boron1006

You have misunderstood.

I have a the cure for cancer. Simply kill the host. Does it work? Yes. Have you learned anything from it? No.

> Nothing is stopping these folks from continuing to study the problems

My understanding is they are? And literally everything in this world is based around incentives. If you say “well you can continue to work on understanding, but your kids are going to starve” that’s not nothing.

Do you work with other, potentially unmotivated devs/managers a lot? I wonder how much of this is an incentive issue. I don’t think refactoring itself is as much of an issue than working with 2-3 other engineers that DGAF and a manager who is only looking at LOC to determine who to promote.

But it also doesn’t mean these things aren’t problems, they’re obviously huge problems.

My Eng lead has no coding experience, 25 years of management experience, yet has driven 3 separate projects into technical bankruptcy to date.

He just accepts anything that Claude says as truth. He vibecoded over 60,000 lines of code in 3 weeks, but couldn’t get it to do what he want and made a project overrun for 3 extra months. When the pissed off stakeholders called a meeting to ask what was going on he didn’t show up and sent his junior engineer to answer questions and take the blame. Now thats leadership.

It’s a good question and I don’t doubt they’re useful.

But I mean they’re not good enough to do the things I need them to. Not enough that any difference can be chalked up to “taste”.

Put it this way, if you hired a very good handyman to build you a cathedral, you wouldn’t stand looking at the smouldering wreckage of the construction site saying “oh well that’s just a matter of taste”.

I don’t like the term taste, but the problem that I have is that LLMs don’t seem to work “good enough”. They seem to be able to solve the immediate problem, but stacking this on the scale of 3-4 devs over 6 months or so doesn’t seem to produce anything.

One thing that I’m particularly frustrated with is the writing quality of LLMs. Like this is the thing that they should be able to do, but I would say almost everything they write has almost no signal.

Over a mid sized AI generated codebase that means I’m reading like 500 words to figure out what a module is even doing.

This is true but also false.

In my experience (scientific programming) AI is a giant multiplier for people with specialized knowledge.

But it’s also a giant devaluer for that same knowledge as people with no idea what they’re doing can clog the field with plausible bullshit.

It’s now the case that if someone tells me they’ve done something, and I look into it and find out it’s completely AI slop, then I will have spent more time on the project than the person who “made” it. The situation is completely untenable and only serves to drain time and resources from people with better things to do.

What I’m saying is that it often uses metaphors in ways that are subtly wrong or don’t make any sense.

Or in a way, nothing at all.

I think that’s just a fundamental tradeoff though.

Being able to run Jupyter cells independently is a feature until it’s not.

I’d say for most of my one-off work, it’s fine. But for stuff I want to share it’s not.

I guess I’m thinking a lot of companies seem to be getting Claude code subscriptions. It usually takes some time and effort for an org to switch away from one solution. In the meantime a lot of workflows get more and more tied to Claude in particular.

It’s not much of a moat, but it’s more than a lot of orgs have.

I think anthropic with its enterprise strategy and google with its integration in everything have a bit of a moat.

But I switched from ChatGPT to Claude 3 months ago because my account was down for like 6 hours. I haven’t used it since. It’s too easy to switch away from chatbots on a whim. There is no moat for that.