Most of the time, the person saying that is wrong.

If you start trying to juggle multiple agents, you are doubling down on the wrong strategy.

https://hbr.org/2010/12/you-cant-multi-task-so-stop-tr

So one user's experience is relevant to another, so they can learn from one another?

For example, it may be my hypothesis that modern computers work through the agency of evil demons. You could spend a lot of time trying discussing with me how this hypothesis could be put to the test empirically. But it may be that this is not a disagreement that scientific inquiry is likely to resolve.

So too, I think, with "intelligence" or "consciousness".

What people are actually concerned about is economic impact, and we can have a fruitful debate over economic impact without discussing "intelligence" or "consciousness".

Before looking at the results my guess was that scores would be higher for Unlambda than any of the others, because humans that learn Scheme don't find it all that hard to learn about the lambda calculus and combinatory logic.

But the model that did the best, Qwen-235B, got virtually every problem wrong.

I would love to see a complete accounting in a year or so.

But even accounting for all these "hard" constraints and metrics, there are clearly reasons to prefer some possible programs over others even when they all satisfy the same constraints and perform equally on all relevant metrics.

We do treat programs as efficient causes[1] of side effects in computing systems: a file is written, a block of memory is updated, etc. and the program is the cause of this.

But we also treat them as statements of a theory of the problem being solved[2]. And this latter treatment is often more important socially and economically. It is irrational to be indifferent to the theory of the problem the program expresses.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_causes#Efficient

[2]: https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

I am burning a lot of tokens every day at work and on personal projects. It's helpful. I generally work in tmux with github copilot in one pane, and a few other terminal panes showing tests and current diff.

I find it really important to avoid the temptation to multi-task by running multiple agents. For quite varied tasks, productivity gains from multi-tasking have proven to be illusory. Why would it be different with writing software?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

How so?

If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.