6 ms·

I'm a seeing-eye dog for a computer

117 points by claytonwramsey 1mo ago

SadErn 29d ago
I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. The useless toil and labor associated with rebuilding the same solutions into different contexts is finally at an end. Coding was never the reward. Acting as a translator for a machine is far worse than allowing the machine to solve the mundane parts and leave you with bigger building blocks to play with. After 25 years I have to confess I hated being a software engineer. It felt like grinding in a video game. Now I can finally create and innovate at the speed of thought, and I'm very grateful to have this technology now.
- zusuzhshhs 29d ago
  [dead]
- grebc 29d ago
  Viva la revolution! Serious question - what do you do for fun? I find fishing with friends enjoyable, and using my hands tidying up the old place I bought. It’s not innovating software I’ll never use but I’ll never tire of writing the same old ASP that delivers my clients the results they’re after.
  - SadErn 28d ago
    [dead]
- altmanaltman 29d ago
  > I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. Yes, when I think of OpenAI and Anthrophic and Google and Meta and any AI labs and their intentions, i cry a single tear for how these great instituitions are working so hard to bring freedom for humanity.
  - Walf 29d ago
    Freedom is slavery! AI owned by a few companies is more likely to put the majority right back to serfdom. You're a privileged fool to believe that freedom is the likely outcome of the current stampede. With a username that appears to cheer for a sociopath¹, I doubt reason will convince you. ¹ https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-altman-sociopath https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-alt...
    - Barbing 29d ago
      Their /s was implied (Like, Meta’s intentions? lol)
      - Walf 29d ago
        I hope so.
    - altmanaltman 29d ago
      It was obviously a sarcastic joke. I get it if you didn't catch that, but do you think my username glorifies Sam Altman? And is that a reason to talk negatively about me? You doubt reason will convince me? And at the end, you call *me* a privileged fool. Wow, just wow. I hope you don't consider NWA a racial hate group given their name. Also, I don't think you can cite a subjective take as objectively correct by including it as a footnote. Why do you need to medically diagnose him to say what he's doing is fucked up? Why does he have to be literally the devil for outrage to work? He could also not be a sociopath, but still his actions will be his actions, and it is okay to criticize them. Next what, you're going to link to an article that says Sam Altman is also a homosexual, and we must be morally outraged at that next? Because that is where your direction is going, instead of arguing about the ill effects of AI.
      - Walf 28d ago
        The comment and username in isolation probably wouldn't have elicited that response from me. In combination, I took you for a delusional ultra-fan. I think anyone who genuinely thinks AI is a wonderful thing for everyone probably enjoys the privilege of its use, reducing their own workload, without it (yet) affecting their employment, or their local environment, and possibly even lacks the empathy to comprehend negative affects on others. Obviously I was mistaken for thinking you were as such. Putting words in others' mouths doesn't give credence to your points, the only homophobia here is coming from you. Straw men are not your friends. Sociopathy in the context of running a powerful organisation is entirely relevant because making decisions that affect many, without really caring about the consequences for them, is generally regarded as a bad thing.
- flyinglizard 29d ago
  I share the sentiment but the question here is how long can we maintain the balance point where the human in the agentic loop is required. It might be a window lasting only a few years, or for the foreseeable future; I think the answer lies the opaque compute economics of the frontier lab: how well models keep scaling and how economically sustainable is serving those models under the current market conditions.
  - post-it 29d ago
    If my job gets automated, I'll find something else to do. I wouldn't have wanted lamplighters to succeed in preventing electrification, so it would be unfair for me to prevent the automation of my job if it can be done.
    - harimau777 28d ago
      What if that something else pays less? Or doesn't pay enough to live at all?
      - post-it 27d ago
        That's life. I'm lucky to be interested in and also good at a profession that pays well. If I lose that and in exchange everyone gets to be good at making software, then that's a sacrifice I feel obligated to make for the benefit of humanity, and I'll still have more savings than someone not in this profession.
  - anonzzzies 29d ago
    I use Astra to drive Fable; I drivel into my phone while walking in the forest and it builds. I don’t need to check; I do as clients need to pay, but it always is great. And it surprises me with things I did not know were possible even (never encountered them before so why would I know). We are at the point where our clients send voice messages and they get what they want without humans basically. This costs 10+10 max2 subs but that’s nothing compared to hiring people. We didn’t fire anyone; we just have 100+ more clients and make almost 50x more money. It’s boring but great as long as it lasts, we are already where you say for what enterprises generally need for the boring parts. That’s 99%.
- burnoutdv 29d ago
  You got nothing. Giant corpos hold every sliver of your so called freedom, you dont innovate, you repeat what others created before you. You use a tool that shackles your thoughts and creativity in a never before seen way, what you perceive is an illusion of liberty that is no present. Without others you are nothing and they can take it away any seconds, you are an addict, not an innovator.
  - post-it 29d ago
    The same can be said of stuff like cloud storage and email and social media. And yet here we are.
    - burnoutdv 29d ago
      Your point is true to some extend, I personally host my own "cloud" storage..it comes with drawbacks, same is true for email..especially email, social media is a society constructs, by definition its reliant on others but many will argue that its not worth keeping anyway (although I wonder how one stays human in this world then, the meat space seems with so many barrieres in this age). I feel very much like a luddite..or some artisan of a bygone age. The guy above laments how he never enjoyed coding, this is an interesting sentiment, I know quite a few people who enjoy the craft itself, myself included. The ability to form words that have meaning, that create something from nothing. Sure, the words are just a tool, but its something _I_ can master, not some abstract wish machine that may change its functionality tommorow. Obviously one can argue that the computer itself is in this case the one that creates and not me, its not magic that just works with me, but the machine I got obeys me and me alone..another reason why personal computing is important.
  - hypfer 29d ago
    I can see where you're coming from, and I share the sentiment and resentment to a large degree, but I think you might be not doing reality justice. It is true that closed weights models are a big issue. It is also true that LLM-generated solutions usually drift towards a median. But that is not the dead end you think it might be. Most coding work is repetitive boilerplate, and most typing is just.. well.. typing. Miserable work I too did not really enjoy. What I did enjoy were the end results, and that was just a necessary step to get there. Now that's less the case than it was before we had LLMs, and for that I too am glad. ___ I think the article headline might've primed you (and me, fwiw) to reading the comment you're replying to as passive. But if you just look at the words of it, that might not actually be the case.
- anonzzzies 29d ago
  For me code still is the reward; I made and make my fortunes with boring code people on HN say no one needs or wants, my hobby is, and has been for 45 years, writing, perfecting and optimizing code manually until I find it perfect. I have been working for 10 years on a programming language and OS (with niche 2 dbs that are now prod quality and we use) and those are the best moment of my day, I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of it or ever uses it. But the lessons learned do flow into LLMs to write the boring code and I can say that our million$ paying LoB code can handle 100s req/s on shite hardware and even if the LLM did a crap job. Which is almost 100s times more than the client will ever need.
- 21asdffdsa12 29d ago
  You lost leverage. Now be great full for the crumbs. If there remain any.
- harimau777 28d ago
  I think that the difficulty is that the difficulty is what results in software developers being paid a decent salary. If anyone can do it or if it only requires a few developers, then why would they pay us that much?
preommr 29d ago
These people need to take a vacation and come back in a few months when the vision models get better/cheaper. Astra is already good at taking screenshots and acting on it (part of the agi claims).
- xyzsparetimexyz 29d ago
  What about cases where a bug is only obvious in motion? Or where you're working with a SBC and the bug is that you forgot a cable? Screenshots alone aren't enough. The authors point stands.
- Muromec 28d ago
  We can also stop doing all of the work at all and just sit there waiting for Godot to solve our problems.
hspeiser 29d ago
I completely understand this. I’ve worked on robot hands and 5.6/Fable 5 were practically useless at helping me debug anything visually. What I have found super useful actually is having models make a interactive 3d viewer in which I use move / highlight / paint (soft body painting directly onto the geometry for issues and different colors mean different failures). This gives a much better way to communicate the physical relationships and positions that are hard to get across in a labeled screenshot. Its for sure still a lot of manual work so the "seeing-eye dog" description definitely holds. But I have found that after a couple of examples with the extra context the model gets much better at handling the problem and becomes useful.
bitwize 29d ago
> All that’s left is the dumbest workflow possible: I fire up the debug viewer myself, look around for weird mistakes, then take a screenshot and tell the language model how badly it messed up this time. Eventually I just decided to do all the debugging work myself, so I would at least get to do the fun part too. I call this "thanoscoding" for two reasons: 1. "Fine, I'll do it myself" 2. In the past I found I have to "snap away" the mess the LLM made in order to start afresh from a known good state (generally with git reset). But that was 1-2 generations ago when it comes to models. GPT6 Astra probably does things right the first time, 90% of the time.
hypfer 29d ago
I mean there's a reason why we're doing MoCap for video games. If computers were good at this, we wouldn't be needing that. But actual motion and all seems to be much more complex than the systems can predict, apparently. Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good? I thought AI was to steal all our jobs. ___ Beside that, kinda weird self-description. Isn't the computer executing your commands and you're just filling in where it cannot do that? Being that dog implies that the computer is in the driver seat. I mean it's supposed to be a joke I guess, but I read it as one that leaks internal metadata which seems to be incorrectly calibrated.
- wolfi1 29d ago
  >Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good? I thought AI was to steal all our jobs. the problem is, the CEOs still think AI solves their problems ie minimize paid jobs
- smugglerFlynn 29d ago
  > Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good? It is weird if you think about it this way: it is AI that waits for you, its ‘eyes’, to provide a feedback so it can continue working. It literally uses you as its organ. <!!spoiler ahead!!>There is a TV show called Person of Interest <!!spoiler ahead!!>, where Machine (AI connected to Internet and CCTV networks) has no legs or eyes, so when it needs to go and check something not covered by CCTV feeds, it gives instructions to a real person. In the show it is called an ‘analog interface.’
  - hypfer 29d ago
    > It literally uses you as its organ. But it isn't. That's my point. I told the clanker "hey do that", and like the intern/junior it emulates, it eventually says "boss! Help! I can't do this alone". It is I who is in the driver seat.
    - smugglerFlynn 29d ago
      If intern is making a breakfast, and boss is the one who suddenly runs to the grocery store because eggs are missing, is boss still the one in a driver’s seat? From the original goal point of view yes, as it was boss who has initiated whole breakfast procedure. But from an execution standpoint it is intern who gives its boss a job of a grocery store run. He could give same job to anyone else, boss as a persona is irrelevant here.
onion2k 29d ago
One of the first things I tell the junior/mid-level developers I mentor is "You can't debug something just by reading the code." We all have a mental model of how our code works, and it's usually a bit wrong. Bugs are the real world manifestations of those mistakes. When you read the code it's all filtered through your model, and that makes you blind to seeing why something unexpected happened. In order to debug something you have to be able to put the system in the state where the bug happens to see why it occurred. LLMs generally only debug systems by reading the code with whatever information you give them in a prompt. The image in the article is meta-prompt - the prompt is whatever comes from the vision model the AI happens to use to 'understand' the red circle annotation. That won't work. To successfully debug what's going on it will need much better state information. Has the 'shelf' been explained to is? Is the contrast and lack of shadows in the image messing up the vision model? Why isn't the 'lid' in the image? And so on. LLMs are clever but they're not magical. Treat them like a naive junior dev. Give them enough data about the state of something to understand it properly.
- OtherShrezzing 29d ago
  I call this a tautological mental model. You can read the code over and over again, but your second reading will be mostly an echo of the mental model you built up in your first.
- rcxdude 29d ago
  Hmmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. Often times once I have witnessed a bug, I have found it just by reading through the code with the behaviour of the bug in mind. For LLMs, this is likely to be disproportionately effective as well: especially because they don't really build up a persistent view of the codebase, they're generally re-reading it each session, and they tend to be surprisingly good at predicting the behaviour of code. (That said, knowing where and how to gather more evidence to make things clearer is a pretty core skill in troubleshooting, so it's generally good advice anyhow)
  - valzam 29d ago
    Also Claude Code is very good at writing small scripts/on-off test cases to confirm bugs, so I wouldn't even say the initial premise is correct.
beklein 29d ago
A bit off topic, but I absolutely love the little robot on the author's main project's landing page (https://rerun.io/ https://rerun.io/). I normally condemn mouse hijacking, but this implementation will be allowed.
- hobofan 29d ago
  Rerun is pretty dope, but I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that it's the "author's main project"? There is a whole company backing it, with no affiliation that I could find, apart from the author being an occasional contributor?
  - beklein 29d ago
    They mentioned "... and my visualizer tool comes with an MCP server ...", with a link to the rerun project. I guess it makes more sense that his visualizer tool uses rerun...Sorry for the confusion from my side.
dwedge 29d ago
> I used to argue with people on the internet, after about six replies, you realize that you’re speaking to someone incapable of thought He realises the current woe of things but doesn't realise he's been arguing with bot farms and teams of people hired just for this reason - to sow doom, arguments and engagement. Around 10 years ago I noticed this happening on trending topics of Twitter - it wasn't that the opponents were stupid because they disagreed, it was that they were simultaneously intelligent and stupid in the way they spoke in a way that I realised I'd never seen in genuine people, making me realise it was probably different people or bots under one account. If I realised it 10 years ago it was probably happening for at least 15. He wasn't better than these people he was falling into their trap
- hliyan 29d ago
  I've now completely stopped engaging with anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person. If any non-real-name account says anything that remotely feels bad-faith in replies, I block them. Having been on the Internet since the mid 90's when it was the frontier, and everyone helped/trusted everyone else, the policy feels very wrong. But unfortunately Twitter has given no tools or alternatives to deal with the situation.
  - hypfer 29d ago
    Same. (I would love to say, but they still get me way too often) I can also highly encourage people to keep notes and do some basic OSINT. The effective internet is smaller than one might think, so that proves useful time and time again.
    - dwedge 29d ago
      Can you elaborate on the OSINT suggestion? Do you mean on the people you engage with?
      - hypfer 29d ago
        Yes, exactly. Though, not by default. If something seems _odd_, I suggest looking up _why_ it might be odd. Gathering context, essentially. Like "Okay, this guy is weird. Aah, okay, LinkedIn says that he works there. Okay _now_ that makes sense". Based on that, you can then decide how to approach the (previously failing) interaction. __ HN is a very easy place for that, because, to give somewhat concrete examples, if someone is shilling for something and seems unreachable for common sense, LinkedIn usually tells you that their salary depends on that. And people play very open here, because this is treated as a business networking event.
dostick 29d ago
LM still can not see and understand the desktop app UI on a level that is acceptable for testing. All the advances in coding are from web dev and thanks to the nature of html UIs. Try to develop a desktop app and it’s like working with a legally blind person who can see some part of the screen is they squint in a certain way but surely will miss all minor details.
walrus01 29d ago
> I often handwrite the code myself, but I’ve found that LLM coding assistants’ limitless patience ameliorates the drudgiest work of coding. I've been using a few different "smart" LLM to work on an analysis, parsing, search and correlation tool that ultimately deals with a 5.5GB on disk (with indexes) mariadb database that has its origin as a federal government department's 905,000 row plain text CSV file. There are a ridiculous number of data entry errors and just plain weird fuckups in the data origin that don't seem they will be ameliorated any time soon, so automating the drudge work of cleaning it up and rectifying it into something usable is a textbook case for this. Very pleased with the results so far.
nannal 29d ago
You could setup a webcam and have a vision llm stalk the breakroom of left over pizza and alert you.
creichenbach 29d ago
Those three colored shapes at the bottom look a lot like the EPA logo, a former grocery store chain: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPA_%28Warenhaus%29?wprov=sfla1 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPA_%28Warenhaus%29?wprov=sfla...
Fr0styMatt88 29d ago
I've found that LLMs are specifically bad at a certain kind of debugging, though I can't quite put my finger on what that is. "Spot the bug in this code" when the code can be looked at and pattern-matched against bugginess is something they seem really good at. Some parts of debugging, like "Here is this logfile, what do you think is going on?" are also surprisingly good. It's that thing kind of in the middle -- I know it when I see it honestly is the best way I can put it into words. An example from recently, I'm receiving some bad data on a network message parser. Immediately I don't know whether it's a my-side or their-side thing, but I know if I try and just vaguely describe the behaviour to the LLM it will start churning tokens. My current approach to problems like this is -- I need to tell the LLM what it needs to do to give itself the data it needs to solve the problem. My first reaction now isn't "It's not working, there's a bug, it's not doing X". It's "Okay, this isn't quite working properly; I need you to add some debug logging around X, Y and Z so we can figure this out". That tends to avoid spirals and get me out of the situation much more quickly. The seeing eye dog analogy is pretty apt actually. I would love to see some transcripts from the author if they are able. Edit to add: I think the 'thing' I'm alluding to might be -- if I have trouble expressing the buggy behaviour clearly in words, then I know it's probably going to be a fair few back-and-forths with the LLM to get something; the harder I find it to concisely describe, the more risk that it'll fall into a pit. Doubly so if I offer up a hypothesis which turns out to be wrong.
Utilera 28d ago
The weird part is that the LLM isn't really replacing the debugging loop here, it's inserting itself into the middle of it
asamadx 27d ago
[flagged]

117 points by claytonwramsey 1mo ago

I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. The useless toil and labor associated with rebuilding the same solutions into different contexts is finally at an end. Coding was never the reward. Acting as a translator for a machine is far worse than allowing the machine to solve the mundane parts and leave you with bigger building blocks to play with. After 25 years I have to confess I hated being a software engineer. It felt like grinding in a video game. Now I can finally create and innovate at the speed of thought, and I'm very grateful to have this technology now.

zusuzhshhs 29d ago
[dead]
grebc 29d ago
Viva la revolution! Serious question - what do you do for fun? I find fishing with friends enjoyable, and using my hands tidying up the old place I bought. It’s not innovating software I’ll never use but I’ll never tire of writing the same old ASP that delivers my clients the results they’re after.
- SadErn 28d ago
  [dead]
altmanaltman 29d ago
> I like to think of training and improving AIs as bringing freedom to the world. Yes, when I think of OpenAI and Anthrophic and Google and Meta and any AI labs and their intentions, i cry a single tear for how these great instituitions are working so hard to bring freedom for humanity.
- Walf 29d ago
  Freedom is slavery! AI owned by a few companies is more likely to put the majority right back to serfdom. You're a privileged fool to believe that freedom is the likely outcome of the current stampede. With a username that appears to cheer for a sociopath¹, I doubt reason will convince you. ¹ https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-altman-sociopath https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sources-sam-alt...
  - Barbing 29d ago
    Their /s was implied (Like, Meta’s intentions? lol)
    - Walf 29d ago
      I hope so.
  - altmanaltman 29d ago
    It was obviously a sarcastic joke. I get it if you didn't catch that, but do you think my username glorifies Sam Altman? And is that a reason to talk negatively about me? You doubt reason will convince me? And at the end, you call *me* a privileged fool. Wow, just wow. I hope you don't consider NWA a racial hate group given their name. Also, I don't think you can cite a subjective take as objectively correct by including it as a footnote. Why do you need to medically diagnose him to say what he's doing is fucked up? Why does he have to be literally the devil for outrage to work? He could also not be a sociopath, but still his actions will be his actions, and it is okay to criticize them. Next what, you're going to link to an article that says Sam Altman is also a homosexual, and we must be morally outraged at that next? Because that is where your direction is going, instead of arguing about the ill effects of AI.
    - Walf 28d ago
      The comment and username in isolation probably wouldn't have elicited that response from me. In combination, I took you for a delusional ultra-fan. I think anyone who genuinely thinks AI is a wonderful thing for everyone probably enjoys the privilege of its use, reducing their own workload, without it (yet) affecting their employment, or their local environment, and possibly even lacks the empathy to comprehend negative affects on others. Obviously I was mistaken for thinking you were as such. Putting words in others' mouths doesn't give credence to your points, the only homophobia here is coming from you. Straw men are not your friends. Sociopathy in the context of running a powerful organisation is entirely relevant because making decisions that affect many, without really caring about the consequences for them, is generally regarded as a bad thing.
flyinglizard 29d ago
I share the sentiment but the question here is how long can we maintain the balance point where the human in the agentic loop is required. It might be a window lasting only a few years, or for the foreseeable future; I think the answer lies the opaque compute economics of the frontier lab: how well models keep scaling and how economically sustainable is serving those models under the current market conditions.
- post-it 29d ago
  If my job gets automated, I'll find something else to do. I wouldn't have wanted lamplighters to succeed in preventing electrification, so it would be unfair for me to prevent the automation of my job if it can be done.
  - harimau777 28d ago
    What if that something else pays less? Or doesn't pay enough to live at all?
    - post-it 27d ago
      That's life. I'm lucky to be interested in and also good at a profession that pays well. If I lose that and in exchange everyone gets to be good at making software, then that's a sacrifice I feel obligated to make for the benefit of humanity, and I'll still have more savings than someone not in this profession.
- anonzzzies 29d ago
  I use Astra to drive Fable; I drivel into my phone while walking in the forest and it builds. I don’t need to check; I do as clients need to pay, but it always is great. And it surprises me with things I did not know were possible even (never encountered them before so why would I know). We are at the point where our clients send voice messages and they get what they want without humans basically. This costs 10+10 max2 subs but that’s nothing compared to hiring people. We didn’t fire anyone; we just have 100+ more clients and make almost 50x more money. It’s boring but great as long as it lasts, we are already where you say for what enterprises generally need for the boring parts. That’s 99%.
burnoutdv 29d ago
You got nothing. Giant corpos hold every sliver of your so called freedom, you dont innovate, you repeat what others created before you. You use a tool that shackles your thoughts and creativity in a never before seen way, what you perceive is an illusion of liberty that is no present. Without others you are nothing and they can take it away any seconds, you are an addict, not an innovator.
- post-it 29d ago
  The same can be said of stuff like cloud storage and email and social media. And yet here we are.
  - burnoutdv 29d ago
    Your point is true to some extend, I personally host my own "cloud" storage..it comes with drawbacks, same is true for email..especially email, social media is a society constructs, by definition its reliant on others but many will argue that its not worth keeping anyway (although I wonder how one stays human in this world then, the meat space seems with so many barrieres in this age). I feel very much like a luddite..or some artisan of a bygone age. The guy above laments how he never enjoyed coding, this is an interesting sentiment, I know quite a few people who enjoy the craft itself, myself included. The ability to form words that have meaning, that create something from nothing. Sure, the words are just a tool, but its something _I_ can master, not some abstract wish machine that may change its functionality tommorow. Obviously one can argue that the computer itself is in this case the one that creates and not me, its not magic that just works with me, but the machine I got obeys me and me alone..another reason why personal computing is important.
- hypfer 29d ago
  I can see where you're coming from, and I share the sentiment and resentment to a large degree, but I think you might be not doing reality justice. It is true that closed weights models are a big issue. It is also true that LLM-generated solutions usually drift towards a median. But that is not the dead end you think it might be. Most coding work is repetitive boilerplate, and most typing is just.. well.. typing. Miserable work I too did not really enjoy. What I did enjoy were the end results, and that was just a necessary step to get there. Now that's less the case than it was before we had LLMs, and for that I too am glad. ___ I think the article headline might've primed you (and me, fwiw) to reading the comment you're replying to as passive. But if you just look at the words of it, that might not actually be the case.
anonzzzies 29d ago
For me code still is the reward; I made and make my fortunes with boring code people on HN say no one needs or wants, my hobby is, and has been for 45 years, writing, perfecting and optimizing code manually until I find it perfect. I have been working for 10 years on a programming language and OS (with niche 2 dbs that are now prod quality and we use) and those are the best moment of my day, I couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of it or ever uses it. But the lessons learned do flow into LLMs to write the boring code and I can say that our million$ paying LoB code can handle 100s req/s on shite hardware and even if the LLM did a crap job. Which is almost 100s times more than the client will ever need.
21asdffdsa12 29d ago
You lost leverage. Now be great full for the crumbs. If there remain any.
harimau777 28d ago
I think that the difficulty is that the difficulty is what results in software developers being paid a decent salary. If anyone can do it or if it only requires a few developers, then why would they pay us that much?

preommr 29d ago

These people need to take a vacation and come back in a few months when the vision models get better/cheaper. Astra is already good at taking screenshots and acting on it (part of the agi claims).

xyzsparetimexyz 29d ago
What about cases where a bug is only obvious in motion? Or where you're working with a SBC and the bug is that you forgot a cable? Screenshots alone aren't enough. The authors point stands.
Muromec 28d ago
We can also stop doing all of the work at all and just sit there waiting for Godot to solve our problems.

hspeiser 29d ago

I completely understand this. I’ve worked on robot hands and 5.6/Fable 5 were practically useless at helping me debug anything visually. What I have found super useful actually is having models make a interactive 3d viewer in which I use move / highlight / paint (soft body painting directly onto the geometry for issues and different colors mean different failures). This gives a much better way to communicate the physical relationships and positions that are hard to get across in a labeled screenshot. Its for sure still a lot of manual work so the "seeing-eye dog" description definitely holds. But I have found that after a couple of examples with the extra context the model gets much better at handling the problem and becomes useful.

bitwize 29d ago

> All that’s left is the dumbest workflow possible: I fire up the debug viewer myself, look around for weird mistakes, then take a screenshot and tell the language model how badly it messed up this time. Eventually I just decided to do all the debugging work myself, so I would at least get to do the fun part too. I call this "thanoscoding" for two reasons: 1. "Fine, I'll do it myself" 2. In the past I found I have to "snap away" the mess the LLM made in order to start afresh from a known good state (generally with git reset). But that was 1-2 generations ago when it comes to models. GPT6 Astra probably does things right the first time, 90% of the time.

hypfer 29d ago

I mean there's a reason why we're doing MoCap for video games. If computers were good at this, we wouldn't be needing that. But actual motion and all seems to be much more complex than the systems can predict, apparently. Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good? I thought AI was to steal all our jobs. ___ Beside that, kinda weird self-description. Isn't the computer executing your commands and you're just filling in where it cannot do that? Being that dog implies that the computer is in the driver seat. I mean it's supposed to be a joke I guess, but I read it as one that leaks internal metadata which seems to be incorrectly calibrated.

wolfi1 29d ago
>Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good? I thought AI was to steal all our jobs. the problem is, the CEOs still think AI solves their problems ie minimize paid jobs
smugglerFlynn 29d ago
> Also.. uh.. isn't this.. good? It is weird if you think about it this way: it is AI that waits for you, its ‘eyes’, to provide a feedback so it can continue working. It literally uses you as its organ. <!!spoiler ahead!!>There is a TV show called Person of Interest <!!spoiler ahead!!>, where Machine (AI connected to Internet and CCTV networks) has no legs or eyes, so when it needs to go and check something not covered by CCTV feeds, it gives instructions to a real person. In the show it is called an ‘analog interface.’
- hypfer 29d ago
  > It literally uses you as its organ. But it isn't. That's my point. I told the clanker "hey do that", and like the intern/junior it emulates, it eventually says "boss! Help! I can't do this alone". It is I who is in the driver seat.
  - smugglerFlynn 29d ago
    If intern is making a breakfast, and boss is the one who suddenly runs to the grocery store because eggs are missing, is boss still the one in a driver’s seat? From the original goal point of view yes, as it was boss who has initiated whole breakfast procedure. But from an execution standpoint it is intern who gives its boss a job of a grocery store run. He could give same job to anyone else, boss as a persona is irrelevant here.

onion2k 29d ago

One of the first things I tell the junior/mid-level developers I mentor is "You can't debug something just by reading the code." We all have a mental model of how our code works, and it's usually a bit wrong. Bugs are the real world manifestations of those mistakes. When you read the code it's all filtered through your model, and that makes you blind to seeing why something unexpected happened. In order to debug something you have to be able to put the system in the state where the bug happens to see why it occurred. LLMs generally only debug systems by reading the code with whatever information you give them in a prompt. The image in the article is meta-prompt - the prompt is whatever comes from the vision model the AI happens to use to 'understand' the red circle annotation. That won't work. To successfully debug what's going on it will need much better state information. Has the 'shelf' been explained to is? Is the contrast and lack of shadows in the image messing up the vision model? Why isn't the 'lid' in the image? And so on. LLMs are clever but they're not magical. Treat them like a naive junior dev. Give them enough data about the state of something to understand it properly.

OtherShrezzing 29d ago
I call this a tautological mental model. You can read the code over and over again, but your second reading will be mostly an echo of the mental model you built up in your first.
rcxdude 29d ago
Hmmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. Often times once I have witnessed a bug, I have found it just by reading through the code with the behaviour of the bug in mind. For LLMs, this is likely to be disproportionately effective as well: especially because they don't really build up a persistent view of the codebase, they're generally re-reading it each session, and they tend to be surprisingly good at predicting the behaviour of code. (That said, knowing where and how to gather more evidence to make things clearer is a pretty core skill in troubleshooting, so it's generally good advice anyhow)
- valzam 29d ago
  Also Claude Code is very good at writing small scripts/on-off test cases to confirm bugs, so I wouldn't even say the initial premise is correct.

beklein 29d ago

A bit off topic, but I absolutely love the little robot on the author's main project's landing page (https://rerun.io/ https://rerun.io/). I normally condemn mouse hijacking, but this implementation will be allowed.

hobofan 29d ago
Rerun is pretty dope, but I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that it's the "author's main project"? There is a whole company backing it, with no affiliation that I could find, apart from the author being an occasional contributor?
- beklein 29d ago
  They mentioned "... and my visualizer tool comes with an MCP server ...", with a link to the rerun project. I guess it makes more sense that his visualizer tool uses rerun...Sorry for the confusion from my side.

dwedge 29d ago

> I used to argue with people on the internet, after about six replies, you realize that you’re speaking to someone incapable of thought He realises the current woe of things but doesn't realise he's been arguing with bot farms and teams of people hired just for this reason - to sow doom, arguments and engagement. Around 10 years ago I noticed this happening on trending topics of Twitter - it wasn't that the opponents were stupid because they disagreed, it was that they were simultaneously intelligent and stupid in the way they spoke in a way that I realised I'd never seen in genuine people, making me realise it was probably different people or bots under one account. If I realised it 10 years ago it was probably happening for at least 15. He wasn't better than these people he was falling into their trap

hliyan 29d ago
I've now completely stopped engaging with anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person. If any non-real-name account says anything that remotely feels bad-faith in replies, I block them. Having been on the Internet since the mid 90's when it was the frontier, and everyone helped/trusted everyone else, the policy feels very wrong. But unfortunately Twitter has given no tools or alternatives to deal with the situation.
- hypfer 29d ago
  Same. (I would love to say, but they still get me way too often) I can also highly encourage people to keep notes and do some basic OSINT. The effective internet is smaller than one might think, so that proves useful time and time again.
  - dwedge 29d ago
    Can you elaborate on the OSINT suggestion? Do you mean on the people you engage with?
    - hypfer 29d ago
      Yes, exactly. Though, not by default. If something seems _odd_, I suggest looking up _why_ it might be odd. Gathering context, essentially. Like "Okay, this guy is weird. Aah, okay, LinkedIn says that he works there. Okay _now_ that makes sense". Based on that, you can then decide how to approach the (previously failing) interaction. __ HN is a very easy place for that, because, to give somewhat concrete examples, if someone is shilling for something and seems unreachable for common sense, LinkedIn usually tells you that their salary depends on that. And people play very open here, because this is treated as a business networking event.

dostick 29d ago

LM still can not see and understand the desktop app UI on a level that is acceptable for testing. All the advances in coding are from web dev and thanks to the nature of html UIs. Try to develop a desktop app and it’s like working with a legally blind person who can see some part of the screen is they squint in a certain way but surely will miss all minor details.

walrus01 29d ago

> I often handwrite the code myself, but I’ve found that LLM coding assistants’ limitless patience ameliorates the drudgiest work of coding. I've been using a few different "smart" LLM to work on an analysis, parsing, search and correlation tool that ultimately deals with a 5.5GB on disk (with indexes) mariadb database that has its origin as a federal government department's 905,000 row plain text CSV file. There are a ridiculous number of data entry errors and just plain weird fuckups in the data origin that don't seem they will be ameliorated any time soon, so automating the drudge work of cleaning it up and rectifying it into something usable is a textbook case for this. Very pleased with the results so far.

nannal 29d ago

You could setup a webcam and have a vision llm stalk the breakroom of left over pizza and alert you.

creichenbach 29d ago

Those three colored shapes at the bottom look a lot like the EPA logo, a former grocery store chain: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPA_%28Warenhaus%29?wprov=sfla1 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPA_%28Warenhaus%29?wprov=sfla...

Fr0styMatt88 29d ago

I've found that LLMs are specifically bad at a certain kind of debugging, though I can't quite put my finger on what that is. "Spot the bug in this code" when the code can be looked at and pattern-matched against bugginess is something they seem really good at. Some parts of debugging, like "Here is this logfile, what do you think is going on?" are also surprisingly good. It's that thing kind of in the middle -- I know it when I see it honestly is the best way I can put it into words. An example from recently, I'm receiving some bad data on a network message parser. Immediately I don't know whether it's a my-side or their-side thing, but I know if I try and just vaguely describe the behaviour to the LLM it will start churning tokens. My current approach to problems like this is -- I need to tell the LLM what it needs to do to give itself the data it needs to solve the problem. My first reaction now isn't "It's not working, there's a bug, it's not doing X". It's "Okay, this isn't quite working properly; I need you to add some debug logging around X, Y and Z so we can figure this out". That tends to avoid spirals and get me out of the situation much more quickly. The seeing eye dog analogy is pretty apt actually. I would love to see some transcripts from the author if they are able. Edit to add: I think the 'thing' I'm alluding to might be -- if I have trouble expressing the buggy behaviour clearly in words, then I know it's probably going to be a fair few back-and-forths with the LLM to get something; the harder I find it to concisely describe, the more risk that it'll fall into a pit. Doubly so if I offer up a hypothesis which turns out to be wrong.

Utilera 28d ago

The weird part is that the LLM isn't really replacing the debugging loop here, it's inserting itself into the middle of it

asamadx 27d ago

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