I feel like there is some very deep generalizable wisdom buried here.

So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that).

We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category.

If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.

We have a bunch of tools - specs, code, tests. All of these really are models of the end outcome we're trying to capture.

You could just build something, see if you're right and then build it again. If that seems ridiculous, what makes a spec special that it can work first time?

Why we've not done this historically is code is annoying and (was) relatively expensive. You can rough out a spec document and get feedback from a wide variety of stakeholders -- after all, they can all read a document.

If you can use AI to explore a problem space and get feedback directly, that's definitely a whole new tool in the kit.

> Agentic search avoids those failure modes. There's no embedding pipeline or centralized index to maintain as thousands of engineers commit new code. Each developer's instance works from the live codebase.

The frame of "the way a software engineer would" and the conclusion seem at odds. I'd love to be schooled otherwise?

I use autocomplete/LSPs all the time and they're useful. That's an index? Why wouldn't Claude be able to use one? Also a "software engineer" remembers the codebase - that's definitely a RAG. I have a lot of muscle memory to find the file I need through an auto-completed CMD+P.

It doesn't need to particularly be real-time across thousands of engineers -- just the branch I'm on.

It's rare that I'd be navigating a codebase from first-principles traversal. It would usually be a new codebase and in those cases it's definitely not what I'd call an optimal experience.

This specific feature is more akin to Remote Control in Claude. You could already kick off Codex Cloud tasks (although it's just a little more fiddly to do so).

If you can move to Codex Cloud (or "Claude Code for the Web"), I think it's the superior approach. Start it there, and just pick it up from the PR if necessary.

We all know it's such an insanely gameable metric you'd be insane to actually use it...

This frames the argument like a dichotomy. And to be honest, using the Social Media "vibe-coding" as a strawman risks anchoring against something that's a mirage.

There are plenty of good engineers getting good results whilst accepting code-ownership as a continuum.

> If Claude goes down tomorrow, can you still do your job?

This is a valid counterpoint, but doing software is already a tricky set of dependencies. The answer here isn't automatically "you need to be able to do everything". It could simply be also use Codex.

I think the overall point is well made, I just don't agree with the absolute framing. There are things you can hand over AI safely. Even if you start small and increment it'll have a decent impact.

I'm using paid on TypeScript and it's genuinely terrific. Subjectively I think it has the edge over Opus.

I'd be surprised if OpenAI is hamstringing the free version. That would seem crazy from a GTM PoV. If anything the labs seem to throttle the heavy paid users.

Plus it's too early to really show, but also working on a dataflow language (w/ immutable data) that uses some code semantics from Rust/Zig and friends: https://github.com/jonathannen/badger

In fact it's in the article - the reason the Great Wall myth exists is because it's so prevalent on the internet... Presumably because a a lot of conscious people also believe it. Plenty of people walking around today, fully conscious, believe things that aren't factually true.

A child might make the same "seen from spain" mistake, but we would never say the same child wasn't conscious.

To my mind it's better to ask how the definition one way or the other has utility. It's less important to me that Dawkins believes an LLM to be conscious, but more important what specifically he thinks the implications of that are (and equally so, for me to interrogate my own beliefs if I happen to disagree).

I don't think couching it as conspiracy is the right frame either. This is not a one-off. I think a critical eye is warranted.

As others have pointed out, Anthropic is allowed to have TOS, even if we disagree with it.

But having Claude deny the existence of OpenClaw is a way more hazardous and likely straight up violates Claude's Constitution: https://www.anthropic.com/constitution