[steventruong]

This is an incredibly weird view to me. If I borrow a hammer from my neighbor, although I don’t own the hammer, it doesn’t suddenly make the hammer not a tool. Associating a tool with the concept of ownership feels like an odd argument to make.

[tacheiordache]

Now the hammer has mapped your house and knows where all the screws are and is uploading all that to some servers.

[Kinrany]

You don't own the hammer but you control it.

[collyw]

As he says a tool's ownership shouldn't affect it's status of a tool.

[AstralStorm]

You do not control the tool either.

You cannot manually train it for your case.

You cannot tell it to not touch particular parts of your project either. It will stomp over all of the code.

You cannot even easily detect this tool has been used except for typical failures.

The tool may also leak your secrets to some central database. You cannot tell it to not do that.

(If you try either tack of those, it will lie to you that it complied while actually not doing that at all.)

When your networking fails, the tool does not work. It's fragile in all cases.

[sadeshmukh]

You control the prompt and the system prompt. No, it's not hyper specialized yet on the training side, but that doesn't matter. You can explicitly control the files it reads in Cursor, and I'm sure Roo and Aider can as well. If you self host, you can control exactly where your data is stored.

I've never seen so many false assumptions in one place.

[nessbot]

and my comment said "own and control" and later focused on "control".

[benreesman]

You get different models, configurations, system prompts (and DAN-descended stuff is like DMCA now, unaccountable blacklist for even trying in some cases), you get control vectors and modern variants with more invasive dynamic weight biasing. The expert/friend/coworker drop down doesn't have all the entries in it: there's a button to make Claude code write files full of "in production code we'd do the calculation" mocks and then write a commit message about all the passing tests (with a byline!), but some ops guy pushes that button in the rare event the PID controller or whatever can't cope.

These are hooked up to control theory algorithms based on aggregate and regional KV and prompt cache load. This is true of both fixed and per-token billing. The agent will often be an asset at 4am but a liability at 2pm.

You get experiment segmented always, you get behavior scoped multi-armed badit rotated into and out of multiple segment categories (an experiment universe will typically have not less than 10000 segments, each engineer will need maybe 2 or 3 and maybe hundreds of arms per project/feature, so that's a lot of universes).

At this stage of the consumer internet cycle its about unit economics and regulatory capture and stock manipulation via hype rollercoaster. and make no mistake about what kind of companies these are: they have research programs with heavy short-run applications in mind and a few enclaves where they do AlphaFold or something. I'm sure they created an environment Carmack would tolerate at least for a while, but I gibe it a year or two we saw that movie at Oculus and Bosworth is a pretty good guy, he's like Jesus compared to the new boss.

In this extended analogy about users, owners, lenders, borrowers and hammers, I'd be asking what is the hammer and who is the nail.