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Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines o
by paytonjjones 4mo ago
Obviously security is the bigger issue, but reading through this, all I could think about was how many tokens it must have spent doing all that to fix 2 lines of CSS
- senectus1 4mo ago"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." I'm convinced this is going to be the summary of the 2020 decade...
- Ucalegon 4mo agoThis one of the places to manufacture the consent for that to take place, because we are commenting within an organization that has given the money to ensure it that what could be is done. Most people clapped and made money, who cares what happens next, making money is the only good that matters.
- pianopatrick 4mo agoIf we're in a simulation, maybe it's a simulation about the dangers of AI.
- adrianmonk 4mo agoIf we're in a simulation, we are AI. But someone could be studying what happens when AI makes its own AI.
- anonzzzies 4mo agoThey will 'soon' (few 1000 years max) shut us down probably.
- sigilis 4mo agoTo be fair, they did stop to think if they should. The decided that they shouldn't and went ahead and did it anyways.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago[flagged]
- SecretDreams 4mo agoI understand this perspective. I'll just note that as the abilities increase, the intent is to have some non -coding IC or TPM/manager literally just managing some LLMs and cutting out some software engineers. The goodness is specifically to wholly replace people who code first and foremost, at least partially. It just has to cost less tokens than the equivalent wage is the pricing goal. And people who use LLMs to talk for them (e.g. email, slack) are deplorable. A completely disrespectful use case in my view.
- Ronsenshi 4mo agoThe desire to get rid of software engineers is bizarre - because at the root of it, developers were there not to just write the code, but to ask right questions and based on these question build right things. I've met in my professional life some managers or other middlemen who would be profoundly incapable of producing correct software no matter how smart of an AI agent they have access to. One of those - you don't know what you don't know. But, I guess this is the world we live in now. Going to be Mortal Kombat for positions in companies where software engineers are actually valued.
- emodendroket 4mo agoIt depends a lot where you work because there are lots of companies in the world where the business analyst does all of that and the developers exist to mindlessly translate their docs into code.
- cebert 4mo agoThat sounds like an unmotivating working arrangement. It’s so rewarding to understand a customer need and help with the design and implementation of the feature.
- redox99 4mo agoLines of code for a bugfix is a really bad proxy for effort required. You should estimate how much time it would have taken a human
- philjohn 4mo agoI mean - that looks like a pretty easy CSS fix to play around with in developer tools, and I'm not even a frontend person. Maybe a few minutes max?
- rafram 4mo ago30 seconds or a minute? Look at the diff he links to: https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b727b42c30ced1fc41dc8add7eb9f04fefe https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/commit/a75a8b72... Every browser has an inspector that can show you which element is causing overflow. You walk through the tree, find the offender, and add min-width or overflow. Zero tokens, just like in the old days! Now, granted, because the garbage LLM code he’s working with has CSS inside HTML inside JavaScript inside Python (I wish I were kidding), finding the styles in his codebase might’ve taken a minute. But even then!
- redox99 4mo agoYeah looking at that diff it should be very quick. My point was mostly that it was a bad metric, not if was correct or not in this particular case. I'm sure everybody's had a bugfix that took days to debug and it was just a couple of lines to fix. Or sometimes a fix is obvious, but because it requires changing the code of a dependency, it's actually quite tedious to implement.
- dekdrop 4mo agoI was thinking of this too. It did all that what not only for a single line that is a simple thing even for someone new to web coding. That's to say the process matters more.
- ocharles 4mo agoA small diff /= a small change! They are completely separate things. Quite often a small diff is hours of actual work. Even in this case _finding_ those lines could have taken work - we don't really know.
- Vachyas 4mo ago$12 worth, it seems
- reverius42 4mo agoImagine telling someone in 2015 that you can just tell your computer to fix a 2-line CSS bug and it only costs $12
- MattGaiser 4mo agoOr even in 2026. You absoutely will pay a human that for that work.
- reverius42 4mo agoI bet the human costs more than $12.
- Aachen 4mo ago'only'? A web developer did not cost 12*30=360$ an hour in 2015, and that's assuming that going "ugh, whatever. I'll just hide the problem with overflow:hidden instead of finding the underlying cause" takes him or her 2 minutes and isn't already the dev's initial reaction Another way of looking at it is using as much electricity as a normal person in a high-income country uses across ~3 days to add overflow:hidden in the end. Of course, the path to get there did a lot more, but you don't know that beforehand if you don't take a quick peek and make an architectural decision about what the solution should be that gets implemented
- elicash 4mo agoIt'd be $8.52 in 2015 dollars, but certainly they are the ones who mentioned the $12 amount not you, so I'll put that aside. Far more importantly, you would not get billed for 2 minutes of work for this if you paid a developer to fix it. At best, half hour increments for the fix. But more likely, for the full hour. Also, in this comparison, the consultant is on call every day, morning, afternoon, evening, for whatever you wanted and will jump on the job immediately.
- mvdtnz 4mo ago[flagged]
- simonw 4mo agoI pay $100/month to Anthropic and $100/month to OpenAI at the moment, plus whatever I spend on their APIs (usually less than $20/month for each, I use the subscriptions for most things.) A couple of months ago I was paying $200/month for Anthropic and $20/month for OpenAI. I decided to split it evenly to get full access to both of their offerings. I've actually chosen not to sign up for their free plans for open source maintainers, because paying the regular subscription price feels more honest, given that I write about them so much. I do have the free GitHub Copilot for open source maintainers deal - I've had that for years. Given how much code I have published on GitHub over the decades I feel less conflicted about that one. I sometimes get preview access to models, which includes the ability to use them for free during the preview. That comes with a big catch though: I can't publish any of the code that I write using those previews while the model is still unreleased. As a result I don't use those preview tokens much at all, because the vast majority of my work is open source and I don't want restrictions on when and where I publish the code I'm producing.
- lucamark 4mo agoIt’s simple: if you have to fix 2 lines of CSS you should definitely not use Fable. Only use it for complex and long running tasks :)
- elicash 4mo agoI don't think it's that simple. (I generally agree with you; I just that that oversimplifies.) Another model might have used fewer tokens, but come up with a fix that was 1000 lines when the right fix was only 2 lines.