flyingcircus3

After more than a decade of using git, I know that my comfort with rebase, and confidence that I wont make an error I can't undo, comes from knowing that I can always abort. And assuming it wasn't garbage collected, I can always get back to orphaned commits, or the commit before I rebased, as long as I keep their hashes. I can definitely look back on my less confident days as times when I wrongly assumed I was walking a tightrope where screwing up was painful and expensive, and easy to take the wrong path, and abort is the universal solvent to all of that.

I do still find myself tripping up on whether the next appropriate step is to make a commit or continue the rebase, as that is dependent on if you're in a merge conflict or just editing a commit. But even when I get that wrong, and collapse two commits together, abort saves the day.

I like the fact that it ends up being a lifecycle. I know it can have different entry points based on what you ask, and which skill you trigger first, but it inherently is chaining together skills. There also seems to be logic built into it such that if the ask is small, but you've still triggered the skill with "brainstorm", it will make judgements like "want me to skip phase X and go straight to implementation?"

I've noticed among my coworkers that we all have different amounts of trust we're willing to give the agent. That seems to manifest into some people only asking questions about the existing code, but never writing anything new with it. Others are willing to do limited targeted changes with the agent, but are unwilling to do things like let it make commits, or connect MCP servers, or really do anything that isnt fully understood by the human before setting the agent loose. Then I find myself, who has dove headlong into it all. I have skills that use MCP servers to check for pull requests, and give me summaries to give me more context for code reviews. I update Jira tickets in batches of 50+. I develop complete features exclusively through prompting the agent to do everything. I know I still have the responsibility to understand it at the same level as if I wrote it my self, and defend it and debug it.

I can easily see that superpowers would be wasted on most of my coworkers, simply because the benefits compound with the complexity of my ask. My coworkers aren't willing to hand off enough control to receive the benefits of superpowers.

I see it as another iteration of the wave that had everyone controlling agents directly from a chat app like slack. It isn't actually a more effective way to reach flow state, exchange information faster, and move your development projects forward to greater success, its simply a novel, oddly satisfying input mechanism, at least for the first day.

Which is no different than when the iphone first came out, the basic concept of touch screens was endlessly novel as an input and output device. That novelty did a lot more heavy lifting than what we can now see in hindsight was appropriate, because now many of us won't be able to control the temperature in our cars after the touch screen fails.

I think its the same underlying mechanism that explains why I, a person who has never recorded or mixed audio in a studio, and a person who can know for certain that purchasing a 24 channel mixing console isn't going to faclilitate my career change or even hobby development. But part of me is still viscerally certain that my life would be fuller if I purchased a 24 channel mixing console.

I don't need a legitimate reason to own a tool, or a problem I would fix with it, to fantasize about using that tool.

Watching him walk out with UFC fighter Alexander Volkanovski as if he were part of his corner, and seeing him continuously, but incorrectly, anticipate that the rest of the men he was with were about to hand him something, or otherwise interact with him in any way, was honestly a mouth wide open moment for me. Not that the other guys ignored him, but that he clearly expected them all to include him at this moment that months of their preparation have lead up to, contrasted with him buying his way in to. It was one of those moments that makes you feel better about your own social awkwardness in comparison.

I think you're ascribing too much thought and reason to the people that use that phrase. If anything, its a signal to their ingroup that they are keeping the faith, and proving that they are sufficiently devoted.

The person youre replying to also employed the term TDS in recent comments, which I believe refers to Trump Devotion Syndrome.

Muddying waters and making debate impossible are his goals. He hoped to antagonize everyone with his trigger word.

There is most certainly still prompt engineering involved. How there can be both the responsivity to different cues like "plan this", "write this", "analyze this", "defend this", "poke holes in this", but not responsivity to the various terminology you provide in your explanations of "this", where to get information about specs/standards/requirements, what details I care about, and therefore can't compromise on, vs what details I'm willing to accept whatever the top reddit post from 4 years ago recommends.

I don't see how these systems can have the ability to be effectively expressive about all of the minutia, and not have all of the various different possible expressions lead to vastly different outcomes.

But what about compositions of your reusable blocks an order of magnitude larger than you were ordinarily willing to manually compose? A lot of this misnaming Im circling around comes down to demanding that the ai user must be giving up their agency. Whatever you can name as a good practice you don't think an AI agent is a capable of employing on its own, I can retort that a human can demand the agent employ it, along with all of its other capabilities that outstrip the human typist.

This is still an incomplete model, in my opinion. You're still holding up what is possible as a non ai assisted developer as equal to the assisted one in the abstract, before adding in real world things like tedium, boredom, distraction, the ephemeral nature of novelty, frustration, and everything else that has derailed human software development, but inference engines are perfectly impervious to.

I can give you a concrete example: this week at work, it occurred to me that the 16 channels of expected and measured binary on or off test data I need to collect could benefit from a visualization because matching expectations will have visual properties that failures will not. So I had my AI agent create a script that encodes 16 channels of expected and measured binary wave forms over time, as a 32 channel 1Hz sampling frequency wav file, which I can view with audacity, which also has the necessary controls to measure time between transitions in the waveformms.

From hindsight, one could argue that since all of that solution consisted of rudiments of perfectly normal software that didnt need AI to be written or integrated, it was equally possible to create without AI. But knowing that could do it with the greatest of ease, for the total price of naming it, converted this from a project that required the motivation to figure out all of the necessary steps to one that just needed a good description.

For months, I've been thinking of how to express or name this idea that people misname the way other people use coding agents and make bad assumptions about what sorts of tasks they could be used for, seemingly all in the service of demonstrating how derivative the end results must be. So thank you for whatever you've done to help dislodge the blocker for me.

I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that AI coding is exclusively handing off the thought processes and ideation processes to the agent, which seems to foreclose on the possibility that it offers the least friction of any other available method to translate the users thoughts into useful artifacts, some of which are the working software that is the primary goal of development. The model says something like "I don't know what it needs to consist of, but make me this thing I'll know when I see.". But there are also plenty of people who have spent the time learning these skills before AI came along, and remain capable of performing those feats without the ai, but realize they are even more capable to do those same things with AI, in volumes that would have been previously prohibitively tedious. And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.

It isn't reasonable to infer that OP was claiming to have universally been unimpressed about every facet of Fable, and now some unrelated impressiveness is the evidence of their false claims.

According to Google, this claim is sourced to a person rather famous for baseless claims, from the founding of companies he owns, to the capabilities of his products, to cash prizes for registering to vote, to when he will send humans to mars.

Continuing to accept this person as a credible source of information isnt a reasonable thing to do.

Yes you do. He came away with that conclusion because he entered with that conclusion. When you're already radicalized to a specific outcome, you lose the ability to perform the process of elimination.

This is because the community around Gamestop is radicalized by the exact same grievance culture behind the MAGA movement. It even started conveniently in January of 2021, at a point of MAGA's seeming obsolescence. The adherents of this movement have already accepted the final result as guaranteed, and literally every piece of news the world over gets interpreted through the lens of this eventuality that Gamestock's stock price will explode, making them all millionaires and billionaires. Just like MAGA, the community is full of people whose main role is to delegitimize negative news, and reframe it all as instead proof that the mother of all short squeezes is imminent. Today is the perfect day to see this playing out on their subreddits.