agentultra

15 ms·

61.
by agentultra 3mo ago
It's not hard to observe what the tools and systems can do. It's impressive. But I suspect for some the trade-off is not worth it based on their principles. No amount of disbelief or encouragement will change that.
62.
by agentultra 3mo ago
You still need an expert human to drive an LLM. And even then, with C, you need to be very careful. LLM’s generate lots of code. Code that has no obvious errors in it. The kind humans aren’t good at picking up on their own. You need other t
63.
by agentultra 3mo ago
I always have to ask people, correct with respect to what? The reason being that most software developers aren’t very good at specifying systems precisely enough that they can confidently determine whether their program does what they thi
64.
by agentultra 3mo ago
Wild idea: just write code. I know. It’s an unbelievable concept in this AI era. Write code ? Isn’t that what dinosaurs did? If you expect that a human will need to read and maintain that code you might as well write it for them. You’ll ge
65.
by agentultra 3mo ago
I learned a while ago that eMacs is more like a programming environment that has a text editor built in. Sort of like some SmallTalk images. When you think of it this way it’s pretty neat.
66.
by agentultra 3mo ago
Coding does not inherently have the “precision” of mathematics. If you’ve ever tried to formally verify even a basic algorithm you’ll know how “loose” programs are with their specifications. If you end up down this route you’ll gain an appr
67.
by agentultra 3mo ago
Well the other thing is that agricultural uses are generally on a different scale and use different sources. And at least you can eat almonds and alfalfa. Probably more useful than asking an LLM to autocomplete your homework. Depending on y
68.
by agentultra 3mo ago
Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable. See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re d
69.
by agentultra 3mo ago
“The knowledge is not in danger, in fact, it has never been safer. The AI models have read every manual that no human reads.” I disagree. If you ask a model for a manual and it regurgitates that manual from its training data, it’s over-fitt
70.
by agentultra 3mo ago
PBT is great and often good enough. I use model checking mostly in the design phase of a project. Some much bigger projects at MS and Amazon use it continuously throughout their process.
71.
by agentultra 3mo ago
If you are willing to relax the restrictions, and you probably should, model checking is probably worth its weight in gold for these scenarios. You won’t get proofs but you will spell out your logic in a formal language[0] and each run
72.
by agentultra 3mo ago
You can’t vibe code a production capable C compiler if you’ve never written one. Sure, companies are asking for LLM experience. But whether they know it or not they are also hiring someone who knows what they’re doing with the output. Proje
73.
by agentultra 3mo ago
Alienation is inherent to the system.
74.
by agentultra 3mo ago
For sure. Just because the studies are incomplete or difficult doesn’t mean they’re useless. We still do unit testing and type systems continue to get more sophisticated and spread further because we believe they have an effect on quality a
75.
by agentultra 3mo ago
A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious complia
76.
by agentultra 3mo ago
Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.
77.
by agentultra 4mo ago
> * whether you’re protected from hackers or data breaches* Not a matter of if, but when, a breach happens.
78.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Doubt that. If you couldn’t write it yourself you can’t get an LLM to do it for you. So unless you’re attracting the 50 best software developers you’re getting middling to miserable results.
79.
by agentultra 4mo ago
You can’t beat thermodynamics no matter how hard you try. This shouldn’t be a surprised to the majority of people.
80.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Exciting stuff, especially the tree-sitter changes. Emacs is a fine weapon. And one that grows with you over the years of honing it to perfection. Nothing else compares.
81.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Every line of code is a liability. A potential security breach. An error waiting to corrupt customer data. A maintenance burden.
82.
by agentultra 4mo ago
I’ve had to use one of these to book something with a service company. It was horrible. It’s like talking to Pinnochio… there’s nothing there. And it’s trying to sound human and conversational. It’s creepy and annoying. Just give me a human
83.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Can’t we value both? If we consider that “attractive code,” to many means simple, elegant… and therefore easy to extend, maintain, few errors, performant, etc.
84.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand. They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among
85.
by agentultra 4mo ago
I feel like the navel-gazing-ivory-tower programmer is almost a straw man used by commenters and bloggers to make themselves sound pragmatic. Summoned only be be torn down. Never to be found on an existing software team. I have come acros
86.
by agentultra 4mo ago
I dunno about everyone, but I do. It drives me up the wall when software is slow, stutters, etc. There’s almost no good excuse for it. But it happens anyway because of some combination of, “nobody cares,” and, “money.” I derive joy out of p
87.
by agentultra 4mo ago
I think there are close to an equal number of pro-AI posts. Personally I just don’t care to use AI tools. I like programming. I don’t like agentic coding or prompting. I’m just not interested. Sometimes the front page is so full of pro-AI&#
88.
by agentultra 4mo ago
> That's what I can't for the life of me figure out. Bad code is bad code regardless of who is writing it. Adding a disclaimer about how it was written is meaningless. Maybe I was reading too much into this part of your comme
89.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Maybe you want to resist normalizing the use of GenAI for programming? I know my personal choice doesn’t make much of a difference but I refuse to own a car. I advocate at my local city council to remove car storage from streets, remove par
90.
by agentultra 4mo ago
Not the commenter you replied to: I think many people in this camp have political or ethical concerns and want to avoid contributing to or supporting the companies behind frontier-AI tools. Or they have moral or technical concerns and want

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