I think it's meant to be taken more in the abstract. Yes, LLM can refuse your request, and yes you can ask it to prepend "have you checked that it already exists?", but it can't directly challenge your super long-range assumptions the same way as another person saying at the standup "this unrelated feature already does something similar, so maybe you can modify it to accomplish both the original goal and your goal", or they might say "we have this feature coming up, which will solve your goal". Without proper alignment you're just churning out duplicate code at a faster rate now.
It’s interesting then to ask if this will behave the same as big orgs? Eg once your org is big and settled, anything but the core product and adjacent services become impossible, which is why 23 often see a 50-person company out-innovating a 5k person company in tech (only to be bought up and dismantled, of course, but that’s besides this point).
Will agents simply dig the trenches deeper towards the direction of the best existing tests, and does it take a human to turn off the agent noise and write code manually for a new, innovative direction?
But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking.
So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.
Tests and type checking are often highway-wide guardrails when the path you want to take is like a tightrope.
Also the code is not a means to an end. It’s going to be run somewhere doing stuff someone wants to do reliably and precisely. The overall goal was ever to invest some programmer time and salary in order to free more time for others. Not for everyone to start babysitting stuff.
Maybe I was stupid or maybe it just doesn’t hit the same way if you don’t grow up in the US, but I remember not being terribly fascinated by it as a 90s kid. In fact, I found it kind of uncanny that the world felt so… disconnected. I later learned this was called “modernist architecture”.
I still get made-up Python types all the time with Gemini. Really quite distracting when your codebase is massive and triggers a type error, and Gemini says
"To solve it you just need to use WrongType[ThisCannotBeUsedHere[Object]]"
and then I spend 15 minutes running in circles, because everything from there on is just a downward spiral, until I shut off the AI noise and just read the docs.
Gemini unfortunately sucks at calling tools, including ‘read the docs’ tool… it’s a great model otherwise. I’m sure Hassabis’ team is on it since it’s how the model can ground itself in non-coding contexts, too.
I think this is a classic old-vs-new tale. I started my PhD in biochemical research where analyzing data by hand was definitely a "craft" in some aspects. Later I forewent going to the lab entirely and instead spent all my time on developing machine learning for automated data analysis. But just like field work, you still need people in labs who can continue the craft.
The article should perhaps introspect a bit more instead of setting up a false dichotomy between "rainforest field work or computers".
But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.
Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.
"On X, anyone can pay to obtain the ‘verified' status without the company meaningfully verifying who is behind the account, making it difficult for users to judge the authenticity of accounts and content they engage with."
As stated in you source the EU is (among other things) not happy about Twitter calling users 'verified' while the meaning of 'verified' switched from "we did sth. to make sure the account owner is indeed the thing/person they say they are" to "the account owner is paying a monthly fee".
I’m interested in earnings correlating with feature releases. Maybe you’re pushing 100% more bugs, but if you can sell twice as many buggy features as your neighbor at the same time, it could be that you could land more contracts.
It’s definitely a raise to the bottom scenario, but that was already the scenario we lived in before LLMs.
reply