eg when the whole point of function A is to call function B under certain conditions, Claude may just…forget to call function B. and not fix this, after repeated reminders.
aaaah 😱 how are there people who don’t find this completely utterly insane to accept such a behaviour from a coding tool?
for me, it’s like an elevator that “sometimes” jumped half a meter and then refused to go to some floors—I would call the emergency repair line if that happened and not try to excuse it that “it’s so much more convenient than the stairs, even if you have to press the 6th floor button multiple times—it might drive you to the 12th floor first, 4th floor second, but it will almost certainly work on the 3rd try” … and if I broke my leg (~didn’t know how to program in some language), this unreliable elevator would sound MORE scary to me, not less
I think I must be missing some kind of adrenaline enthusiasm that makes me less excited around hype for an incompetent technology that will probably kill us all not long after it gets actually competent … or just generally becoming a grumpy old man.
Unacceptable compared to what? the automated coding tool that never gets anything wrong? But that doesn’t exist. Compared to doing it myself? It would be, if I were better at web dev! but at the moment the comparison point is “no website at all” and it’s clearly better than that.
Have we became so anti-social that the only 2 options are to do it alone or not at all?
I’m afraid that I do understand your point of view—I feel myself very exhausted for the last few years so I was not helping my friends in open source lately, so they opted for coding assistants instead and now when I see the code I feel recoil from the AI slop and I do not wish to return to the project. If they want things done and I don’t “want” to help, what are their options?
Brave new world we live in, infinite productivity increase from zero to something for people who don’t have time to became good at a craft, burnout for a few of us who used to be good and well paid but became overwhelmed by the ever-ready Waluiging incompetent assistant attractor.
i was always antisocial; i literally don’t know how this worked in the Before Times. you… ask your buddy to write code for you? isn’t that a pretty big favor? i ask my friends software questions all the time, but that’s smaller. & i never touched open source contribution because it seemed more like a thing for stronger progranmers. are you saying you would ordinarily react to thinking “this app should exist” by starting an open-source project?
still low on energy these days, so I should acknowledge that I am probably not supposed to feel like a museum piece by the comment about Before Times… but I don’t remember ever having a thought in the shape of “this app should exist” myself, so yeah, I probably do feel like a museum piece now
as for the more-likely-intended genuine interest about my closest examples I can think of how I deal with these kinds of situations:
if I randomly visit a friend and they are cooking dinner and they ask me if I want some, I say yes (..as a stereotypical cis man when it comes to free food)
in a recent PR, in the code slop from @mruwnik, I can see what was the tradeoff that the imperative DOM shit was simpler for the team at the time to do and that the code could have been improved “later” if needed for more complex features .. and now @Olivier Coutu with the help of coding assistants will need to parse my comment about potential memory leaks—is that situation better with coding assistants or would it have been better if the current team was forced to pay some human developer if they wanted new features to be developed? (although the “average” humans would probably produce slop code too)
if I have a dispute with my husband, we argue in person
if I have a dispute with my ex, we tend to have difficult conversations over whatsapp
is whatsapp a dispute app for me? no.
if I am interested to continue a conversation about how exactly we seem to misunderstand each other in a comment section of a lesswrong post, I write one more comment
is lesswrong a dispute app for me? maybe.
if someone could benefit from a vibe-coded dispute app even though I am clearly not the target audience myself, does that sound like a good thing to happen in the world?
yes
is vibecoding going to be a net benefit for the vibecoders and for humanity?
I’ve set up a calendar reminder for 1 year from now to ask @sarahconstantin that here .. no idea myself, just a big fat bias towards “oh god no”
Oi! I take issue with you calling my code slop! That was good old fashioned the least rubbish option available, which then grew out of hand! Also known as not knowing how to do frontend properly...
It’s fine—you get used to having to throw away the last hour’s work, but since you were scrolling twitter at the time it’s not that much of a loss...
If you roll the dice enough times you get your answer. Or at least close enough for you to not have to have written what it came up with. And every now and then it gets things perfectly right on the first try!
I wish I’d chosen coding for fun instead of coding for work and dooming for “fun” couple years ago.. But it seemed that delegation of work to tools will be more deterministic and reliable than managing people, oh well!
aaaah 😱 how are there people who don’t find this completely utterly insane to accept such a behaviour from a coding tool?
for me, it’s like an elevator that “sometimes” jumped half a meter and then refused to go to some floors—I would call the emergency repair line if that happened and not try to excuse it that “it’s so much more convenient than the stairs, even if you have to press the 6th floor button multiple times—it might drive you to the 12th floor first, 4th floor second, but it will almost certainly work on the 3rd try” … and if I broke my leg (~didn’t know how to program in some language), this unreliable elevator would sound MORE scary to me, not less
I think I must be missing some kind of adrenaline enthusiasm that makes me less excited around hype for an incompetent technology that will probably kill us all not long after it gets actually competent … or just generally becoming a grumpy old man.
Unacceptable compared to what? the automated coding tool that never gets anything wrong? But that doesn’t exist. Compared to doing it myself? It would be, if I were better at web dev! but at the moment the comparison point is “no website at all” and it’s clearly better than that.
Have we became so anti-social that the only 2 options are to do it alone or not at all?
I’m afraid that I do understand your point of view—I feel myself very exhausted for the last few years so I was not helping my friends in open source lately, so they opted for coding assistants instead and now when I see the code I feel recoil from the AI slop and I do not wish to return to the project. If they want things done and I don’t “want” to help, what are their options?
Brave new world we live in, infinite productivity increase from zero to something for people who don’t have time to became good at a craft, burnout for a few of us who used to be good and well paid but became overwhelmed by the ever-ready Waluiging incompetent assistant attractor.
i was always antisocial; i literally don’t know how this worked in the Before Times. you… ask your buddy to write code for you? isn’t that a pretty big favor? i ask my friends software questions all the time, but that’s smaller. & i never touched open source contribution because it seemed more like a thing for stronger progranmers. are you saying you would ordinarily react to thinking “this app should exist” by starting an open-source project?
still low on energy these days, so I should acknowledge that I am probably not supposed to feel like a museum piece by the comment about Before Times… but I don’t remember ever having a thought in the shape of “this app should exist” myself, so yeah, I probably do feel like a museum piece now
as for the more-likely-intended genuine interest about my closest examples I can think of how I deal with these kinds of situations:
if I spot a bug in software I am using and I have energy to report it with repro steps, I try to do that—not exactly asking a “buddy” but whatever, e.g. https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/41707
if I randomly visit a friend and they are cooking dinner and they ask me if I want some, I say yes (..as a stereotypical cis man when it comes to free food)
when I visit a website a lot and their dark mode has big eye-piercing white button, I go ahead and add a style for myself using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/ to make that button dark:
when I wanted to see a spreadsheet of buildings in a game, I made one .. and why not open source it too even if probably no one else will ever use it .. https://peter.hozak.info/urbek/#?c0=Desert,c37=\+,
or long time ago when I joined https://github.com/odegroot/Anno-2070-data-extraction so that I could make the optimized layout shown as the first table row on https://anno2070.fandom.com/wiki/Eco_%26_Tycoon_Housing_Layouts#Without_Monument
in a recent PR, in the code slop from @mruwnik, I can see what was the tradeoff that the imperative DOM shit was simpler for the team at the time to do and that the code could have been improved “later” if needed for more complex features .. and now @Olivier Coutu with the help of coding assistants will need to parse my comment about potential memory leaks—is that situation better with coding assistants or would it have been better if the current team was forced to pay some human developer if they wanted new features to be developed? (although the “average” humans would probably produce slop code too)
if I have a dispute with my husband, we argue in person
if I have a dispute with my ex, we tend to have difficult conversations over whatsapp
is whatsapp a dispute app for me? no.
if I am interested to continue a conversation about how exactly we seem to misunderstand each other in a comment section of a lesswrong post, I write one more comment
is lesswrong a dispute app for me? maybe.
if someone could benefit from a vibe-coded dispute app even though I am clearly not the target audience myself, does that sound like a good thing to happen in the world?
yes
is vibecoding going to be a net benefit for the vibecoders and for humanity?
I’ve set up a calendar reminder for 1 year from now to ask @sarahconstantin that here .. no idea myself, just a big fat bias towards “oh god no”
Oi! I take issue with you calling my code slop! That was good old fashioned the least rubbish option available, which then grew out of hand! Also known as not knowing how to do frontend properly...
It’s fine—you get used to having to throw away the last hour’s work, but since you were scrolling twitter at the time it’s not that much of a loss...
If you roll the dice enough times you get your answer. Or at least close enough for you to not have to have written what it came up with. And every now and then it gets things perfectly right on the first try!
I wish I’d chosen coding for fun instead of coding for work and dooming for “fun” couple years ago.. But it seemed that delegation of work to tools will be more deterministic and reliable than managing people, oh well!