jimmaswell
jimmaswell on Hacker News
A rewrite is a slam dunk for any decent frontier AI. It has a penchant for maintaining API/etc contracts to a fault in the absence of instructions to the contrary. It can easily validate its work and loves building exhaustive test cases. You can tell it to get 100% code coverage if you want. It will laborously accurate document every accumulated edge case and help you find a better overall cohesive structure.
A rewrite has historically been a huge mistake in many situations, some of which I've personally had the agony of witnessing firsthand, powerless to stop it. But AI completely changes the calculus because it doesn't waste significant developer time or energy crawling back to the previous working state, it just does it while you go get coffee. And this I've found to be a huge benefit, that I can continue making my codebases nicer to work with and better documented/integrated with bugs stamped out for free. There are upsides to a rewrite, and they're now much more likely to be worth it as the downsides are automated away.
This isn't a big problem for roads, sidewalks, or the library.
A job is bullshit if it's wasting resources duplicating the work of a machine without good reason. Replacing excavators with teams of shovelers would be a bullshit job, but the same job wouldn't have been bullshit before excavators.
Demanding the world halt progress and do something inefficiently just to give you a bullshit job is not a position that engenders my empathy
Her "cause" of making everyone's lives worse by delaying food delivery? Why would I ever support this?
In what scenario is Sunoco going to try to steal all my money?
It's obvious pretty quick that you use the prediction line to inform what to do on the next pass, and you have to time it. It would be too easy if it was just "wait for the projection to point at the other player and hit fire".
Being able to shoot the other player is a minor quibble for this kind of web minigame. It's still fun and interesting.
AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.
Somehow this just hasn't happened to me. I use Astra on high all day for fairly intensive game dev tasks, sometimes cranked up depending on the task.
I have heard ultra thinking might delegate to worse agents for some of its sub-tasks, but I don't use that much anymore since Astra came out. Just high seems good enough to throw most laundry lists at.
Why would I ever do that to myself? My experience with Codex/GPT is fantastic, while my impression of Claude/Opus is that it's longwinded, patronizing, token-inefficient, stops to ask stupid questions every other minute, overcomplicates simple tasks, often poor engineering overall. I don't use it but this is what I see my partner run into who has access to both and compares them often. She has the same assessment.
Agreed. I don't believe intuition and creativity would be more than pattern recognition, remixing ideas, and trial and error combined with a kind of "genetic algorithm" approach if you deconstructed them into what the brain is actually doing.
I would find it very interesting to train a model on information only available prior to the discovery of e.g. relativity or calculus and see if it can invent it. My intuition is that modern frontiers absolutely could. Not to take away from their brilliance, but Newton and Einstein were brilliant people who also happened to be in the perfect place at the perfect time - there's not so much "low hanging (i.e. approachable by one brilliant individual) but immensely valuable fruit" anymore.
It feels goalpost-movey to downplay exploring a large search space efficiently in regards to "intelligence". If we dug into a human genius's brain and found it was somehow trying out a million ways to solve a a problem at once, no one would seeiously suggest the person isn't actually intelligent.
And our brains must something like that at some physical level. You can't have a "turtles all the way down" of reasoning - the building blocks must be simpler. It must reduce to something like pathfinding and brute force at some point, weighted by factors in the system and maybe some randomness.
You would often not have wifi available, and you wouldn't want to have to type in wifi passwords to your camera all the time. But your phone will almost always be nearby and persistent bluetooth is easy.
I would hope they have some feature for automatic backup to your phone over bluetooth or such today.
find is absolute agony once you get a taste of fd.
Humans have been hand-crafting artisanal test cases of equal banality for years, often to meet some metric no one is verifying deeper than an automated report etc. I'm more inclined to believe the null hypothesis here, that the formula doesn't need any change and the signal is still equally valid. If anything changed, the signal is probably more useful now, since you'll never catch a good AI writing test cases that do literally nothing except call a function in a try catch with an empty catch block. (Models may have done that a few years ago but I haven't witnessed that behavior in a long time.) I've witnessed myriad examples of this in pre-AI production code.
As a programming lead on a hobbyist video game project, we're reaping massive rewards being in category #1. I keep the architecture and important details in check while letting frontier models go ham. As alluded, it's a video game, not a life support system, so bugs are low-impact. But even better, the defect rate is actually the lowest it's ever been. Insidious bugs baked in by years of accumulated human error are trivial for Sol or Astra to untangle. This is the best time to be alive so far if you enjoy hobby game dev.
This is perplexing because I've been all over the country, coast to coast and north to south and to Canada, and never encountered this despite being shorter than the person you're responding to (who is actually well above-average height..)
other people are just standing there shooting head-on?
How tall are you and where do you live? I'm dead-on average US male height (5'9") and I've never experienced this.
Is there a study demonstrating that AI-assisted articles are less substantive or is it purely a kneejerk bias towards humanslop?
> At this point, what do the words even mean? Your own patience and available time are always completely random and fairly distributed across a large enough data set?
Predicting the time a task will take is impossible. Something that sounds like a 5 minute script can turn into a month of banging your head against unknown unknowns. I lose my patience when the afternoon I allocated is getting overrun by nonsense and I'm missing out on other things I wanted to do or household maintenance.
> Our ignorance isn't random chance. As we research and experiment, we reduce the problem area.
Every thought we have has random chance to be wrong despite our conviction that it's correct. Descartes' Evil Demon plays his tricks on all of us. How many times have you typed some line of code only to realize it was obviously wrong afterwards? Even for simpler matters we "hallucinate" all the time. I was deep in thought trying to help someone come up with an acronym the other day and felt convicted that "Goal Oriented Augmented Retrieval" worked for GOAL until I said it aloud.
Our thoughts and actions are consistently wrong some portion of the time because our meat computers are not perfect positronic brains running prolog. We put cereal in the fridge and say "you too" to the waiter. Every thought we put down or action we take is a gamble on the soundness of the thought or action.
Programming before AI was
always variable reward. It was a gamble against your own time and patience. Maybe I'd waste hours down the wrong rabbit holes trying to find a library that worked for my use case. Maybe I'd waste a day trying to get an API to do something it turned out it couldn't do. Maybe I'd have to redo my entire approach because of some factor I hadn't considered. Something I wrote could have worked on the first try or I could have had to spend the day chasing logic errors (or multiple days chasing memory errors if it was C or C++). Maybe I would just get bored of the project, especially if I realized there were 20 layers of yaks I needed to shave first, and Visual Studio got stuck updating again, and before I could even start actually coding I had to spend the entire evening on an exhausting merge conflict. My entire weekend could be gone with nothing to actually show for it.
I got so sick of all this at some point that I slowly stopped doing anything that wasn't my job. But then AI got better and better and I realized it was the ultimate unblocker. When that dreaded malaise started creeping in signaling it was a project's end because I didn't want to waste any more of my life dealing with bullshit orthogonal to what I was trying to do, I'd give it to the AI. It felt like a miracle the first time this worked, and it still does. If we were previously equipped with shovels to dig through bullshit, we now have a fully automated Bagger 288.
The reward schedule now isn't variable anymore; the chance that I finish something in a good state is 100%. I can focus on the parts I actually enjoy - architecting the broader system, making the parts mesh together in a sensible way that's easy to work with and has some mathematical elegance to it, hand coding the bits I want to be really specific about (but now without the endless frustration of bugfixing or import errors and edgecases being immediately discovered, thanks to the AI).
You can still ask a general model to do that and it will probably have a nearly full success rate at this point. Either a good open weights or something like Astra.
This entire comment section is almost entirely people bemoaning AI output, calling AI a "slop machine", and you posted your regressive religious screed against it as if it were something to be proud of, seemingly to the approval of others. nearly every comment section with AI involved is like this, and many comment sections where AI is not involved. It deserves pushback.
Did I imply you did? I simply said I never see a "pro AI" mob, only an "anti AI" mob.
Is the "pro AI" mob in the room with us? The only real mob I ever see is the one taking every chance to try to put AI down and imply its users are somehow deficient.
Repetition can make a good impact, but it's beyond excessive in this instance. Contrast with this poem:
Non est salvatori salvator,
neque defensori dominus,
nec pater nec mater,
nihil supernum.
Translated:
No rescuer hath the rescuer.
No Lord hath the champion,
no mother and no father,
only nothingness above.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
I find this one profound, and it's given me a lot to think about over the years - in situations ranging from asking what our place in the universe is, to doing the "right thing" (and deciding what "the right thing" even means to yourself), or standing at the helm of some team or project, knowing that judgement call is yours alone and there's no authority or higher power coming to swoop in and give you the answer or authoritatively judge your decision can be simultaneously liberating and terrifying. The use of repetition works incredibly well in my opinion and it still gives me chills to read it.