This is an astute comment, despite "Arathorn" CEO of Matrix LLC's downvote ring pushing down the score. (Hey bud you know you can just read without commenting, right? Sit and listen for awhile)
ActivityPub has the same problem. Browse a Japanese MissKey server and it'll start loading yours up with questionable drawings. I turned off my server FAST
This is a big, big problem for federated software that I have not seen addressed or even frequently discussed. Arbitrary file upload by the public is not something small operators can reasonably allow on their servers.
Even large operators of non federated systems with controlled access like Facebook struggle with this. It's impossible to protect yourself as a server operator on Matrix or ActivityPub from malicious actors that want to use your server to distribute illegal material, and you'll be the one found liable!
Hosting any publicly uploaded content is a bad decision and a problem since e-mail. IRC and MQTT with QoS 0 do not have this problem. They have others though. At least criminals won't use them because of how easy is to snoop.
you'll understand the first time you lose half an hour evaluating a library that has all the old signs of competent design and even the trivial examples don't work and you realize the project was generated and you've had your time completely wasted
In the new world, increasingly you’ll be better off writing your libraries from scratch than pulling in external dependencies. Less supply chain risk. Less bloat from features you don’t need. Sure complex mature libraries aren’t going away. But for many simple tasks the balance is shifting.
It's a mirror. Address it like it's a friendly person and it will glaze you; that's the source of much of the sycophancy.
My queries look like the beginning of encyclopedia articles, and my system prompt tells the machine to use that style and tone. It works because it's a continuation engine. I start the article describing what I want to be explained like it's the synopsis at the beginning of the encyclopedia article, and the machine completes the entry.
It doesn't use the first person, and the sycophancy is gone. It also doesn't add cute bullshit, and it helps me avoid LLM psychosis, of which the author of this piece definitely has a mild case.
I'm also tired of seeing claims about productivity improvements from engineers who are self reporting; the METR paper showed those reports are not reliable.
I can't find the CPC certificate for this product. Children's toys are heavily regulated in the US and based on the thermal paper, the lack of display of their authorization to sell, the fly by night nature of a drop shipping website like this ...
I don't think this is a legal product to market towards children in the US
and that's without even mentioning the LLM usage
real glad my nibblings all got real art supplies when they were little. that fosters real creativity and the lot of them can draw better than any of the examples on the sales page, and they're still little kids. and there's no subscription, no EULA, their supplies are legal and safe to use, etc.
the faddish nature of these tools fits the narrative of the METR findings that the tools slow you down while making you feel faster.
since nobody (other than that paper) has been trying to measure output, everything is based on feelings and fashion, like you say.
I'm still raw dogging my code. I'll start using these tools when someone can measure the increase in output. Leadership at work is beginning to claim they can, so maybe the writing is on the wall for me. They haven't shown their methodology for what they are measuring, just telling everyone they "can tell"
But until then, I can spot too many psychological biases inherent in their use to trust my own judgement, especially when the only real study done so far on this subject shows that our intuition lies about this.
And in the meantime, I've already lost time investigating reasonable looking open source projects that turned out to be 1) vibe coded and 2) fully non functional even in the most trivial use. I'm so sick of it. I need a new career
Honestly the comment is so poorly written I can't figure out what the GP is trying to say. They think agent coding is going to replace all existing coding because the only reason manual coding is hanging on is because engineers can't convince middle management to let them use it?
in my experience it's management forcing agent workflows on reluctant senior engineers who are afraid to speak up about how poor the tools are, as it would be career suicide to argue that agentic workflows are anything less than the inevitable future.
Isn't there something wrong with that? I have extreme suspicion towards any tech or movement that is forced top down. How can we know the effectiveness of these tools if only praising voices are allowed? Why is the inevitability of this tech a foregone conclusion?
> Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive
The METR paper demonstrated that you are not a reliable narrator for this. Have you participated in a study where this was measured, or are you just going off intuition? Because METR demonstrated beyond doubt that your intuition is a liar in this case.
If you're not taking measurements it is more likely that you are falling victim to a number of psychological effects (sunk cost, Gell-Manns, slot machine effect) than it is that your productivity has really improved.
Have you received a 5-10x pay increase? If your productivity is now 10x mine (I don't use these tools at work because they are a waste of time in my experience) then why aren't you compensated as such and if it's because of pointy haired bosses, you should be able to start a new company with your 10x productivity to shut him and me up.
Jeez... this seems like another condescending HN comment that uses "source?" to discredit and demean rather than to seek genuine insight.
The commenter told you they suspect they save time, it seems like taking their experience at face value is reasonable here. Or, at least I have no reason to jump down their throat... the same way I don't jump down your throat when you say, "these tools are a waste of time in my experience." I assume that you're smart enough to have tested them out thoroughly, and I give you the benefit of the doubt.
If you want to bring up METR to show that they might be falling into the same trap, that's fine, but you can do that in a much less caustic way.
But by the way, METR also used Cursor Pro and Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Cursor had smaller context windows than today's toys and 3.7 Sonnet is no longer state of the art, so I'm not convinced the paper's conclusions are still as valid today. The latest Codex models are exponential leaps ahead of what METR tested, by even their own research.[1]
Does Amazon pay everyone who receives "Not meeting expectations" in their perf review 0 dollars? Did Meta pay John Carmack (or insert your favorite engineer here) 100x that of a normal engineer? Why do you think that would be?
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Carmack was paid 100x more than the average engineer once equity from the acquisition of his company is taken into account.
Does anyone know how much he made altogether from Meta?
The unfortunate reality of engineering is that we don't get paid proportional to the value we create, even the superstars. That's how tech companies make so much money, after all.
If you're climbing the exec ladder your pay will scale a little bit better, but again, not 100x or even 10x. Even the current AI researcher craze is for an extremely small number of people.
For some data points, check out levels.fyi and compare the ratio of TCs for a mid-level engineer/manager versus the topmost level (Distinguished SWE, VP etc.) for any given company.
I would agree with that premise, but at that point they are not engineers, they are founders! I guess in the end, to capture their full value engineers must escape the bonds of regular employment.
Which is not to say either one is better or worse! Regular employment does come with much lower risk, as it is amortized over the entire company, whereas startups are risky and stressful. Different strokes for different folks.
I do think AI could create a new paradigm though. With dropping employment and increasing full-stack business capabilities, I foresee a rise in solopreneurship, something I'm trying out myself.
I disagree with the parent’s premise (that productivity has any relationship to salary) but Facebook, Amazon etc do pay these famous genius brilliant engineers orders of magnitude more than the faceless engineers toiling away in the code mines. See: the 100 million dollar salaries for famous AI names. And that’s why I disagree with the premise, because these people are not being paid based on their “productivity”.
As they said, it depends on the task, so I wouldn't generalize, but based on the examples they gave, it tracks. Even when you already know what needs done, some undertakings involve a lot of yak shaving. I think transitioning to new tools that do the same as the old but with a different DSL (or newer versions of existing tools) qualifies.
Imagine that you've built an app with libraries A, B, and C and conceptually understand all that's involved. But now you're required to move everything to X, Y, and Z. There won't be anything fundamentally new or revolutionary to learn, but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all). Getting the AI to execute the changes gets you to skip much of the tedium. And even though you still don't really know much about the new libs, you'll get the gist of most of the produced code. You can piecemeal the docs to review the code at sensitive boundaries. And for the rest, you'll paint inside the frames as you normally would if you were joining a new project.
Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.
> but you'll have to sit and read those docs, potentially for hours (cost of task switching and all).
That is one of the assumptions that pro-AI people always bring. You don't read the new docs to learn the domain. As you've said, you've already learn it. You read it for the gotchas. Because most (good) libraries will provide examples that you can just copy-paste and be done with it. But we all know that things can vary between implementations.
> Even as a skeptic of the general AI productivity narrative, I can see how that could squeeze a week's worth of "ever postponed" tasks inside a day.
You could squeeze a week inside a day the normal way to. Just YOLO it, by copy pasting from GitHub, StackOverflow and the whole internet.
Besides what Sam Altman wants everyone to believe, there isn't a lot of evidence what you're saying is true. My experience with LLMs hasn't borne it out, and I also don't think it's okay -- I LIKE writing software!
I shouldn't have to accept government surveillance just because 15% of the population is functionally illiterate. We should have support structures for those people as a society, but "dumb people exist" is a fucking horrible argument for why I should have my freedom restricted
There doesn't need to be a solution that works for everyone. It doesn't matter how many barriers you put in place, people will always get scammed - so don't punish the other capable 85%.
You do in fact need a system that works for the vast majority. If your system flat out doesnt work for 15% of the population, you'd have mass riots and unrest.
ActivityPub has the same problem. Browse a Japanese MissKey server and it'll start loading yours up with questionable drawings. I turned off my server FAST
This is a big, big problem for federated software that I have not seen addressed or even frequently discussed. Arbitrary file upload by the public is not something small operators can reasonably allow on their servers.
Even large operators of non federated systems with controlled access like Facebook struggle with this. It's impossible to protect yourself as a server operator on Matrix or ActivityPub from malicious actors that want to use your server to distribute illegal material, and you'll be the one found liable!
No thanks!