2 ms·

My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go

My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say that AI is pushing people away from computing, it's just that it's creating such massive low resistance paths to getting to the goal without the "productive friction." p.s. and at the same time, it's such a fantastic learning tool. It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy.

a34729t 16d ago
Yeah thats the silver lining in the whole mess: For those of us who enjoy software, hardware and building things, this will be a new golden age and we can filter out all humans and elves.
- fragmede 16d ago
  What about the dwarfs?
  - kragen 16d ago
    I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole.
kragen 16d ago
I don't know, maybe? I think it's opened the doors to a lot of people who don't really want to program, but do want, for example, a studio appointment booking management system. Which is good; people's needs matter just as much if they don't enjoy programming. You can use it to create a pretty wide range of things, which seems like it's going to change the things that get created in hard-to-predict ways. Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic. Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me. By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them. The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors. But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.
RugnirViking 16d ago
> It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy. The only problem I have at the moment is it's very prone to hallucinations, even now, yes frontier models astra fable with all the bells and whistles. This makes it hard to confidently use while learning because I have to be on the lookout for lies while I'm learning, which is precisely the moment I am least able to distinguish them. So instead theres just a constant low lying dread. Nonetheless, I am able to get some value out of them. Just not all, everything requires manual effort to duplicate and check which you should probably be doing anyway as part of learning
- fragmede 16d ago
  I'm not doubting you, but what's the most recent hallucination you've come across? I haven't had one in ages.
  - kragen 16d ago
    I mentioned the minimal proof assistant I elicited last night. When Fable 5.1 thought it was done, I asked how we knew the prover was sound (which means, in the jargon, that the theorems that it proves are actually true). It checked and immediately found five different ways it could "prove" false theorems with it (and fixed them). Then it suggested writing a fuzzer to try to flush out more soundness problems. It loves fuzzers! And usually they are an excellent cost/benefit tradeoff. However, in this case, I questioned whether a fuzzer would ever actually succeed at finding proofs of a theorem it was set to prove, even unsound proofs, and after doing some tests it admitted that the fuzzer it had proposed would have been completely useless. Then the conversation was incorrectly flagged as me working on a malicious security attack, so I was downgraded to Opus 4.8. I switched back to Fable, renamed the file in its scratchpad, and asked it to please use the term "generative testing" instead of "fuzzing". Thanks to not using the computer-security name for generative testing, there were no further false flags. Then, this morning, I was reading the spec it proved its program fulfilled, and asked whether a certain trivially incorrect alternative program would also fulfill the spec (a misformalization problem rather than a soundness problem). It churned away for a while, discovering that while, actually, no, that program would be rejected, a different trivially incorrect program would pass, and credited me in the docs with pointing out the issue. I pointed out that in fact the issue it had found was completely different from my stupid misreading of the spec. It fixed the doc. Fable 5.1 isn't Mythos but it's generally considered to be a "frontier model". So, from my point of view, the whole experience has been a constant fractal of hallucination, in which I have to constantly struggle to keep my grip (and Claude's grip) on actual reality, because it's so willing to make up surface-plausible nonsense. ______ P.S. Also, in another task today, it thought pip wasn't installed and was trying to figure out how to work around it. But that's not so much a hallucination as a failure to recheck assumptions — I hadn't installed pip on the machine before the first Claude work on it, and it just assumed that was still the case. Also I think that might have been Opus rather than Fable, so it's not as strong a case.

a34729t 16d ago

Yeah thats the silver lining in the whole mess: For those of us who enjoy software, hardware and building things, this will be a new golden age and we can filter out all humans and elves.

fragmede 16d ago
What about the dwarfs?
- kragen 16d ago
  I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole.

kragen 16d ago

I don't know, maybe? I think it's opened the doors to a lot of people who don't really want to program, but do want, for example, a studio appointment booking management system. Which is good; people's needs matter just as much if they don't enjoy programming. You can use it to create a pretty wide range of things, which seems like it's going to change the things that get created in hard-to-predict ways. Structurally, though, I'm sort of pessimistic. Throughout my career as a programmer, I've earned much more money than electronic engineers whose skills are mostly very similar, and probably much of this happy situation is due to the fact that my productivity depends only on me having access to a computer with GCC and Perl or Python on it, and the internet. If I were living in rural Malawi, I probably couldn't practice my trade, because the US$200 it takes to buy a working laptop is a year's wages there, and people lack the social permission to innovate. (William Kamkwamba's astounding achievements under those circumstances deserve more recognition. Read his autobiography!) But, if I work in any developed economy, that's somewhere between 1 hour and 20 hours of my earnings, so I'm not dependent on investors to create jobs for me. By contrast, electrical engineers mostly can't ship their designs unless an investor is willing to put up the capital to produce a batch of PCBs or chips — probably three batches or so before you get a fully working product. If you're working on a cutting-edge chip, that's several million dollars, so you're probably not going to save that up while working as an employee. This puts electrical engineers in a much worse bargaining position relative to investors. To a smaller extent, the same thing applies to machinists, auto mechanics, and many other skilled workers: they only get jobs if investors invest to create jobs for them. The capital-intensive nature of current AI seems like it might push the negotiation equilibrium for programmers two or three orders of magnitude in favor of investors. But it might not work out that way, and, at least at the moment, I'm finally bringing about numerous projects I'd been procrastinating on for years.

RugnirViking 16d ago

> It distills the intuition of a whole world and is able to transmit it on demand, like in your examples. It's an interesting dichotomy. The only problem I have at the moment is it's very prone to hallucinations, even now, yes frontier models astra fable with all the bells and whistles. This makes it hard to confidently use while learning because I have to be on the lookout for lies while I'm learning, which is precisely the moment I am least able to distinguish them. So instead theres just a constant low lying dread. Nonetheless, I am able to get some value out of them. Just not all, everything requires manual effort to duplicate and check which you should probably be doing anyway as part of learning

fragmede 16d ago
I'm not doubting you, but what's the most recent hallucination you've come across? I haven't had one in ages.
- kragen 16d ago
  I mentioned the minimal proof assistant I elicited last night. When Fable 5.1 thought it was done, I asked how we knew the prover was sound (which means, in the jargon, that the theorems that it proves are actually true). It checked and immediately found five different ways it could "prove" false theorems with it (and fixed them). Then it suggested writing a fuzzer to try to flush out more soundness problems. It loves fuzzers! And usually they are an excellent cost/benefit tradeoff. However, in this case, I questioned whether a fuzzer would ever actually succeed at finding proofs of a theorem it was set to prove, even unsound proofs, and after doing some tests it admitted that the fuzzer it had proposed would have been completely useless. Then the conversation was incorrectly flagged as me working on a malicious security attack, so I was downgraded to Opus 4.8. I switched back to Fable, renamed the file in its scratchpad, and asked it to please use the term "generative testing" instead of "fuzzing". Thanks to not using the computer-security name for generative testing, there were no further false flags. Then, this morning, I was reading the spec it proved its program fulfilled, and asked whether a certain trivially incorrect alternative program would also fulfill the spec (a misformalization problem rather than a soundness problem). It churned away for a while, discovering that while, actually, no, that program would be rejected, a different trivially incorrect program would pass, and credited me in the docs with pointing out the issue. I pointed out that in fact the issue it had found was completely different from my stupid misreading of the spec. It fixed the doc. Fable 5.1 isn't Mythos but it's generally considered to be a "frontier model". So, from my point of view, the whole experience has been a constant fractal of hallucination, in which I have to constantly struggle to keep my grip (and Claude's grip) on actual reality, because it's so willing to make up surface-plausible nonsense. ______ P.S. Also, in another task today, it thought pip wasn't installed and was trying to figure out how to work around it. But that's not so much a hallucination as a failure to recheck assumptions — I hadn't installed pip on the machine before the first Claude work on it, and it just assumed that was still the case. Also I think that might have been Opus rather than Fable, so it's not as strong a case.