[zarzavat]

It feels like everyone's gone mad.

Here I am mostly writing code by hand, with some AI assistant help. I have a Claude subscription but only use it occasionally because it can take more time to review and fix the generated code as it would to hand-write it. Claude only saves me time on a minority of tasks where it's faster to prompt than hand-write.

And then I read about people spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on this stuff. Doesn't that turn your codebase into an unreadable mess?

[aprdm]

Why read code when you are getting results fast ? See https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

I am not kidding. People don't seem to understand what's actually happening in our industry. See https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johubbard_github-eleutherailm...

[zarzavat]

I'm not getting results. That's the point. Claude doesn't fucking work without human intervention. When left to its own devices it makes bad decisions. It writes bad code. It needs constant supervision to stop it from going off the rails and replacing working code with broken code. It doesn't know what it's doing!

It's about as far as you can get from being able to work independently.

Yegge is an entertainer. Gas Town is performance art, it's not meant to be taken seriously.

[aprdm]

How much are you spending ? See initial post of the thread. My team has no problems with it, they are spending each 5-10k per month.

[wahnfrieden]

Use Codex

[godelski]

Why is everyone obsessed with Mac Minis. They're awesome but for the work that these people are attempting to do? Just seems... nonsensical. Renting a server is cheaper and still just as "local" as any of this (they want "self hosted", I don't think anyone cares about local. Like are people air gapping networks? lol)

And a senior director of Nvidia? He had several Mac Minis? I really gotta imagine a Spark is better... at least it'll be a bit smarter of a cat (I'm pretty suspicious he used a LLM to help write that post)

No time to think, gotta go fast?

[duskdozer]

It seems like the monkey-ladders story. Someone probably just had one sitting around and it worked or needed to do something Apple-specific and that message got lost along the way

[egeozcan]

They want access to Apple Messages. That's all there's to it AFAICT.

[duskdozer]

These are like, jokes right?

[foo42]

I've been thinking about this recently and it seems like the most enthusiastic boosters always suggest difference in results is a skill issue, but I feel like there are 4 factors which multiply out to influence how much value someone gets: - The quality of model output for _your particular domain / tech stack_. Models will always do better with languages and libraries they see a lot of than esoteric or proprietary - The degree to which "works" = "good" in your scenario. For a one off script, "works" is all that matters, for a long lived core library, there are other considerations. - The degree to which "works" can be easily (best yet, automatically) verified. - Techniques, existing code cleanliness, documentation etc.

Boosters tend to lay all different experiences at the feet of this last, yet I'd argue the others are equally significant.

On the other hand, if you want to get the best results you can given the first 3 (which are generally out of one's control) then don't presume there's nothing you can do to improve the 4th.