I don't think it's productive to tell students today they must spend all their time understanding the code. Because it's clear now so many people will bypass that, even myself included. Some of the most fun I have with software these days is figuring out how to make it without looking at the code (for now on side projects only, see below).

I agree we're not quite all the way there yet to do this with large production systems. Yes, LLMs are highly fuzzy and non-deterministic things, but so are electrons! As computers improved we handled random bit flips that would occur due to a large number of unpredictable reasons. In either case, we have to reach a high enough confidence and redundancy bar that it doesn't hinder our productivity.

Raising confidence and redundancy in code output from LLM is still a nascent field. We're learning some things like "maybe unit tests don't work as well for LLMs as they did for humans", and "if the AI can self-evaluate in a loop against a factual number, it does a lot better".

But yeah, in this rapid wave of change I would consider "write the code yourself" more and more similar to "know how your CPU does branch prediction so your loops perform better", and the majority of our efforts will need to go into raising our confidence in this new fuzzy shape of software.

[1] Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5QSVhgrqVE

We have many agents per employee working in parallel pushing way more commits than was humanly possible before AI, triggering GitHub actions a lot more than the workflows were built for, causing Actions costs to escalate (they really aren't cheap if you compare to hosting it yourself), meanwhile working with YAML workflows is just a pain, and just writing code would be so much more fun and AI compatible[1].

At the same time, GitHub has about ~3 different PR review UIs? And they're all half-bad? Any decently sized PR triggers their "optimized for large PRs" UI which jumps around randomly in my experience. If you don't get that UI and keep the scrolling one (there's an old and a new one btw) then god forbid you click a line number because at some point your browser will randomly scroll back to that line and it won't unstick. Now Linear[2] (and others) is replacing the PR review experience for the agentic era.

I'd love to see a solid AI first Git + CI + reviews.

[1] Cloudflare CI https://blog.cloudflare.com/ci-workflows/

[2] Linear PR reviews https://linear.app/changelog/2025-01-23-pull-request-reviews

[1]: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/trotten-cabinet-with-doors-whit...

(I had originally replied on safety of letting LLMs skip questions but I don't think that was your point so I removed it.)

Furthermore, believing that the only thing saving you from disaster is Claude deciding to ask you a question is not a great conclusion either. You need guardrails in the power you bestow upon Claude from outside, not from inside.

Meanwhile, this article was written by Claude and has sentences like "Which cuts less far than it looks.", which I doubt Claude stopped to ask about.

    for (...) {
        el.style.height = `${something}px`;
        whatever.value = el.style.offsetHeight;
    }

What is least surprising? That INTEGER implicity accepts 'hello world' without error, or that you can't insert such a value unless you use a keyword like NONSTRICT or a type like ANY?

I would wager the vast majority of SQLite users if asked would probably not expect it to work.

All put together, paying ~$60 to get a hit-or-miss report seems a bit excessive, but obviously as the models they use under the hood get better it becomes more and more worth it, assuming they also improve their grounding/search capabilities.

I'm a big fan of Sakana though, and have followed David Ha / @hardmaru since the world models papers (with the racing car game and the Doom clone), which were incredible at the time.

Some nice topics to talk about instead:

- When to use an encrypted value (and symmetric or asymmetric), vs. a random (but secret) value, vs. a signed value (readable but not tamperable)

- Where to put these values (memory, localStorage, cookies)

- How to make sure these values don't last forever, and whether you need to be able to revoke them (make them invalid before their natural expiration timestamp)

I've been using the c, cw, and cr shortcuts for a long time but today I wished to switch to another account and wanted to keep the simplicity so I built this.

It's been mostly coded by Fable 5, with strong guidance by me. I've vetted the code and made sure the code it executes is readable in one file and that domain is secured, script is checksummed, project is open source, etc. but as always use your judgment and double check what you download from the internet!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48493953

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

- Come up with a file extension (.hmml)

- Decide on an entrypoint filename and format (index.html)

- Use an existing standard for combining resources into one file (tar + zstd)

Now you have something that is usable only using pre-existing tools.

I've yet to find a reason why it couldn't be the opposite, way more things are conscious than we've been led to believe. What if consciousness appears out of any system that is actively persisting through effects caused by itself? That might be a forest, or outside the realm of the living, a company. An ant colony, or a planet.

Complex chemical reactions, layered upon each other such that tiny blocks make up large entities. Individual bits combined such that they make up something new intelligible by us.

I think the strongest argument against AI being conscious is that it does not persist, it resets, but that does not seem unchangeable.

I believe there are several ways achieve that analogy today, even though the technology we have access to (and our own demands) has exponentially grown in complexity. I am happy to see more people thinking about it.

[Side track: I am personally not a fan of "break it up into many tiny systems" (microservices, etc) since it removes that agility of logic/state moving around the system. I just see an attempt to codify the analog of a very large human organization.]

Now that AI lets a single person (and in some cases, no person at all!) write several orders of magnitude more code than they would possibly have been able to, the requirements of our systems will change too, and our old ways of working is cracking at the seams. In a way we're perhaps building up a whole new foundation, sending our AIs to run 50-year-old terminal commands. Maybe that's all we needed all along, but I do find it strange that AI is forced to work within a highly fragmented system, where 95%, if not 99%, of all startups that write code with AI while hiding it from the user, are essentially following the recipe of: (1) launch VM (2) tell AI to install Next.js and good luck.

I too have a horse in this race and have come to similar conclusions as the article: there is a way to create primitives on top of bare metal that work really well for small and large applications alike, and let you express what you really wanted across compute/memory/network. And I believe that with AI we can go back to first principles and rethink how we do things, because this time the technology is not just for groups of humans. I find this really exciting!

I'd not be surprised if this is the year where some models simply stop being available as a plain API, while foundation model companies succeed at capturing more use cases in their own software.