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by Trasmatta 37 days ago
> Hasn't the economics of maintenance and change shifted so much that accidental complexity isn't actually all that expensive/painful?

I sincerely believe that extensive accidental complexity will ALSO be bad for AI agents. Their quality will diminish as their context windows get filled up with endless amounts of spaghetti and accidental complexity. I feel like we won't fully start feeling those effects for another year or so.
1 comments
panflute 37 days ago
True, yet they have a Moore's Law like growth going for properties like their context windows.. I think the larger problem with letting them be verbose is Occam's razor. The more verbose they are the more variant behavior they will have where any variation that is not strictly necessary is likely to include incorrect behavior.
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pona-a 37 days ago
Attention is an O(n^2) algorithm. Combined with Moore's doubling, it will at best produce linear growth (assuming Moore's law is still remotely close to alive)
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panflute 37 days ago
I don't think many developers like software bloat or what it has meant for our professional reputation but we would be dishonest if we predicted a future without outcomes where ugly brute force wins given all the constraints. It is not Moore's law that dictates context window that is only an analogy and so far it has been exponential growth that went from well bellow humans to more than a human can deal with in terms of short term tasks.
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