Actually, I've been saying that even models from 2+ years ago were extremely good, but you needed to "hold them right" to get good results, else you might cut yourself on the sharp edges of the "jagged frontier" (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700) Unfortunately, this often necessitated you to adapt yourself to the tool, which is a big change -- unfeasible for most people and companies.
I would say the underlying principle was ensuring a tight, highly relevant context (e.g. choose the "right" task size and load only the relevant files or even code snippets, not the whole codebase; more manual work upfront, but almost guaranteed one-shot results.)
With newer models the sharper edges have largely disappeared, so you can hold them pretty much any which way and still get very good results. I'm not sure how much of this is from the improvements in the model itself vs the additional context it gets from the agentic scaffolding.
I still maintain that we need to adapt ourselves to this new paradigm to fully leverage AI-assisted coding, and the future of coding will be pretty strange compared to what we're used to. As an example, see Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
FWIW, Gas Town is strange because Steve is strange (in a good way).
It's just the same agent swarm orchestration that most agent frameworks are using, but with quirky marketing. All of that is just based on the SDLC [PM/Architect -> engineer planning group -> engineer -> review -> qa/evaluation] loop most people here should be familiar with. So actually pretty banal, which is probably part of the reason Steve decided to be zany.
Each failed prediction should lower our confidence in the next "it's finally useful!" claim. But this inductive reasoning breaks down at genuine inflection points.
I agree with your framing that measuring should NOT be separated from political issues, but each can be made clear separately (framing it as "training the tools of the oppressor" seems to conflate measuring tool usefulness with politics).
It's a little weird how defensive people are about these tools. Did everyone really think being able to import a few npm packages, string together a few APIs, and run npx create-react-app was something a large number of people could do forever?
The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
Every profession changes. Saying that these new tools are useless or won't impact you/xyz devs is just ignoring a repeated historical pattern
I think perhaps for some folks we're looking at their first professional paradigm shift. If you're a bit older, you've seen (smaller versions of) the same thing happening before as e.g. the Internet gained traction, Web2.0, ecommerce, crypto, etc. and have seen your past skillset become useless as now it can be accomplished for only $10/mo/user.... either you pivot and move on somehow, or you become a curmudgeon. Truly, the latter is optional, and at any point when you find yourself doing that you wish to stop and just embrace the new thing, you're still more than welcome to do so. AI is only going to get EASIER to get involved with, not harder.
Agreed, it always seemed a little crazy that you could make wild amounts of money to just write software. I think the music is finally stopping and we'll all have to go back to actually knowing how to do something useful.
> The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
My experience has been negative progress in this field. On iOS, UIKit in Interface Builder is an order of magnitude faster to write and to debug, with less weird edge cases, than SwiftUI was last summer. I say last summer because I've been less and less interested in iOS the more I learn about liquid glass, even ignoring the whole "aaaaaaa" factor of "has AI made front end irrelevant anyway?" and "can someone please suggest something the AI really can't do so I can get a job in that?"
Democratizing coding so regular people can get the most out of computers is the opposite of oppression. You are mistaking your interests for societies interests.
It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
It's incredibly ironic how socializing what was a privatized ability has otherwise "socialist" people completely losing their shit. Just the mask of pure virtue slipping...
On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?
Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?
I used claude code to set up a bunch of basic tools my wife was using in her daily work. Things like custom pomodoro timers, task managers, todo notes.
She used to log into 3 different websites. Now she just opens localhost:3000 and has all of them on the same page. No emails shared with anyone. All data stored locally.
I could have done this earlier but the time commitment with Claude Code now was writing a spec in 5-minutes and pressing approve a few times vs half a day.
I count this as an absolute win. No privacy breaches, no data sharing.
> The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
Tt's because these companies profit from all the existing art without compensating the artists. Even worse, they are now putting the very people out of a job who (unwittingly) helped to create these tools in the first place. Not to mention how hurtful it must be for artists seeing their personal style imitated by a machine without their consent.
I totally see how it can empower regular people, but it also empowers the megacorps and bad actors. The jury is still out on whether AI is providing a net positive to society. Until then, let's not ignore the injustice and harm that went into creating these tools and the potential and real dangers that come with it.
When you imagine my position, "I hate these companies for democratizing code/art", then debate that it is called a strawman logical fallacy.
Ascribing the goals of "democratize code/art" onto these companies and their products is called delusion.
I am sure the 3 letter agency directors on these company boards are thrilled you think they left their lifelong careers solely to finally realize their dream to allow you to code and "manifest your artistic ideas".
> If I am unable to convince you to stop meticulously training the tools of the oppressor (for a fee!) then I just ask you do so quietly.
I'm kind of fascinated by how AI has become such a culture war topic with hyperbole like "tools of the oppressor"
It's equally fascinating how little these comments understand about how LLMs work. Using an LLM for inference (what you do when you use Claude Code) does not train the LLM. It does not learn from your code and integrate it into the model while you use it for inference. I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative which is probably why it's always ignored. If not ignored, the next step is to decry that the LLM companies are lying and are stealing everyone's code despite saying they don't.
The prompts and responses are used as training data. Even if your provider allows you to opt out they are still tracking your usage telemetry and using that to gauge performance. If you don’t own the storage and compute then you are training the tools which will be used to oppress you.
I find it hard to believe there are people who know these companies stole the entire creative output of humanity and egregiously continually scrape the internet are, for some reason, ignoring the data you voluntarily give them.
> I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative
"Narrative"? This is just reality. In their own words:
> The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas. Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer. The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries [0]
Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?
Or perhaps you are a wealthy westerner of a racial and sexual majority and as such have felt little by way of oppression by this tech?
In such a case I would encourage you to develop empathy, or at least sympathy.
> Using an LLM for inference .. does not train the LLM.
In their own words:
> One of the most useful and promising features of AI models is that they can improve over time. We continuously improve our models through research breakthroughs as well as exposure to real-world problems and data. When you share your content with us, it helps our models become more accurate and better at solving your specific problems and it also helps improve their general capabilities and safety. We do not use your content to market our services or create advertising profiles of you—we use it to make our models more helpful. ChatGPT, for instance, improves by further training on the conversations people have with it, unless you opt out.
Who is the parent oppressing? Making a comment and companies looking to automate labor are a little bit different. One might disagree that automation is oppressive or whatever goals the major tech CEOs have in developing AIs (surveillance, influencing politics, increasing wealth gap), but certainly commenting that they are oppressive is not the same thing.
keeda|1 month ago
I would say the underlying principle was ensuring a tight, highly relevant context (e.g. choose the "right" task size and load only the relevant files or even code snippets, not the whole codebase; more manual work upfront, but almost guaranteed one-shot results.)
With newer models the sharper edges have largely disappeared, so you can hold them pretty much any which way and still get very good results. I'm not sure how much of this is from the improvements in the model itself vs the additional context it gets from the agentic scaffolding.
I still maintain that we need to adapt ourselves to this new paradigm to fully leverage AI-assisted coding, and the future of coding will be pretty strange compared to what we're used to. As an example, see Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
CuriouslyC|1 month ago
It's just the same agent swarm orchestration that most agent frameworks are using, but with quirky marketing. All of that is just based on the SDLC [PM/Architect -> engineer planning group -> engineer -> review -> qa/evaluation] loop most people here should be familiar with. So actually pretty banal, which is probably part of the reason Steve decided to be zany.
QuantumGood|1 month ago
I agree with your framing that measuring should NOT be separated from political issues, but each can be made clear separately (framing it as "training the tools of the oppressor" seems to conflate measuring tool usefulness with politics).
biammer|1 month ago
[deleted]
spaceman_2020|1 month ago
The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
Every profession changes. Saying that these new tools are useless or won't impact you/xyz devs is just ignoring a repeated historical pattern
stefan_|1 month ago
mikestorrent|1 month ago
idiotsecant|1 month ago
ben_w|1 month ago
My experience has been negative progress in this field. On iOS, UIKit in Interface Builder is an order of magnitude faster to write and to debug, with less weird edge cases, than SwiftUI was last summer. I say last summer because I've been less and less interested in iOS the more I learn about liquid glass, even ignoring the whole "aaaaaaa" factor of "has AI made front end irrelevant anyway?" and "can someone please suggest something the AI really can't do so I can get a job in that?"
square_usual|1 month ago
Workaccount2|1 month ago
It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
It's incredibly ironic how socializing what was a privatized ability has otherwise "socialist" people completely losing their shit. Just the mask of pure virtue slipping...
deergomoo|1 month ago
Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?
spaceman_2020|1 month ago
She used to log into 3 different websites. Now she just opens localhost:3000 and has all of them on the same page. No emails shared with anyone. All data stored locally.
I could have done this earlier but the time commitment with Claude Code now was writing a spec in 5-minutes and pressing approve a few times vs half a day.
I count this as an absolute win. No privacy breaches, no data sharing.
spacechild1|1 month ago
Tt's because these companies profit from all the existing art without compensating the artists. Even worse, they are now putting the very people out of a job who (unwittingly) helped to create these tools in the first place. Not to mention how hurtful it must be for artists seeing their personal style imitated by a machine without their consent.
I totally see how it can empower regular people, but it also empowers the megacorps and bad actors. The jury is still out on whether AI is providing a net positive to society. Until then, let's not ignore the injustice and harm that went into creating these tools and the potential and real dangers that come with it.
biammer|1 month ago
Ascribing the goals of "democratize code/art" onto these companies and their products is called delusion.
I am sure the 3 letter agency directors on these company boards are thrilled you think they left their lifelong careers solely to finally realize their dream to allow you to code and "manifest your artistic ideas".
elzbardico|1 month ago
It's incredibly ironic how blatant theft has left otherwise capitalistic people so enthusiastic.
Aurornis|1 month ago
I'm kind of fascinated by how AI has become such a culture war topic with hyperbole like "tools of the oppressor"
It's equally fascinating how little these comments understand about how LLMs work. Using an LLM for inference (what you do when you use Claude Code) does not train the LLM. It does not learn from your code and integrate it into the model while you use it for inference. I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative which is probably why it's always ignored. If not ignored, the next step is to decry that the LLM companies are lying and are stealing everyone's code despite saying they don't.
meowkit|1 month ago
The prompts and responses are used as training data. Even if your provider allows you to opt out they are still tracking your usage telemetry and using that to gauge performance. If you don’t own the storage and compute then you are training the tools which will be used to oppress you.
Incredibly naive comment.
biammer|1 month ago
I find it hard to believe there are people who know these companies stole the entire creative output of humanity and egregiously continually scrape the internet are, for some reason, ignoring the data you voluntarily give them.
> I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative
"Narrative"? This is just reality. In their own words:
> The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas. Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer. The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries [0]
Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?
Or perhaps you are a wealthy westerner of a racial and sexual majority and as such have felt little by way of oppression by this tech?
In such a case I would encourage you to develop empathy, or at least sympathy.
> Using an LLM for inference .. does not train the LLM.
In their own words:
> One of the most useful and promising features of AI models is that they can improve over time. We continuously improve our models through research breakthroughs as well as exposure to real-world problems and data. When you share your content with us, it helps our models become more accurate and better at solving your specific problems and it also helps improve their general capabilities and safety. We do not use your content to market our services or create advertising profiles of you—we use it to make our models more helpful. ChatGPT, for instance, improves by further training on the conversations people have with it, unless you opt out.
[0] https://www.ai.mil/latest/news-press/pr-view/article/4242822...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...
Gud|1 month ago
goatlover|1 month ago
biammer|1 month ago
[deleted]