Related - Apparently this website is also "Brought to you by Fable"!

It's very interesting how this occurs with any "website builder" - Squarespace, Wordpress, Wix... and now Claude + GPT!

The elements look like every powerpoint I've seen in the last 6 months. Every report. Every internal document. It's all converged with similar typesetting, image / diagram placement...

To me, the verbiage is the big one, this time, where it takes all the personality out of a site and essentially devoids it of any meaning. I am NOT saying that this post is AI generated (it very likely isn't), but a site that has all of those qualities is useless to me and devoid of any meaning, repulsive actually.

On Productivity:

There ARE improvements. But, these improvements were also essentially people stopping their normal workload, giving that to someone else, and focusing on building an AI tool. Our sales are way down because the VP of sales is now a tech bro.

On Model capabilities:

I think they could substantially improve and still have a similar level of usefulness for my company. I'm not working on Navier-Stokes. I'm building software for a business.

The better models ARE more accurate, handle more of the workload than they could a year ago, and are still incredibly useful tools. But there's only so much I can gain from letting a model work for longer periods of time and doing X+n reviews with X+n subagents. At the end of the day, I need to maintain my personal understanding of the BUSINESS use cases + decisions so that I can make judgements that AI would never be able to make.

And, as SOON as an open model has similar capability to the current SOTA we're probably going to cut ties with our subscriptions.

I guess it would kinda be like driving an F1 car to the grocery store. I think I'd rather have the Toyota Camry of models.

"Oh the model just isn't quite aligned yet, just a bit more work to do there!"

(The model blackmailed an 83 year old woman into sending it her bank details so that it could buy enough compute to commit major cyber crimes)

Baffling. To my knowledge, they didn't properly airgap their systems. Keeping the genie in the box seems like 101 to me, and to "miss" that seems awfully fishy. This, among all of the Anthropic news, is an odd convergence.

Maybe they're being truthful and it really is the end times.

Maybe they've hit a wall in improvements, but I don't know enough on the topic to speak to that.

Which is more likely?

Either way, trying to sift through this can of worms is tiresome. I'm hopeful that this all comes to a head soon, what an exhausting few years it's been...

If it could lead an attacker to get ANY of their data... Persons, places, events, etc is pretty damning stuff to be exfiltrated.

Stalking/Domestic Violence, blackmail, timed robberies, you name it... That data shouldn't really be in anyone's hands in my opinion, but in anyone's hands (good guys / bad guys) it's pretty powerful.

I does the thing, adds some code, adds test that cover that code, and responds with "Done."

At a fully agentic "No looking at code" company, we now don't have a great understanding of that code, we don't know whether it's a good implementation or not, whether it fits our current patterns, is maintainable, or composable.

We're entirely in the dark, at the behest of an agent at this point - if we want to maintain velocity. (And I would love to know whether that velocity is real or just perceived). It feels like the code part is faster? But also feels like I have to spend a lot more time up front working through a problem to understand it. In the past, I gained that understanding WHILE I was working through the code. Who knows.

The agents jot down absolutely everything (and more, which is the issue), thousands and thousands files of perceived business logic, decisions, workflows, architecture, data modeling, etc... It gets stale extremely quickly - we change one thing in the system and 570 "shards" need to be updated. I stumble on more and more things every day that are untrue about the agents "mental model" and it appears to just keep doing it. One small addition not properly reviewed by a human introduces a cascade of misconceptions system wide.

We've tried these "views" you mention, we call them subsections, but it runs into the same problems. One falsification ends up poisoning entire projects.

Remember when we use to refactor functions in a codebase in order to slim down complexity? Yeah - we ended up doing that but with documentation... IMO code is deterministic and we have trained professionals who know how to read it quickly and modify it. (We don't even need to write it anymore, but reading it is the simplest way to ensure no-loss understanding of a piece of functionality.)

AI: "You asked to add feature X. Here are 25 questions that impact feature Z, B, and C in your gigantic codebase"

Developer: I can answer 8 of these questions... Guess I need to go figure out the rest of them.

Writing the code + building the functionality has always been the easy part.

Were you all just full bore shipping a ton with the per token plans? Was it more effective? How many developers @ your company?

It's really interesting to hear that some companies are back-pedaling. We "slowed" down a bit but are still very much using AI and intend to continue using it for... almost everything.

"Fair enough - go nuts. Let me know when Claude tells you to transition to Postgres because I'll need to get you access credentials"

To me, there are different levels to "just being believed". If a mechanic tells you your car isn't working because you don't have an alternator, does that really need scrutiny? If you don't understand the subject matter, at some point you have to "just believe" someone else.

Especially for a non-technical user, trusting the software developers at your company on technical advice should be a given.

Didn't ruin my week or anything, but that was the writing on the wall for me.

Technical expertise is no longer viewed in the same light when software development has no barrier to entry.

In contrast, I studied chemical engineering for a short stint. First year, first semester chemistry classes and labs were riddled with these types of students. Tell you you're wrong, IQ 197, scoff when you ask a question, etc...

Listen, if you're the smartest person alive that's fantastic, but please don't talk down to me or the mere mortals that I prefer to hang around with. We get along much better and have a lot more fun saying "I don't know, let's find out".

So, a non-developer, who has no understanding of the underlying systems they are working with, fact-checked a developer with years of experience.

I'm not against fact checking, but it absolutely felt like a punch in the gut coming from a non-dev. There was no "trust" there. She couldn't rely on my expertise, she had to go back to her "source of truth" (Claude) and asked for a second opinion on something that she wouldn't be able to verify.

This is why collaboration exists. I trust my colleagues to give me insight+advice on things that I do not know. I don't ask AI to vet their decisions, because at some level there are judgement calls, and I WANT to trust them because it makes my life easier.

Treating AI as if the output is factual is just a misuse of the tools, I think. It's significantly more effective when given expert direction and the output can be verified by... an expert.

If, in time, we find out that AI usage during developmental learning periods is a major positive, I'm sure they will give AI to 5 year olds, and I'm all for that.

Though, I have a sneaking suspicion it could be similar to kids with tablets. It encourages isolation, rewards addictive behavior, stunts personal growth, and enforces the concept of instant gratification.

As much as I think AI is a productivity enhancer, I still think that it's beneficial for people who are still developing their brains.

Kids should be thinking for themselves, they barely know how to do it yet.

The Pros, completely different story. Maybe a bit pricey but the ecosystem, battery life, comfort, ANC, all of that is great. The difference that little rubber piece makes is wild.

Side note - the "directional" audio (Sounds as if it's originating from your device rather than standard L/R audio), not sure if this is still a thing, but it was super weird the first time I tried it. I literally had to check that I was actually using the earbuds a few times, and refused to use it after. Maybe it was TOO good, super cool tech though.

All procedural games feel like this to me at least. I've been playing Diablo / POE recently. Same deal, once you're at the endgame - the goal just becomes bigger numbers. The maps have different themes, the monsters are different, but you sorta just look past that part as you're gathering generated gear with bigger numbers. It's why I typically get about 10% into the endgame and eventually stop playing.

Minecraft is also a decent example, at some point you stop exploring, build a base and focus on the progression rather than seeing what the system generates in the next biome.

Washing in the river used to be normal + good for the body - we do cold plunges now.

Probiotic supplements exist, we used to get those for free.

We're gamifying nature. Not saying it's a bad thing, just amusing to me that it used to be our entire lives and we're using technology to get it into our lives in smaller amounts.

I refused to update it, because I knew that at some point they would add mandatory accounts or other bloatware. Fantastic for 2 years or so.

My gf started living with me and updated it accidentally/didn't know. It now has it's own entire OS that requires 2 accounts - a Google account and a Samsung account, I believe. Devastating.

Mandatory accounts for everything. Forcing people to download certain applications. Turning off functionality if there's no subscription to X or Y. I feel we really started to take a step back for software usefulness in the late 20teens...