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Discussion (85 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It depends on Factory: https://github.com/hmlongco/Factory/blob/main/CLAUDE.md
Sticking to a strident "No AI" policy developing software is going to become increasingly difficult.
Edit: Landing page says "Completely free of AI. Read our stance." in the hero section. That borders on false advertising
I'm by now past the point where I thought "this is a great tool that will help me programming" to the fear phase where I know it will destroy my job and career. But still I can't agree fully with the article. Hallucinations are not the issue. We can extract value from it even when it does hallucinate.
The only reason we're having this discussion is because AI is intelligent and therefore poses a threat to us.
https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesn...
Some stuff from the Onion is genius, but this is not it.
This post sounds like someone who lives in deep in an echo chamber and has a warped reality because of it. That said I read this point and was like yup they’re right about one thing anyway.
But then, I can also imagine a world where nobody cares enough about writing code and instead we have "human designed software" just as we currently have human designed cars and fridges but few made by hand (and no market for them). Then, handwritten software becomes an impressive curiosity like Chris Sawyer's original Rollercoaster Tycoon written entirely in ASM.
And that's because the definition of "good enough" is drifting towards "crappy", has been for decades, now accelerated by the AI.
Was thinking the other day how the bars of quality for software pre-Internet was so much higher just because any small software shop only ever had one shot: ship your software on floppy disks, with practically no chance to patch and fix bugs later. People either like your 1.0 or they don't and that's your whole business story.
Then came the Internet, bug fix updates became so much easier, and with it came crappification and bugs-as-a-norm attitude.
And now this.
Not whining, just stating the facts.
Interestingly I have found the opposite in the software I write. LLMs make it so easy to get the basics in place that I spend the time on the details and polish.
This is the kind of posturing that leads nowhere. If you're concerned about resource usage then use an open model locally
I would love that local AI's, would be good enough for my coding demands, but so far It's not there yet for me.
- Rug pull scam
What's going to happen when the AI companies jack up prices 20x to meet API prices? 1: they won't, because they'll get their lunch eaten immediately by 2: the local models that are almost as good that you can run yourself (with a few thousand in hardware costs).
- AI is not intelligent
This doesn't matter at all, as long as it performs the task who cares? It's better that it's not intelligent because otherwise we'd be enslaving it. A plane doesn't flap its wings but it gets you somewhere - without actually "flying".
Hallucinations are also clearly way less prevalent than, say, 2023. Perhaps it's not possible to get rid of them totally, but there's much fewer.
- AI is the most successful con man in history
If this is true, won't AI-free companies soon outcompete ones that use AI? I'm afraid this is just wishful thinking. You can easily create complete garbage with AI but if you know how to code you can also be much more productive, hence why so many renowned programmers, mathematicians, creators of languages and so on use it.
- AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives
How could a data centre be polluting the water with rust? The power problem is true but the amount of land used by them is miniscule.
- AI will lead to a tyrannical police state
It could contribute, but we've had surveillance since long before AI. The Stasi had mass surveillance without even computers (which I would say have been much more conducive to the proliferation of surveillance).
- Nobody knows what AI even is
Then what did you just spend the rest of the page complaining about?
"AI is designed to make you dependent on it"
This is throwing a lot of agentic opacity bathwater and not really looking what else's in there.
Yeah, companies might save headcount, but the cost of automation and lost customers? Given the market momentum, we’ll learn this over the next few years.
And how will debugging occur if there’s no strong grasp on the current code or purpose?
> AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature
How the times have changed... I would have agreed two years ago.
Sensible not to depend on it and create a vibe-coded mess, but keep everything modular & review the generated code closely and you can go back to humans-only in future with no problems.
If someone offered a whole team of devs in India for an unknown number of months basically for free, one would be a fool to turn that down even knowing it wouldn't last forever. Claude etc feels like the same kinda deal.
I've made a lot of money fixing software where people paid for those offshore teams and they would have been better off having not done that and writing maintainable software from the start. They were fools paying for it and they still would have been fools if it had been free.
Good on them, and shame on those dumping on them.
There have been a lot of hiccups to the transition towards using AI-assisted code but, ignoring some of that sloppiness, I've enjoyed the product velocity from some of the services/apps I know that heavily use coding agents.
If you’ve done a proper cost-benefit analysis and truly found that it’s not yet worth it for your use case, great.
But if you’ve decided it _would_ be helpful but then decided ostentatiously not to use it so you can farm clout on Twitter… not so good.
Sure, LLM effectiveness might seem debatable to some (not for me), but these things improve frequently. So saying you'll never use it, is a red flag to me and I question what other technologies and advancements you ignore.
Also there are already non-VC subsidized hosted open weights LLM providers which should give you a very good sense of the marginal cost.
To give you a particularly specific example, Rob Pike really wants you to know that if you use syntax highlighting, he thinks of you as a child.
I'm sorry but you can compare them in the sense that they're just computer programs that can be useful to you.
IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters aren't the cause of a global microchip shortage, immensely increased energy demand, or the destruction of rare works. They have not, at any point, been the cause of effectively DDoS attacks in an effort to slurp up all of the internet's data, or the extensive proliferation of hallucinated content on the internet.
The development of IDEs, static linters, and syntax highlighters has at no point employed low-paid labor from third world countries for data labelling or safety filtering, exposing thousands of people to violent and abusive content for multiple hours a day.
Any of these issues alone would be a reasonable cause for adopting a policy to avoid using such tools. Calling it equivalent to not using IDEs or linters is bizarre to me.
* [1]: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
Still I’m quite alright with people kneading on one hand while there’s the big bad Jacquard Loom.
BTW I vividly remember there was the older non-programmable loom at my grandmas place and it was huge. Like one room big. People used both techniques though and nobody hated it. Eventually there was also a foot powered Zinger and eventually the electrical one. All these coexisted and I’ve never seen a printed manifesto against any of them.
Pretty sure also people were smarter back then.
> corporate executives love AI because it is extremely good at one thing - making you think it knows what it’s talking about, and masterfully avoiding any accountability.
Whether or not the LLM output is actually correct is often overshadowed by efforts to convince people that it is. This to me is the most concerning thing about AI (in its current state): the potential for mis/disinformation is huge and the companies controlling AI are more interested in it being widely used than in it being factually correct.
"AI is designed to make you dependent on it" - pre-AI service subscriptions - music, movies, you name it.
"AI is not intelligent, and hallucinations are a feature" - yes, pretty much the same way most (if not all) humans I ever interacted with hallucinate some times; me included. And I don't think it needs fixing (it's not a disease, it's a feature for us also), it just needs dealing-with.
"AI is great at lying. And that’s it." - Where shall I start about humans lying and being great at it? I just can't seem to find a good example....
"AI is killing the environment and destroying people’s lives" - pretty much humans have been inflicting this kind of damage onto themselves and our environment since the start of time, and even more so once doing this accelerated due to heavy machinery that can do what humans never could.
"AI will lead to a tyrannical police state" - Again, don't get me started on the ingenuity of humans building tyrannical police states.
[Edit: typos]
Agentic game dev is a fantasy. All it takes is 5-10 minutes of unmonitored changes to scenes and scripts before I am catapulted into a realm of uncertainty and no longer have any control over the ship. The safest thing is still to copypasta mono behaviors into chatgpt web client and otherwise retain complete control over how the scenes and assets are organized. Anything more is like paralysis over time.
You'd think there would be some massive revolution in game dev tooling by now but it's mostly been crickets. I suspect it will remain that way. Getting a game to Steam is easier than ever, but the market seems indifferent. All these robots are doing is stacking a bunch of rows in databases and files on CDNs that no one will ever look at.
But maybe it was written years ago idk.
Isn't there a case to be made that this is/already has been the case and is not uniquely an AI thing? The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?
Because AI can do this at a scale previously impossible.
We are also seeing daily examples of this surveillance state being used against political opponents, powerful bloggers and journalists among the alternative media, and regular citizens who said the wrong thing at the wrong time.
Since human beings are easily corrupted by power, this system will be weaponized more and more, and democracy will be hacked away at as well, until we are living in an authoritarian society with a democratic fig leaf, as we can see among the dirka-dirka-stans of the world.
Can we stop using this argument? Multiple Opus/Fable class open source models have shown the prices are sustainable with open models and self hosting.
People using these arguments are stopping better arguments from surfacing (loss of agency in workplace, junor ot senior training path, etc).
What really is annoying in all these "stances" is how it boils to a pursuit of quality and idealistic views that are —while appreciated— not really going to necessarily help the product. If someone is going to choose you over X or Y just because you don't use AI, then by all means let them do so; but most likely someone will use AI to replace you, even if you were a programming language or an OS!
If your problem is with environment, sovereignty, and tech feudalism, then by all means I totally agree with you; it sucks, and we should find solutions, not abandon the tech just because it enables greedy psychos to gain more billions. If anything, it's now more important than ever to have a voice, as this technology can lead the way to meaningful automations to help small business owners get on even ground with bigger players by providing them necessary tools to focus on what they actually do, rather than chasing tech and SaaS solutions that dry their wallets. Or can enable individuals who can't afford education/research in a certain area to at least get started by asking questions and finding resources without the stigma or lostness of doing so that many face.
Finally. I am sorry but the "AI will replace you" argument is getting old and silly! If you are to be replaced by AI or X, then neither AI nor X are the problem: it's the people who chose to replace you in the first place. You were replaceable to them; they just lacked the opportunity.
At the end, I think all opinions matter, but sometimes opinions become a jail.
If you've tried making one yourself, you'll find that when fed tiny pieces of information for a few tasks at a small scale, this technique results in something that sorta, kinda works. Or, works surprisingly well.
But when scaled... When the amount of information starts approaching the sum of all human knowledge, the tasks start approaching all useful applications of that human knowledge, and the fidelity of the predictor approaches incomprehensible sizes, the starts encodes / becomes (I'd argue it becomes) something that can model all human knowledge.
It feels wrong to say that, but let me explain, what is the best way to predict the behavior of a ball constrained in two directions that bounces with initial vertical velocity v(y) (y is up / down axis) and horizontal velocity v(x) (x is side by side in 1d) ?
If we purely look at it via a graph, it's by modelling the function of acceleration under earth's gravity.
If only a few points are given to you for this and you can't make something really sophisticated, then you'll make something that's rough that kinda sorta works and then call it a day.
But... if the number of points keeps increasing in number, precision and accuracy as well as the number of examples (assumed that data about air pressure, velocity and all other factors is included alongside these points), the fidelity with which you can replay / tweak the function keeps improving, and the number of times you can iterate keeps increasing, you'll eventually create a function that models that process so well that it intrinsically contains a good enough model of the deformation of the ball (provided the dataset contains information about elasticity of the ball's material, its dimensions and mass etc..), the nearly negligible (under normal conditions) effects of the ambient environment (provided there's diversity in the number of environments supplied), the oblateness of the Earth and minute changes in the gravitational field (the length of a seconds pendulum varies depending on where the experiment happens. It's presumed that all of the prior set of experiments were repeated across the Earth and the subtle, but real deviations were faithfully recorded)... and so much more.
A machine trained on the above with a large number of parameters, measures to prevent "laziness" and enough reps for high fidelity across a large enough dataset would start to approach a simulation of the ball falling. Because to predict what happens next in the sequence, you must model what's occurring in the sequence.
Now imagine doing that for other tangible and intangible things in this world. For all of human knowledge across all fields of endeavor. All experiences. No matter how noble, ignoble, notable or ignorable. But putting all of it into the soup that's this machine. Then at larger and larger scales, you eventually start encountering "good enough" models (in modelling the falling ball sense) for even the most hard to quantify / qualify things like grief and joy. At some point, by simply trying to predict what it has been taught ought to be the next part of the sequence in say... human interaction, it starts to make a model of something that hews ever closer to a full fidelity theory of mind.
Is there evidence for this? Kind of, yes. There are early indications that as machines are trained for an ever larger number of tasks at larger and larger scales, their internal representations converge. It's called the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Overview and paper here, https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
It is my opinion that these machines are displaying a new form of intelligence that human beings haven't quite encountered before. They are the sum of all human knowledge made manifest and given voice by processes that nudge (bit-by-bit) what kind of step it ought to predict for the next part of whatever sequence it displays.
In my mind this means that, of course, these models can create new knowledge. This strains the analogy, but with the sum of all human mathematics within them, they can "reason" via the act of predicting what ought to come next.
Of course, these machines are "surprisingly" good at a lot of things the larger they get, because what the labs have created here is a rough version of humanity's collective knowledge given form and the ability to say hello.
I suspect that the current generation isn't close to the "true frontier" of what these machines could be. They are nowhere close to the sum of all human knowledge and endeavor. They are quite a way there, but they haven't yet achieved true completeness for domains where the data isn't so public.
I think it's the most exciting scientific and technological breakthrough of my lifetime. And I can't wait for us to get close to the true frontier of all domains.
Just because LLMs are (or can be) reliable predictors in some domains does not mean they are (or can be) in all domains.
It's worth doing it over an afternoon, but you can do very simple curve fitting with real sensor data from your smartphone and you'll see it naturally starts to ignore extremes / becomes accurate.
As long as there are enough correct data points, the incorrect data shouldn't matter. How much is enough is a black art though.
The reduction of the individuals cost of labour by also reduces perceived egalitarianism which is the mental model used by ultra capitalists to allow themselves to sleep at night whilst homeless people beg for food on the streets.
The long term impact of AI on society is exclusively a net positive if utilised in the correct way. But most of the westerners lack faith in government fiscal policy and think that they are going to be left destitute when they can no longer provide for themselves. When in fact UBI is going to be the most likely outcome.
They are myopically focusing on the short term labour market effects of AI on their own profession instead of realising the long term utopian societal outcome.
"We need to ban AI because I'm going to lose my job!" - This is only said by someone who is winning in their society and wants to maintain the status quo not by those who slipped through the cracks.
Look, it’s fine to be anti AI. You don’t need to justify it.
But when you say it’s bad at programming then you’re just proving your own ignorance. Honestly saying AI can’t program in the same breath as saying you don’t use it makes you look like a fool.
Be anti AI - no problem with that, just don’t be an ignorant ill informed fool.
How many articles do we really need about how AI will break into your house and steal your TV, narrated from the perspective of someone who thinks Terminator was realistic? This in particular feels like a shallow marketing ploy to appeal to luddites; especially since as simonw has discovered, it depends on code produced by Claude anyway.