weitendorf

You’re absolutely right

note that this also applies to ironic LLM-assisted shitposts

I think there should maybe be a little more leeway/amnesty for accounts that aren’t new or don’t have a high rate of LLM tells. IMO if you could self-declare the AI usage and wrap them in <details> tags to handle the verbosity and attribution you could integrate it reaosnably

it's precisely because you can tune them to do that off a strong base

and because they start off generalized, you can train them against multiple of your workloads (they'll start with some generalized performance/world knowledge about them)

Which allows you to embed proprietary processes/data (world knowledge only you may have) across multiple domains into a model cheaply

General classifiers are actually incredible for two things:

1. inference on arbitrary context / world knowledge with fast, structured output

2. I almost don't want to say it because I don't know if people realize this yet... but that makes traces from any kind of non-AI process or system "learnable", you can easily model it by by just asking it to predict the next outcome during learning and compare against what happened.

which also means it could also learn new strategies through rollouts in a way that generalizes across semantic space which means...

so these models are actually quite promisingly useful for existing companies because they do have general traces of what happened in their company and want to discover ways they can tweak their business processes, and then there is durable demand for models you can embed within a product or UX flow without exposing your user to slop + then train or customize and build real IP or custom capabilities

general classification itself is quite interesting IMO for applications that need to make judgment calls or select one of many UX actions, and a much better fit for this than LLMs. So if you think about it, this is the type of thing businesses might be calling a lot - every trace (eg user session, package shipment, sales motion, marketing campaign, job outreach) + proactively throughout dynamic experiences to decide whether to eg end a call or which of multiple UIs to manipulate

this is just an unfamiliar product experience to most people because it hasn't really been bootstrappable with a strong general baseline until now. But now it's posible and I think it will be very col.

I think there are certain parts of certain products where the implementation details are really important, or where you need to make sure the behavior is fully reviewed/understood, or some invariant maintained. In some places that's the entire job and in other places almost none of it.

If you're running tons of product/UX experiments code review is just going to waste everybody's time. But the volume of changes you can make now is so large, someone could touch something important about at any given time without proper oversight.

IMO an effective team has to be able to either trust each other enough/be accountable enough that code review is mostly unnecessary, or everybody just works really independently on mostly separable things, or you regularly pair/mob-program.

If you can trust your colleagues not to pump out code without messing it all up or turning everything into slop, or creating large amounts of work for other people, things are great. Realistically most dev teams have a wide range of skills and personalities and people also make mistakes, and code review helps us build shared knowledge and collaborate.

Maybe there is too much of a moral hazard from the reviewer's role as a cosigner, or some people are only as conscientious as necessary to get things done (not a problem writing every line by hand)... but people can ruin code review for everyone else by demanding an asymmetric level of accountability/judgment and oversight.

The bigger issue for me is whether or not you still do code review, you need to build shared knowledge within teams. I really think we should be reviewing our colleagues' coding agent session logs

Not even to critique them (but that could be useful), but just to understand what it is they are actually trying to do/what mental model they're operating under, and if there are issue in the PR, what miscommunication or technique or process could help fix it? I think a lot of people feel that asking to see those logs is invasive or embarrassing, but the problem is that it's just really hard to build a model for how someone works or thinks without it. You don't need that in a deontological sense, but you do if you want to fix coordination problems.

They're challenging someone to "test it" by burning down a backlog, because the other person thinks they will just do more work, with the implication that this person believes they'll just be laid off - and so they are better off not burning down the backlog of work.

I take an issue with that mindset because I know it is not true. And I'm not sure why you think I am attacking this person - if someone were to actually sandbag their own career, that is probably one of the most damaging mistakes they could make. Maybe I misunderstand something, if so I apologize for that

I mean, if you're in a contract job, you're always to get laid off at the end of the job - that is the job. Very few of the software jobs in my world are like that

If someone is deliberately stretching out a job and making it an adversarial business relationship, when the business arrangment is that they complete the project then do another job somewhere else, then I would not expect that to be a very successful strategy, and also not really want to help them in any way beyond existing contractual obligations. You are basically guaranteeing a bad working relationship with every employer you ever have.

And it doesn't make sense because this is not a strategy that's rational for someone who enjoys their work or is good at their job anyway - if that describes you, then your existing employer is probably one of if not the best advocate you have, and your best strategy would be to either switch careers or progress to a point you don't feel precarious

That's why I say you are really hurting yourself more than you know. You are guaranteeing an at-best "every boss dislikes me and my career goal is not getting fired" outcome and (idk about your actual employer) damaging relationships you really probably need (if this is your mindset)

claude code and codex are literally IDEs. as are any other remote agent that you use like them

you're not "in the terminal", in fact the product is selling you on the concept of being "in the terminal" as you work, but you're literally just asking a computer with ~full userspace access and direct ability to compile and run programs to do stuff for you, in an environment with "plugins" and like 30 "slash commands" and menus. it has auto-review and manages git for you and even writes your PR descriptions and other messages to your colleagues if you want. that is an integrated development environment.

I think if you can just run a one line bash command from a big company's website, and then just ask it to set up git and everything else for you (which it will default to anyway), and it tries to sell you on third party plugs in and Skills and managed proxies like MCP, and workflows, you are just using the new kind of IDE. And there is nothing bad about that because it makes us more productive to not have to mess with things like that. The idea that you are not using an IDE, or that we are "better" because the IDE looks like the development environment of the type of developer we'd admired in the post (but literally has the value proposition of being the easy way to accomplish that), is dangerous.

I'm sorry and will be the first to admit I went for this too, but "using agents to write more tools for agents." is literally the problem.

The purpose of software is to help people with their problems. I think it's easy to tell ourselves that other people want to use our tools which we really made to help ourselves (especially if them using it also helps ourselves even more!). And also, this is all so new and there are real opportunities that it is good to learn and try new things and be open to actually making something valuable.

But! Other people extensively using agents are literally the last people who would pay for a project like this! And unless it's a fulltime job like it is for a 5 or so well resourced tech companies, it's hard to make something as good and useful as them. I say this as someone who spent a long time on this problem as my fulltime job.

We should still have fun with our work. But literally, "software for other software people, that solves the problem of us needing to write more software for writing software, faster", who is that helping? There are no constraints or end users besides ourselves, and half of that is not so much it benefiting us through productivity, but learning new things and play - again, important. But there's a reason so many people are doing this and I think it's because they don't have to go outside and solve someone else's problem, or do something unusual, or involving unfun non-software aspects - agents are fun! But how many random people's agent have you installed?

IMO: if the technology does not help a non-technology person live a better life, and especially if it involves "using an agent to build a framework for agents" we should do some more, deeper introspection about what problem we are actually solving and whether or not we're being ambitious. And I say that not to pick on you but myself.

it is and you do matter

LLMs have introduced me to things like photodiodes and specific economists I would likely not have found on my own

I do however wonder about specific research priority/project from labs' solving their own problems leaking into my chats. I noticed one month that Claude really started harping on about "legibility" and suggesting Seeing Like A State to me, and saw it like any other interesting suggestion/insight.

Now I see a lot of people mentioning "legibility" and think that was just some weird attractor state or useful vocabulary term for being an LLM (that literally can't see certain things or be observed easily!). It's a weird feeling, because nobody tried to trick me and in fact it objectively helped me to acquire useful information. I just have to wonder if other people are having the same conversation and there's really nothing special about it - maybe Anthropic just really liked that book right around when they were doing a lot of RL

Not only that, was the intent just to give Claude the vocabulary to be an LLM in a company that wants it to be legible, and apply that book to managing it, and we're either intentionally or unintentionally memetically downstream of that? Or was it just extra likely to be mentioned because it's a genuinely helpful book - either because the AI learned over time that it was (very good!), someone just wanted to recommend it to more people to help them (~good). I worry that the "intelligent conversation" or "wow look at the agent go" can give us very poor epistemics

We're going through a very unique, fast-paced transition and the problem is mostly cultural/psychological IMO

People react before they've had the time to really process it, and show a lot about their existing thought processes

Many technical people IMO fetishize technology and processes, disagreeable-but-right authority justified by their willingness to work on things that most people find hard or just don't want to do. Computers can be a vessel for identity and self-worth - it's alluring to think of technology (and ourselves) as intrinsically valuable. A surprisingly large contingent seems to see work as necessarily zero-sum and adversarial, and make it a core part of their identity (and often not even particularly abnormally powerful or better for it) - like what even is the archetype there?

People like your wife are the ones writing crazy excel spreadsheets and VB6 macros, and making decisions about enterprise IT products, and solving problems with computers! They're actually probably more knowledgeable about "what is a useful and valuable way to use computers" than the ones who find computers fun and freeing and Just Want to Code.

Algorithms will dole out as much outrage as you can take but at the end of the day, doing stuff with computers that people want to pay for - usually, automating or securing things - is why people pay us!

One framing is people overindex on Being a certain kind of person or (the archetype they aspire to or identify with, that is valuable in a passive sense), over Becoming or Doing what's necessary for their work to be valuable (actively helping people, and stuff that's not fun). Very normal to feel grief and not want life to feel so uncertain, but it was literally always uncertain! Life isn't over because the business people at your IT job want to build software!

This is a particularly Western democratic trend. Japan and Singapore both have their own models for democracy. Each builds differently, in their own way, and gets it done.