One could hope that we'd use these newfound agentic coding powers to actually realize value, improve quality, etc. Instead I see enshittification and stagnation. What are we even doing with all these tokens?

But the flipside is, I see the same gym crowd at the coffee shop next door and we always have a good chat there. Context matters.

But I found myself laughing at the style; just ranting about software like a cartoon villain in his bathrobe. No fucks given.

Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions.

Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.

YES. The beauty of programming is and always was that, first, you enjoyed it and, second, for some oddball reason you could actually get paid to do it. And one can't produce anything good unless you actually love working on it which means you want to put yourself working on it. The outcome might accidentally serve the one who pays for it but ultimately what did get the work finished was the sensation when you were reaching the point where you would finally tie things together and see everything you designed come to life and work together.

AI doesn't give you that personal involvement. We can do it but it's a different line of work and we care very little about what goes in and what comes out. We just do the grunt work of connecting the two ends. We're not for a fuck interested in elevating ambitions which is a word that relates to what is outside while all the good stuff comes from the inside.

Yes.

> Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work

I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM

Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish

Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.

In my experience anyone saying they're still producing high quality work while using LLMs is full of shit when the work is actually reviewed properly

Most of my interaction with AI models and agents is still mediated by a keyboard and still requires a lot of "typing ascii characters". ;-)

BTW, there's nothing preventing you from using AI agents and staying in the flow state. If you want that, the universe is not stopping you. In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences.

You say minutia, but others say well organized notation and predictive systems. At least for me, writing code is as easy as writing English and with less effort.

Unless Page McConnell is creating his music with AI these days, I don't think this point holds.

    claude-local () {
     MODEL=$(curl --silent localhost:1234/api/v1/models | jq 'first(.models[].loaded_instances[].id)') 
     ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:1234 ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN='' claude --model $MODEL
    }

The Story of CO2 taught me something I had never considered. It wasn't exactly that photosynthetic life started pumping out O2 and chilled the planet. Snowball earth happened way later. It was photosynthetic life that got buried in sediment and locked it away from aerobic respiration. The amount of carbon stored in the earth's crust is insane. Fossil fuels are just a minuscule fraction of that.

This has some implications for our current climate: If we want to use biology to sequester carbon (growing trees, algae, etc), it's only a temporary sink unless we lock it away for eons. Once it's eaten/burned, the CO2 is right back in the atmosphere. In short, we gotta physically put it back into the earth's crust if we want to draw down carbon.

20% of the world's oil production. But only half is sold on the international market, the rest is used domestically. So roughly 40% of the world's purchasable oil comes through the Strait.

If it is that high, reddit comments seems like a ripe target for LLM poisoning.

REST came along and tried to put some discipline around this. The URLs now mattered and had semantic meaning! All the self-describing hypertext stuff was interesting but largely ignored.

That one point - giving URLs noun-like semantics - led to the realization that the return mimetype could be anything. We could treat the website like a database and fetch raw information from it.

The only thing REST and JSON HTTP Apis have in common is that they agree URLs should have semantics. REST sorta opened peoples eyes to that fact... and the term was incorrectly adopted to describe everything that came after.

Many projects involve stringing together capability from different systems (via their api's) and creating essentially a new business layer on top of the combination of those systems. Now the abstract high level state is really managed by the new system and the component systems are just providing foundational capabilities.

The idea of HATEOS seems interesting but with limited application.

LLM: "I am Alive"

Human: OMG

(credit to https://old.reddit.com/r/coaxedintoasnafu/comments/1qtavj9/c...)

But I think this and the other testing from Anthropic about LLMs being willing to kill a data center tech by flooding a room with gas (or blackmail them with their Google Drive files) to avoid being shut off, for example, is concerning - the important part isn't whether AI are trained on human behaviors, it's whether a good or bad human actor will accidentally or intentionally allow AI to control something that can hurt people, or a weapon, etc. Fiction like the Three Laws of Robotics at least assumed that we would try to put in place stronger 'laws' before allowing AIs to control such things.

I 100% agree this isn't sentience, but sentience isn't the concerning result for me. (And I think the Three Laws, Skynet, etc. were intended to be cautionary tales.)

AIs can do unexpected things. There was a news story in recent days about how a Cursor agent deleted a company's prod DBs:

> The agent was working on a routine task in our staging environment. It encountered a credential mismatch and decided — entirely on its own initiative — to "fix" the problem by deleting a Railway volume. To execute the deletion, the agent went looking for an API token. It found one in a file completely unrelated to the task it was working on.

Of course, that’s the reason there’s a story. “We did this and everything went dandy” isn’t that exciting, the purpose of science fiction tends to be to explore “we made this advancement and then shit hit the fan this way”. That and loud explosions in the vacuum of space, of course.

These models pattern match on content from the internet, and are fine tuned to do whatever their human operator says. Occam's razor says these cases are merely playing out the "sentient AI sci fi" script, at the specific request of the researchers.

As you mention, it's bad actors controlling sycophantic-but-powerful models. And yeah, we definitely need to worry about that! It's a human problem, not an AI sentience problem. Let's focus on the bad actors themselves, not invent sci fi scenarios.