4 ms·

Its inevitable: software (and other systems) will also become like this.

by DrNosferatu 2y ago

codr7 2y ago
And then it's pretty much game over.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  It’s better we [democracies] ride and control the AI change of paradigm than just let someone else do it for us.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    "Democracy" is just a chant now. It's supposed to somehow happen without votes, privacy, freedom of expression, or freedom of association.
    - DrNosferatu 2y ago
      Well, Democracy is still the least worst of all political systems! But please: would you prefer something else?
      - codr7 2y ago
        The point is there is no difference except spelling.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  Not game over: it’s just that Engineering will turn into Biology :D
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Psychotherapy, rather, as the natural evolution of prompting.
satvikpendem 2y ago
I've been using Cursor, it already is. I've found myself becoming merely a tester of the software rather than a writer of it, the more I use this IDE.
- DrNosferatu 2y ago
  It’s a bit clunky still IMHO. Or you found a good tutorial to leverage it fully?
  - virgildotcodes 2y ago
    It’s really been advertised heavily lately but I just discovered it a couple weeks ago, and in case you’re unaware the real aha moment with Cursor for me was Composer in Agent mode with Sonnet 3.5. If you want the highest chance of success, use a reasoning model (o3-mini high, o1 pro, r1, grok 3 thinking mode) to create a detailed outline of how to implement the feature you want, then copy paste that into composer. It one shots a lot of greenfield stuff. If you get stuck in a loop on an issue, this prompt I got from twitter tends to work quite well to get you unstuck: "Reflect on 5-7 different possible sources of the problem, distill those down to 1-2 most likely sources, and then add logs to validate your assumptions before we move onto implementing the actual code fix." Just doing the above gets me through 95% of stuff I try, and then occasionally hopping back out to a reasoning model with the current state of the code, errors, and logs gets me through the last 5%.
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Now with Claude 3.7 with thinking, you can skip the copy paste step entirely.
invalidusernam3 2y ago
One of the junior developers I worked with years ago wrote code that humans couldn't understand, maybe he was was just ahead of his time
perlgeek 2y ago
Some software I inherited from my predecessor is already like this. When I got it, one part of it was a single Perl file with about 5k lines of code, with 20+ variables visible in the whole file, with 10+ levels of nested loops, basically all of them with seemingly random "next LABEL" and "last LABEL" statements, which are basically slightly-constrained GOTOs. Oh, and the variable names very mostly meaningless to me (one or two letters). This was only a small part of my job, over the years I've managed to reduce this mess, broke out some parts into smaller functions, reduced the scope of some variables etc. but a core remains that I still don't really understand. There's some mental model deep in the original programmer's mind that I simply cannot seem to grasp and that the code structure is based on. (We're now replacing this whole thing by cleaner re-implementation, with unit tests, a less idiosyncratic structure, and more maintainers). Now imagine what it must feel like if the original programmer wasn't human, but some alien mind that we're even further from understanding.

Its inevitable: software (and other systems) will also become like this.

codr7 2y ago

And then it's pretty much game over.

DrNosferatu 2y ago
It’s better we [democracies] ride and control the AI change of paradigm than just let someone else do it for us.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  "Democracy" is just a chant now. It's supposed to somehow happen without votes, privacy, freedom of expression, or freedom of association.
  - DrNosferatu 2y ago
    Well, Democracy is still the least worst of all political systems! But please: would you prefer something else?
    - codr7 2y ago
      The point is there is no difference except spelling.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
Not game over: it’s just that Engineering will turn into Biology :D
- int_19h 2y ago
  Psychotherapy, rather, as the natural evolution of prompting.

satvikpendem 2y ago

I've been using Cursor, it already is. I've found myself becoming merely a tester of the software rather than a writer of it, the more I use this IDE.

DrNosferatu 2y ago
It’s a bit clunky still IMHO. Or you found a good tutorial to leverage it fully?
- virgildotcodes 2y ago
  It’s really been advertised heavily lately but I just discovered it a couple weeks ago, and in case you’re unaware the real aha moment with Cursor for me was Composer in Agent mode with Sonnet 3.5. If you want the highest chance of success, use a reasoning model (o3-mini high, o1 pro, r1, grok 3 thinking mode) to create a detailed outline of how to implement the feature you want, then copy paste that into composer. It one shots a lot of greenfield stuff. If you get stuck in a loop on an issue, this prompt I got from twitter tends to work quite well to get you unstuck: "Reflect on 5-7 different possible sources of the problem, distill those down to 1-2 most likely sources, and then add logs to validate your assumptions before we move onto implementing the actual code fix." Just doing the above gets me through 95% of stuff I try, and then occasionally hopping back out to a reasoning model with the current state of the code, errors, and logs gets me through the last 5%.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Now with Claude 3.7 with thinking, you can skip the copy paste step entirely.

invalidusernam3 2y ago

One of the junior developers I worked with years ago wrote code that humans couldn't understand, maybe he was was just ahead of his time

perlgeek 2y ago

Some software I inherited from my predecessor is already like this. When I got it, one part of it was a single Perl file with about 5k lines of code, with 20+ variables visible in the whole file, with 10+ levels of nested loops, basically all of them with seemingly random "next LABEL" and "last LABEL" statements, which are basically slightly-constrained GOTOs. Oh, and the variable names very mostly meaningless to me (one or two letters). This was only a small part of my job, over the years I've managed to reduce this mess, broke out some parts into smaller functions, reduced the scope of some variables etc. but a core remains that I still don't really understand. There's some mental model deep in the original programmer's mind that I simply cannot seem to grasp and that the code structure is based on. (We're now replacing this whole thing by cleaner re-implementation, with unit tests, a less idiosyncratic structure, and more maintainers). Now imagine what it must feel like if the original programmer wasn't human, but some alien mind that we're even further from understanding.