I think AI is kind of like that stupid universal socket wrench head that has a bunch of pins in it. The main skill in using something like that would be guessing when it's not gonna work and not using it.

I think an even bigger problem here is - what are you bringing to the market, and why should you be making any money? Your AI provider has perfect knowledge of how your "organization" works, but they are far better equipped to optimize it, while you're just using their API as a black box.

Yeah sloppers I know went from “see it proved new math! that totally clears us of plagiarism accusations we get when we repost that someone ai generated a frogger and a WoW clone” to “tried to use it for coding and it didn’t do a good job”.

The math stuff is mostly using Lean proof verifier and all that, by the way, the only use of LLM that they found that is actually legit because it doesn’t matter if its slopping, and you want your attempts randomized.

Anyone who would have tried the kind of bullshit he's trying, a century ago, would have died of radium poisoning or something equally dreadful. The only reason this idiot is still alive is regulations; however he's pretty good at risk compensating greater safety of quack treatments in 21th century with the sheer number of quack treatments he's doing.

I'm going to prognosticate that he'll die through some combination of the sheer brute force effort he's putting into finding a lethal quack treatment, and the weakening of regulations and corresponding societal norms relating to quack treatments.

Fucking knew it. I follow some idiot slopper thread and they are all always going on about their prompting and absolutely none of them ever even considered measuring the effects.

Having actually done optimizations including professionally once upon a time, its so ridiculous to see people thinking they optimize a stochastic process [when they don't even formally measure anything]. It is just gambling.

In addition to shoving absolute piece of shit "products" into everything. Prompt injectable "assistants", worthless search overviews, shoveled out without any QA or security reviews or anything.

Take those doctor transcriotionists that make up whole sentences. Why in the fuck is there even an LLM in there? Oh it lowers word error rate? That's because nobody expected having to benchmark bad faith efforts where coherent sentences can be completely made up, so nobody thought it necessary to disqualify for it.

There’s a slopper at the other end of it who believes that asking AI to find the best place to buy bitcoin is something that AIs are good at. Or perhaps asking AI to summarize the article and getting a penis enlargement ad as a summary.

"But I thought chatbots were great at security! They hacked huggingface and also fable will fix all security bugs in firefox".

I think even if development at an instant is some % faster to start with, it writes the same functionality in more lines of code which will rapidly lead to a cumulative slowdown.

Imagine you are traveling the oregon trail in a wagon and a devil offers you an extra horse but all of its manure has to go into the wagon. Initial speed up followed by a cumulative slowdown. If you keep accepting devil’s deals as your wagon keeps slowing down to a crawl, the progression is governed by a horseshit version of Tsiolkovsky’s equation.

Well, the big issue is that there's only this much demand. How many web browsers is there genuine end user demand for, worldwide? Probably just 1. Several are made thanks to other demands by large corporations. How much value does a web browser provide, to billions of people who use it? What ever the number may be, it's orders of magnitude more than it costs to develop.

Why is software observably hard for companies? When 90% of people are working on projects that are going nowhere, that creates a situation where competence is quite rare. Because in most projects it is objectively unnecessary (would make no difference). Where majority of software engineers never seen a successful project all the way from the start to the finish line.

Then there's startups, these are (predominantly) mere vehicles for moving money from the coffers of large publicly traded corporations into pockets of VCs (who sell startups to said corporations). Whole world of pretend software engineering.

Then there's large corporations, where CEOs want to get paid more and to be able to get paid more they need to add more layers to the hierarchy underneath them, which they need to fill somehow, and they can't fill on merit because they just don't have enough stuff happening that they could measure merit in.

edit: basically the management always wants to do the equivalent of having hired a dozen heart surgeons to work on one heart and a "heart surgery architect" as well, the more layers the better because the more layers the higher is the pay their layer can get.

As a software engineer, all of the free portion of the article is 100% correct about software engineering dysfunction.

There's another reason why it is that way, though. A software engineer who is competent and productive and working under competent leadership making an useful product, would make a very large multiple of their salary in profits.

That permits all sorts of utter dysfunction while still breaking even on the average. You can have incompetent leadership in 90% of projects, you can saddle your developers with any kind of bad practices, you can impose all sorts of productivity damaging nonsense and yet still break even.

The dysfunction can be presented as relentless innovation and pursuit of new, uncertain opportunities, as a shrewd strategy.

If you fall below break-even, the consequences will not be visible for many years. And up until it becomes impossible to recover, on the technical level it is extremely cheap to recover: it's easier to do nothing than to convert your OS's start menu to React. Tech companies don't fail because of tech.

This also relates to using AI to write code. You already can have a human write your code and pay them $1 for $10 you would make from it - or $0 you would make if you fucked up. You want it to become $0.5 with AI coding tools? Then you're multiplying your probability of success by what's left after the probability that you get some unmaintainable slop . It's simply not worth it.

Into a black hole.