I'm a big fan of your blog simonw, and it's interesting to see how a few of the people you've responded to here aren't receptive at all to your responses.

I have become somewhat convinced that the 'ai doesn't help with programming crowd' is a little bit obtuse / entirely unwilling to experiment with new tools. It seems too much of a coincidence to see the same crowd that you've responded to struggle to perform basic website navigation and take anything away from your blog posts.

I keep experimenting because of comments like this and they still always have the same problems:

- Inability to stay self-consistent

- Random extra unused and unreachable code

- Constant wack a mole with issues they have

- Random opposite or adjacent thinking

- Assuming that how things work in one library or language must work the same in another

I then had someone say well... Just break up the work, but, that's also not what people say works for them, and also, you still have to side-eye the smaller stuff and it just gets exhausting.

A ton of studies show that if you know less than 80 about a field it'll get you to that 80 percent. And if you know more than that it'll bring you back down to 80% due to randomness, lack of data in the training, incompleteness in the model that your incomplete prompt amplifies, and just automation bias errors where you trusted something it did that you shouldn't have.

I would say that anyone claiming these things do everything are just simply new to systems.

Oh you're the guy who couldn't save emails to a file that I replied to on Mastodon. I don't understand how extracting frames from a video and that cumbersome, error prone workflow is an improvement over the code out there to extract JSON from random text files. I think it is neat that it did it automatically for sure, but that doesn't generalize to something that is repeatable and efficient compared to existing systems. I'm sorry that the magic isn't impressive to me but given the nature of how they work that I've been playing with as well since their early fake-dnd game generator days and BERT even before the pandemic do indeed give me a bias to feel justified in criticizing the immensely clear unscalable and inefficient inference.

It is like you can ask these things how to be better at getting people to not cower when you speak and it'll go on and on about the role of discourse and never mention toothpaste. They are X/Y problem factories. I applaud your efforts in documenting it all but the prescriptive value just isn't there and doesn't prove anything about these thing's general applicability.