It’s just surprising how few people understand this. It’s not like it’s new either. Polyani’s theory of tacit knowledge captured this back in 1958

But we can’t do away with the quasi-religious lip service to the canons of the AI creed now can we? /s

And in general, especially with something like C, the correspondence between the compiled code and source code isn’t very “lossy”. You don’t get one-to-one correspondence but it’s not too bad and you’re not introducing massive uncertainty by running it through a compiler. With LLMs though all bets are off… you’re not gonna know what you end up with

Along with putting estimated reading times (21 minutes in this case) can authors please start putting estimated writing times?

Did it take 10 seconds of prompting? Or hours of thought, trial error and revision? Especially when asking people to read for 20+ minutes...

They should put a Summary section at the top with the raw prompt.

But but according to Mr Altman, we've like entered the singularity. Right? Who cares about a billing issue?

It’s called the singularity because all your money vanishes into a black hole.

Precisely. I think everyone has been affected by the fearmongering and gaslighting to some dfgree. But step back and try and see whether software's getting better as a whole or going into reverse? OpenAI has basically unlimited internal compute and talent yet they screw this up amongst many other things. Shouldn't it be a 5 minute job for someone at AI to spin up a team of agents annd make sure this sort of thing never happens?

At a high level, most uses of AI I've seen seem to be people building other AI tools, orchestrators, managers, agent managers etc. But these are all means to ends. I mean I guess it's nice to play aroud with harnesses and command agents to do this and that, but where are the tangible outputs?

I just see so many people boasting of their token burn and the complexity of their agentic setup, yet they rarely show the actual outputs

Exactly. It fascinates me when I'm emailed long AI transcripts of meetings with the disclaimer "generated by AI. Be sure to check for accuracy".

Like, did somebody seriously think through the meaning and implication of that disclaimer and still write it?

No, the disclaimer is there only to avoid liability.

No. The particular context I’m referring to doesn’t have any legal implications so it’s not that. It’s just brain-deadness instead

Exactly. It's quite scary that some people are reacting viciously to this type of question. There's real insecurity here...

LLM use breeds insecurity, as well it should.

I do. I deny the "gains". The "gains" will turn out to be a mirage in the medium to long term. The technical and cognitive debt incurred will be too extreme.

I'm running a startup and we deliberately don't use AI for development. We only use it for review.

We're working in a really deep area where having full understanding of our code is more important than speed.

Besides, in this area, clients getting one whiff of AI code would be an immediate deal-killer

IMO there's a big difference between using AI to write code and using it to review your code. In the latter, you know the code well (you are the one who wrote it), and so it is much easier to understand if AI suggestions are good or hallucinations. In the former case, realizing when the AI is making mistakes is harder, because you don't have the full context anymore.

That's a fair challenge. AI review can mean many different things though. We treat it like a slightly better CppCheck, for context. TBH the way we use it doesn't really add much beyond regular static analysis tools.

Re "the hard way", I disagree. While it may seem like the hard way, in the medium and long term this is turning out to be the easy way. We have basically no technical debt, we can fix issues rapidly and (intangible I know) we can stand behind our codebase with absolute confidence.

Out of curiosity - what space are are in?