaves the third.
If you assume that programmers’ skills follows a bell curve, the typical output will not be better than the average. And that leads directly into your third conclusion: average programmers just do not put in the effort. That’s literally part of what makes them average.
Unfortunately most people just treat it as a job. And indeed, it is a job for most people. Not all farmers love gardening and all in their free time. It's just a livelihood. For me I like programming but honestly for my job I can't be assed to do it by hand anymore. It looks good enough, screw it, it's not like they pay me extra to produce handwritten code. When the whole org is pushing down this one path you know it's time to dgaf
It works if you neglect code quality and understanding. I've done a few vibe coded projects on my free time but I would feel shame for submitting that kind of code at work where I use LLMs more responsibly.
You previously asserted that devs repeatedly ignored specific code quality instructions, which is clearly a fireable offense. You're now generalizing out to a vague concept of "sloppy code", which is not even quantifiable.
In any case, the point is that low quality code shouldn't be promoted as the acceptable goal for AI.
The truth is people just don't seem care about code quality anymore (if they ever did?). I don't think it generates great code (yes even using the state of the art, frontier, super max pro 9000 turbo boost ++ models), but it usually generates code that works. Sadly, that's all that most of the people in charge care about. I mean shit, half the time it doesn't even have to work great, look at the state of a lot of modern software. People complain about it all the time. Quite sad, but that seems to just be the state of things these days.
I don't think corporate ever gave a shit about code quality. Honestly if there weren't building codes skyscrapers would be made with the cheapest shit that didn't collapse immediately and your house would be made of cardboard. Similarly if users were OK with buggy crap or if they had no choice (e.g. windows) then you can get away with lots of crap.
You could only argue about it when an engineer was in charge and even so when they're high up enough the pressures and incentives are to just ship fast and break stuff. Not every company can afford to be a NASA making uncrashable code that runs for 100 years and goes to pluto and all.
It’s quite an uncanny alignment with Nvidia and other semiconductor companies that benefit from their customers to bloating software and buying as many of their chips with no real thought given to efficiency of the runtime.
Probably the largest part is that this kind of code quality is not that important to a lot of devs and applications. Personally I would not describe the majority of code I work on as particularly hard, the challenge was always in getting what I needed done efficiently as opposed to getting it done at all, and LLMs are extremely helpful for that. Though I think I'm more at 90% LLM-generated code, I still do spend a fair bit of time tidying up layout (and any user-visible prose).
It is imperative that the feature be shipped, damned be the quality of that which underlies its existence. And once that feature has indeed been shipped, the machine shall toil, and from its work there shall be thousands of lines born, and for the next feature: thousands more!
I agree that it's a waste of time, but I started to realize that doing it
a) puts be ahead of those people who don't, yes
b) but also diminishes my technical skills if I don't actively try to engage about what I'm "vibecoding" and proactively trying to understand it.
for your point a: writing code by hand puts you ahead of the people who don't write code by hand, eg, the people using LLMs to generate code? that doesn't make much sense assuming both of those personas are senior SWEs.
Yes, it's more like the people who agressively vibe-code and had lost interest in learning by doing, and instead are doing by vibecoding. I feel like they are starting to lose their technical ability.
The big AI tech companies are still interviewing people on manual coding tasks and deep understand, which when you're vibe coding a lot, you tend to diverge from those skills, because it's just easier to use AI to "help" you a lot.
If you already had a hand crafted codebase, a ton of miles on it, no real issue for a long time and customers who value some metric of quality then it might be worth crafting things by hand — if only for the bragging.
Thats you, don't assume everybody in the IT world works in code sweatshops like that. Your above ultra confident statements are also not correct across much of industry.
I always write my assembly by hand because nobody appreciates the craft anymore. It’s all hidden by those pesky compilers which generate extremely inadequate code that could easily be improved by some thinking on the programmer side /s
I do think a better programmer will be a better prompter just like a better compiler engineer will be a better programmer (when performance matters at least).
What is you are writing, what is the problem domain? What does need tens of thousands of lines of code written each day?
Because 100 lines of (debugged, reviewed) code per day is a good speed for seasoned software engineer. I assume that you can produce more than 100 lines of something per day as a prompt.
So, what is the problem domain that requires one to write several thousands of lines of code per day?
My comment was to match productivity of human programmer to claimed productivity of their use of LLM.
If they write 2 (two) lines of code, the combined output of them with LLM, as I read it now, is 20K SLOC. This is yearly output of human programmer.
It is very much possible to write 100 lines of (debugged, reviewed) code per day for human. And these 100 lines of code would result, if we apply their LLM multiplication factor, in 50 (fifty) man-years of work!
Even if they write very little code, say, one line per month, after a year of work they will get result of about 6 (six) years of human programmer. SQLite is 155K SLOC, about 8 man-years.
And that what raised my question: what is the problem domain that requires so much code?
Thing is, lines of code was never a good metric in software engineering (at least it shouldn’t have been). When people talk about “~% of code” I feel certain dissonance between what they’re measuring and what they’re actually doing. I mean, you certainly want to type less for working code, sure - that’s why programmers develop high level languages.
Maybe now we should consider how to code with AI and how well/terrible different approaches are doing. Just saying “99% by AI” doesn’t sound like a good way of saying things are replaced by AI. I mean a lot of things will be replaced by AI, but at least not because of/according to lines of code.
Everyone I have talked to who uses coding agents at all now uses them to write almost all their code.
The two people I know who don’t use coding agents work in government, and in a data science company working with government.
I’d say if you work at a tech company and agents aren’t writing the majority of your code, that is weird. But if you work at a traditional company that doesn’t have Claude or Codex subscriptions, there it might be pretty normal to still be writing code by hand.
Well in my personal projects I write all code by hand because people relying on agents will have forgotten how to do their fucking job in 3 years and then it will be appreciated to have people understanding what they're actually doing. That being said, in my job ai writes the code just because it's way faster.
Your "fucking job in 3 years" will be very different, and if you don't learn how to do it in time, you won't still have a job in the computer industry.
Pick an industry where you can stop learning new things once you're out of school, because the computer industry is not one of them and never has been.
My fucking job used to be writing 6502 assembly language on an Apple ][, and I loved it, but I hope I've forgotten enough of it to have room to learn new things. If only I could forget all those hex I/O and peripheral addresses from $C000-$CFFF and the Monitor ROM routines from $F800-$FFFF, without forgetting how brilliantly beautiful Woz and and Allen Baum's code is.
Forgetting old stuff to make room for new stuff is one of the most valuable skills you can have in this industry.
The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
You forgot to read the last line of my message, in my profession I utilize LLMs to a high degree, my point was, that in my free time I code by hand 1) because self esteem benefits from the process of problem solving 2) I want to understand the fundamentals to not feel like a fraud 3) there is no time pressure to perform.
People neglecting this side will inevitably become less proficient at their job and become rather helpless without AI, that's all I'm saying.
Yeah, I read it, and we don't disagree about your job.
You put a number on it at the top of the thread: three years until people relying on agents have
forgotten how to do the job. Copilot's technical preview was 2021, ChatGPT was November 2022, and
agents that write the majority of the code are a 2024-2025 thing. So the window you're predicting
is roughly the entire span in which these tools have existed, and the atrophy hasn't shown up in it.
For scale, the last ARM I wrote was for a Sony Clié and the last PowerPC for a Mac, both more than
two decades ago. If I needed to write ARM for my Mac now, I could brush up about as fast as I could
on the 6502 I mentioned upthread, most of whose opcodes, $C000 I/O addresses and monitor ROM entry
points I genuinely cannot recall any more. Two to four decades of not touching an instruction set
didn't cost me the fundamentals, and it hasn't made me less proficient in Python and TypeScript or
helpless without AI. Three years of using a good tool is not going to do it either.
There's also a distinction buried in your last line, because "people neglecting this side will
inevitably become less proficient" bundles two different things. Losing a skill you had is not the
same as never acquiring one, and only the second is an argument about tools.
So take acquisition. I've been learning PDP-7 assembly in order to recover, OCR, and analyze 128
pages of PIXIE assembly source and octal machine code that Heinz Lemke wrote at Cambridge in the late 1960s,
and get it running in an emulator. A language I never knew, with custom instructions for bespoke
networking hardware, no Stack Overflow, and almost nobody left to ask except Heinz himself. AI has
been extremely helpful for exactly that, and the understanding is still mine to build: I have to
predict what the machine will do, and catch the explanations that are wrong.
On feeling like a fraud: the test isn't whether you typed it, it's whether you can predict what it
does and fix it when it breaks. Plenty of hand-typed code fails that test and plenty of carefully
reviewed generated code passes it. Your reasons 1 and 3 are good reasons to hand-code, since
problem solving is genuinely fun and nobody is waiting on your free time, but reason 2 is
measurable, so measure it instead of trusting the feeling.
The atrophy you're worried about is real. It just isn't caused by the tool. It happens to people
who stopped wanting to learn, and that predates AI by decades, even millennia. I watched it happen
back when much of the industry ran on assembly language.
If you're not using AI to teach yourself new things, you're not holding it right.
You're not wrong and it really comes down to how the tool is used. People wanting a quick solution, thus skipping the learning process entirely out of either complacency or because they feel like they don't have the time or energy are more at risk of atrophy I'd assume.
Personally the tools have simply gotten too good to ignore so I have been thinking about how to write skills and prompts in a way that enable me to keep learning, overcoming friction and challenges and not simply using the tool for hand holding and jumping straight to the end result.
For me personally, what matters is the process of learning and mastery, my self esteem depends on it, and enriching that with AI instead of AI eradicating that process for the sake of efficiency is my current challenge.
The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now. I just don't know if it is in 3 years or more, because the market can stay irrational longer than I can foresee.
I saw this idea from elsewhere that the things AI helps with was never the "profit bottleneck" of companies. 10x engineering productivity gain does not translate to 10x more revenue if your profit bottleneck is customer acquisition and retention. In other words, your profit is limited by how many people are willing to give you money for your services and AI can't really affect that.
And even the productivity gains per individual is a generous assumption. An individual can only prompt (and check! You guys check right?) so much. Sooner or later the pendulum is gonna swing in the other direction and it will be cheaper to build a team than equip individuals with AI _to deliver the same value_. I'm also assuming that AI is still in the VC-subsidized pricing stage.
Hence why I think the job in the future is gonna be pretty similar to the job four years ago.
> The next most important skill is persistence ;) -- writing stuff down before you forget it, in a way that won't make future-you hate present-you when you need to learn it again.
Huge amen. Another thing I've found Claude very useful for is writing documentation for legacy systems and cleaning up my own notes on it. I only need Claude to be 70-80% correct because from there I can take it. That error margin is no different from moderately-outdated-but-still-useful documentation.
When that pendulum swings, I will have a documentation binder that I will print money with.
> The thing is I think there will come a time when AI tools will not be as accessible as they are now
I am very convinced that today's SOTA level will be accessible 3 years from now, but you might be right about the SOTA accessibility at that point in time.
Still with today's SOTA you need to know much less details to be able to write code than without it.
My (arguably not very directly communicated, true) actual point is that "weird" is a term that is not really suited for tool choices like this.
"Weird" is a social concept. It's an artifact that has its roots in social cohesion and friction induced by individual nodes to glue the group together.
Software development otoh is an engineering discipline (or.. it should be).
And Engineering does not use the local social consensus algorithm for determining correctness. (or.. it should not)
I think they just meant its weird as in if you met a software dev at a dinner party who was still writing all their code by hand it would raise an eyebrow and you’d want to enquire further why that is.
I think understand the purpose of this comment. I think you're sensing friction and you'd like to reduce that by explaining for the other guy. Which is a common social script, but one that is being exploited here I'd say.
But, regardless, what is interesting I think is the scenario chosen there. Because a "dinner party" is not where engineering happens; and that's kinda the point I was getting at.
That's pulled from the pool of "social consensus" and not "math" or "physics" or whatever.
It's interesting, isn't it?
Just like how specific tokens in the context window of LLMs pull probabilities towards specific clusters of ideas (and tokens); with humans, you see similar things happen.
(This comment is more coherent than it might look at at first sight.)
___
Anyway, point (and to the point) is: Don't get hacked by the current thing fraudsters/grifters.
They don't respect you or me or really anyone the slightest. They're just in it to get rich quick (or simply just inflict psychological damage for sadistic reasons), and they will use any means necessary to do so.
This comment chain only exists because some hype guy is trying to induce FOMO into people for not doing more AI.
Why is unclear, but it's clearly malicious. Whether they consciously know that they are doing that doesn't matter for that assessment.
I think LLMs just allow you to get to where you want to get to quicker. So in a productivity oriented world it seems weird to not be making use of them where those gains can be had.
Let me try another analogy:
AI-related comment sections are like a watering hole for both get-rich-quick grifters, but also bad people wanting to hurt others.
The technology is so disruptive that there are all sorts of opportunities while stuff is still developing, things aren't regulated, and people themselves have not yet learned how to self-regulate.
So if you're looking to make money or to just inflict pain onto others, you're pulled towards this stuff.
This is what I am seeing in this specific comment sub-tree. A troll.
But in current year, you cannot just call people trolls, so instead you get these elaborate meta comments that bypass the anti-anti-troll defenses, but get so abstract, people just go "what".
My advice would be to view any of these comment sections through a zero-trust lens.
Godspeed. We will all eventually get through this.
Software can be an engineering discipline doesn't change whether it's a human doing it or AI doing it.
Arguably engineering is something AI should be really good at since you're just trying to compute a working product given constraints, formulas, resources.
Maybe "unusual" or "uncommon" would be better terms here.
I definitely wouldn't put it at 99% of developers, but I'd say it is the norm among developers I know that agents are their primary mode of writing code now (still using IDEs and GitHub to review changes).
While this can work, especially for disposable code, doing this for non-disposable code is going to set you up for a very very _very_ rough awakening, the moment the models fail or your access to them fails.
Make sure to regularly validate that what you think you understand is still what you actually understand.
One can only safely offload so much.
I mean, thanks, but the PR was 60 lines of code and I've been doing this for over a decade, so I know how to critically evaluate the output.
I don't want to do this, for what it's worth. But my company has gone all in, I'm pretty sure our C suite has psychosis, and if I don't use it I'm seen as lesser.
I'm not planning to do this much longer. If I can't find a real SW engineering gig again soon I'm switching careers (to what - idk yet). Capable models or not, I don't want to be a manager, I want to solve problems, and they took the best part of my job from me.
I spent the time it was churning practicing drawing.
> Every LLM has a persona. My opinion is that Claude’s training guardrails are constructed in a way it truly believes Humans are stupid. It always wants to play the contrarian: the Human is wrong, they don’t know what they’re doing, I must correct them.
Well, yeah. Conway's law.
Claude's image and perception of humanity is a reflection of Dario's image and perception of humanity.
If you read that guy's writing, hear him talk and all that, you will see it.
From an outsiders perspective, Matt's claims of comment sections like this one being heavily astroturfed do sound somewhat credible.
Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised - and then nothing else other than implying that corporate processes are correct and you are to shut up.
Are there real people with opinions about this?
I'd like to hear them.
> Every single one of them I saw so far has the same bad faith attacks, claiming that that guy's mental health would be compromised…
That's because the substantive discussion happened in 2024 when this whole mess started. He was commenting here - which resulted in screenshots showing up in federal court filings - in deeply unwise fashion.
Do you still happen to have any links there? Or pointers of phrases or similar.
This would check out indeed for me, as it would invoke the same responses as an astroturfing campaign in normal people, as the whole "social cohesion" stuff would pull them towards trying to shut stuff down and re-establish coherent reality. By any means necessary and as they see fit.
So that's a hypothesis that would satisfy the data given.
I see what you mean with "unwise", though, I would not say that it would validate the bad faith attacks I'm seeing.
After all, all he did there is show his hand, which (possibly) hurt him in court.
I suppose the takeaway there is that page 24 proves that his intent was to do harm, and that's why there's this counter-reaction by people that feel harmed, but that still makes stuff exactly as bad faith as it smells.
But we do not need to discuss this further (unless you have further thoughts), as stuff now makes sense to me.
If you're coming to this late you may be missing the history, which is that Wordpress seemed to abuse every power at its disposal to force a third party company out of its ecosystem unless they "paid up", a demand associated with no formal process or agreement or contract of any kind which brought avalanches of negative press and a lawsuit to Wordpress.
In the aftermath of that news, he personally wrote blog posts and participated in comment sections, getting deep into the weeds of arguments and going into personal attacks in ways that seemed unflatteringly blow back on him. And seemingly neutral third parties watching these events have found his actions hard to justify and he seems to have alienated a lot of the Wordpress ecosystem (though by no means all and it's hard to quantify that kind of thing).
And here, if you read the article (and if the article is basically right in its details), he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play. I don't think unhinged is a controversial characterization of his choices both to flex power and get into personal attacks leading up to this point, and this seems like yet another entry.
So try looking at the face value of the events being reported before treating the reaction like it must be astroturfing. If you don't read about it, you won't have the context to know what the comments are reacting to.
> he seems to be outrightly defying a decision of his own board in a brazen power play.
There are a lot of people in this comment section repeating this as if it was an act of heresy, but I kinda do not see why one would do that?
I'd like to see terms like "unhinged" to stay reserved for non-made-up structures. Stuff where someone genuinely harms other people and not just their financial wants/needs/etc.
The board itself of course wants people to believe that it has power and not following its orders is wrong, but that's just.. their opinion. And they rely on someone actually believing that.
It is genuinely weird to me to keep reading this, because it's normal people defending how power structures in which they are not winning work. Why would one do that? What do you care if a board is respected?
I kinda get the general desire for "order" thing and all, but boards - generally speaking - do not get there through merit or a democratic mandate, nor do they act in the interest of normal people, so.. why care if he pisses his board off?
Care to the degree that is being cared here, I mean.
Should he be doing this? Probably not.
But the immediate "victim" of it is most likely just a group of people with equally deep pockets doing exactly the same kind of brazen power play. I don't see why that would get strong emotions out of normal workers.
Unless of course it's not them at all. Hence that suspicion.
__
I've consulted the LLM about this, and while doing so, I've remembered that Boards usually are full of VCs, and YC is VC, so.
Yeah, I can see why not respecting the board would be seen as heresy here. Weird how all the money in the world cannot buy one everything, huh?
I would recommend working on control over your attention. You've gone from saying negative reaction was "heavily astroturfed" to acknowledging he should not be doing this and you've gone from that to drifting into first impression shower thoughts about how boards work, apparently learning about the facts your commenting on for the first time every step of the way.
I think I can tell from how you're talking about boards that you're underestimating how many there are, how varied they are (non profits, community theaters, land trusts, boring but non-scandalous corporate governance) and how diverse their cultures and missions can be. And we don't need vague shower thoughts about how you think "most" boards work when there's a lot of reported detail about the Wordpress drama that sets the context for their operating conditions with a lot more specificity than your guesstimations.
It should be enough to note that the details coming straight out of the reporting are inflammatory enough to the average person that it can explain why there's a negative reaction against Mullenweg without having to assume it was astroturfed, which was the point you were originally making.
This seems pretty easily explainable by Matt’s actions appearing to be hypocritical and antithetical to the views of people likely to comment on Internet message boards. People value stability from infrastructure providers and Matt’s antics with wordpress.org during the WPEngine dispute salted the earth for his chances of getting support in a board dispute. Even Matt’s own previous posting here did him no favours.
Sometimes a broadly one sided reaction is just a broadly one sided reaction, no conspiracy needed.
The reality is that the board has the votes to remove Matt as CEO and Matt has enough shares that if the board is decided by simple 1 vote per share then he can replace them but without knowing the agreements with its investors and shareholders we don’t know if the boards mechanisms actually allow him to replace all the members. Since the company is privately traded, these aren’t published anywhere, so it’s unknowable for those of us in the peanut gallery (unless it eventually goes to court, which is likely unless those agreements are decisive).
Matt can flex his 84% voting power, but proxies can be clawed back, at which point he'll be left with 30% voting power (that being the fraction he owns outright). At worst, that is, since it would take a united front of shareholders and years of messy litigation. I think most investors would rather just cut their losses and sell their position.
You would have to imagine that a big shareholder being able to neutralize ordinary functions of the board is outside, at a minimum, the spirit of that intended process. Though I'm sure that can be argued sixteen different directions.
If you’re inclined to see everything as a diversion and all criticism as inorganic, then I think it’s better to admit you just want someone to confirm your views and you’re not really looking to be convinced, as much as you phrased your question that way
I mean, this is not his first rodeo at that and our not first watch of these power struggles.
He's clinging to what he has, and for any outsider this (or the path leading to this) doesn't look like healthy behavior.
What we live through life can trigger extremely strange behaviors we didn't see before from people, so I don't think all of this can be attributed to astroturfing.
Every comment section on the internet is a target for astroturfing, yet attribute everything to it, is not right.
Uh you've just now said the same in slightly different words, then closed with "you're wrong" spoken through a corporate filter.
Which.. kinda doesn't really convince me.
But anyway
> He's clinging to what he has, and [..] this [..] doesn't look like healthy behavior.
That's not something I would agree with. Can you explain why you believe that protecting "your baby" and clinging to it is seen by you as "not healthy"?
From my understanding of the world, that is very healthy.
It's because his behavior pattern is instantly recognizable as what happens when people get out of control on prescription stimulants and since those are an epidemic in the field at this point most people have seen it and know the trajectory and find it utterly exhausting.
I wouldn't rule out that it might also be that, though, this too sounds like "he's mentally ill" but phrased differently.
I honestly do not see what you're saying there, but I also have no people in my life that would be using prescription stimulants. So it's not impossible that I have an experience gap there.
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