Programming

Insurers, he said, are already lobbying state-level insurance regulators to win a carve-out in business insurance liability policies so they are not obligated to cover AI-related workflows. "That kills the whole system," Deeks said.

If insurers are going through extreme lengths to remove AI output from the list of things they will insure, this says everything about its future.

Because nothing says “effective risk management achieved” like an insurer signing off on, or forbidding the insurance of, an entire class of materials.

It’s a canary in a coal mine, like how insurers are now removing any ability for Floridians to insure against hurricanes or sea level rise, despite flat earthers screaming their heads off that climate change is a conspiracy and isn’t real.

(Note: I have seen the term “flat earther” starting to be used as a catch-all term for anyone who vehemently denies reality in spite of copious evidence that shows they are wholly and completely wrong)

People delude themselves if they think LLMs are not useful for coding. People also delude themselves that all code will be AI written in the next 2 years. The reality is that it's incredibly useful tool but with reasonable limits.

I wonder if it isn't that AI is good, its that all other software is ass.

I use a patching software, antivirus, and backup software at work and they're all now broken, after being patched. One is a 10.4B dollar company with a critical bug.

Hahaha. Im guessing this guy works in developer tools. These types of metrics are great but you rarely get there. You will get a few of them but the reality is the same people who want to use AI to produce faster are the same people that won't give you time to properly instrument your system for metrics like these. Good luck with your expectation that someone measures the impact of AI in a meaningful way.

I keep trying to use the various LLMs that people recommend for coding for various tasks and it doesn't just get things wrong. I have been doing quite a bit of embedded work recently and some of the designs it comes up with would cause electrical fires, its that bad. Where the earlier versions would be like "oh yes that is wrong let me correct it..." then often get it wrong again the new ones will confidently tell you that you are wrong. When you tell them it set on fire they just don't change.

I don't get it I feel like all these people claiming success with them are just not very discerning about the quality of the code it produces or worse just don't know any better.

Businesses were failing even before AI. If I cannot eventually speak to a human on a telephone then the whole human layer is gone and I no longer want to do business with that entity.

Recently had to call out a coworker for vibecoding all her unit tests. How did I know they were vibe coded? None of the tests had an assertion, so they literally couldn't fail.

Yeah these newer systems are crazy. The agent spawns a dozen subagents that all do some figuring out on the code base and the user request. Then those results get collated, then passed along to a new set of subagents that make the actual changes. Then there are agents that check stuff and tell the subagents to redo stuff or make changes. And then it gets a final check like unit tests, compilation etc. And then it's marked as done for the user. The amount of tokens this burns is crazy, but it gets them better results in the benchmarks, so it gets marketed as an improvement. In reality it's still fucking up all the damned time.

Coding with AI is like coding with a junior dev, who didn't pay attention in school, is high right now, doesn't learn and only listens half of the time. It fools people into thinking it's better, because it shits out code super fast. But the cognitive load is actually higher, because checking the code is much harder than coming up with it yourself. It's slower by far. If you are actually going faster, the quality is lacking.

AI is a solution in search of a problem. Why else would there be consultants to "help shepherd organizations towards an AI strategy"? Companies are looking to use AI out of fear of missing out, not because they need it.

Guy selling ai coding platform says other AI coding platforms suck.

This just reads like a sales pitch rather than journalism. Not citing any studies just some anecdotes about what he hears "in the industry".

Half of it is:

You're measuring the wrong metrics for productivity, you should be using these new metrics that my AI coding platform does better on.

I know the AI hate is strong here but just because a company isn't pushing AI in the typical way doesn't mean they aren't trying to hype whatever they're selling up beyond reason. Nearly any tech CEO cannot be trusted, including this guy, because they're always trying to act like they can predict and make the future when they probably can't.

We never figured out good software productivity metrics, and now we're supposed to come up with AI effectiveness metrics? Good luck with that.

I love this bit especially

Insurers, he said, are already lobbying state-level insurance regulators to win a carve-out in business insurance liability policies so they are not obligated to cover AI-related workflows. "That kills the whole system," Deeks said. Smiley added: "The question here is if it's all so great, why are the insurance underwriters going to great lengths to prohibit coverage for these things? They're generally pretty good at risk profiling."

Generative models, which many people call "AI", have a much higher catastrophic failure rate than we have been lead to believe. It cannot actually be used to replace humans, just as an inanimate object can't replace a parent.

Jobs aren't threatened by generative models. Jobs are threatened by a credit crunch due to high interest rates and a lack of lenders being able to adapt.

"AI" is a ruse, a useful excuse that helps make people want to invest, investors & economists OK with record job loss, and the general public more susceptible to data harvesting and surveillance.

This is all fine and dandy but the whole article is based on an interview with "Dorian Smiley, co-founder and CTO of AI advisory service Codestrap". Codestrap is a Palantir service provider, and as you'd expect Smiley is a Palantir shill.

The article hits different considering it's more or less a world devourer zealot taking a jab at competing world devourers. The reporter is an unsuspecting proxy at best.

Lmfao

Deeks said "One of our friends is an SVP of one of the largest insurers in the country and he told us point blank that this is a very real problem and he does not know why people are not talking about it more."

Maybe because way too many people are making way too much money and it underpins something like 30% of the economy at this point and everyone just keeps smiling and nodding, and they’re going to keep doing that until we drive straight off the fucking cliff 🤪

So is this just early adaptation problems? Or are we starting to find the ceiling for Ai?