[elefanto]

The diligence to the absurd that you describe is really just a consequence of cutting corners at planning stages. Consider an organization that relies heavily on formal proofs and specifications to one that uses what fits on the 3 bullets allowed in a PowerPoint slide. The first might do less work over all because the second is cutting corners in planning.

[ben_w]

Perhaps, though I find myself disagreeing as the planning stage where it itself told me about WarpX. It just then made stupid decisions when left to itself.

Can plan… just not well. Can code… just ok. Can do TDD… just most of the time.

Definitely none of these well enough to be a dark factory though.

[elefanto]

Yeah, well.. I think a lot of engineers don't have reason to see the bulk of the industry but if you took an exactly median manager, programmer or PM and ask them a few things you also tend to find that they don't even notice that they will contradict themselves in their answer to a second question, etc. Organizations in general are harnesses that try to get some kind of result out of some pretty sloppy attention.

[ben_w]

> Organizations in general are harnesses that try to get some kind of result out of some pretty sloppy attention.

Certainly.

LLMs have superhuman attention, and are so cheap that they can be left running for absurdly long outputs. Despite this, still not high on the competence scale (yet*).

A human doesn't output a few million tokens every day, not even counting our inner monologues, but the AI asymptote to an upper bound of quality somewhat worse than a senior human.

* I would like to have a new job before they reach this point. Got a mortgage to repay.