[weego]

What does any of that mean in practice? it's just rambling about abstract concepts that seem to be designed to hint at a bigger picture, when it's just getting AI to write code for you.

Is this where it's going? Having to mystify our roles so it seems like we're still the thought leaders when actually we're just becoming pseudo-teachers that try and herd our group of AI idiots to the right conclusion for us so we don't have to, without ever giving away that it's just all techno-babble?

[kixiQu]

This is not rambling and it is not abstract. The content here is about the second-order effects of "getting AI to write code for you" in less supervised ways. I'll cede the author could have polished this to more concise effect, but at the level it's at, a reader's failure to understand the substance doesn't imply there's mystification going on.

[mikepurvis]

I agree. I think the comparison made elsewhere in the thread to Yegge's recent AI delusions/projects is especially unfair.

Armin is actively grappling with the implications of AI-produced code on the software engineering craft, and trying to reflect on how to responsibly adopt the best parts of the new world. He's recognizing that the AI skeptical/cautious are still massively impacted by everyone else using tools that run or are built this way.

I really appreciated the piece, and I'm glad we can still publish work in progress thoughts that don't have a clear thesis and call to action.

[coldtea]

Once you buy into the AI hype, you babble like that. Yegge is an even worse example.

[ricardobeat]

I'm convinced the field of software engineering is being split in two. These are real concerns and coherent arguments, that make sense for developers who have been using "agentic loops" and heavily AI-assisted workflows.

It scares me that someone can see this as "rambling about abstract concepts" while I see exactly what the author is talking about, both at work and in personal projects; the thought that the majority of people have absolutely no idea what's unfolding.

[fantasizr]

tech blogs used to read like actionable readme guides. I couldn't finish it without thinking: what am I supposed to do with this information? The shelf life of the latest and greatest is about 2 weeks in the AI space. I never caught up to the ralph wiggum loop and now I'm glad I never tried.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682325

[f311a]

> What does any of that mean in practice?

They want you to spend more tokens

[georgemcbay]

> They want you to spend more tokens

Spending your tokens like some sort of primitive meat bag is passe and any developer doing that will be left behind by the true AI natives.

What you need to do this month is set up a central planning agent that creates a 5 year plan and then orchestrates teams of subagents to each direct subteams of subsubagents to fulfill your goals.

Have each team at every level inspect each other's work and authorize each agent up and down the chain to spend tokens on your behalf for the greater good.

With any luck, the US Administration will see the light and allow AI agents to open up their own credit cards on your behalf to eliminate unnecessary bottlenecks. Agentic Fintech is the future.

We need to move beyond this early stage where you give any thought to spending those tokens yourself!

[bashtoni]

Practically, what this boils down to is having clear success criteria.

The harness (Claude Codex, Codex, Pi etc) keeps throwing things into the context and executing tools (as directed by the model) until the success criteria is satisfied.

The "rules" of using AI successfully are basically just the rules of any successful development team. Break things down into clearly defined chunks, make the success criteria clear and provide a way to get the right feedback on how the system is running (logs, metrics, traces etc).

[dofm]

From my past experience of religion at various levels I am very often reminded of borderline-cult religious meetings, and the zeal of converts repeating gnomic oversimplifications, and of how exhausting it was to try to engage with them on any topic of substance.

My own feeling is that it is totally OK to simply route around these people.

It's fascinating how many of the "keep your identity small" folks in the YC/HN sphere have lost any sense of perspective at the first sign of a technology that wanders into the philosophical realm. AI-oriented identities are everywhere.

[wahnfrieden]

Why is HN interested in management and team process discussion but allergic to similar topics on how to manage agents?

It’s like saying why discuss these team workflows when it’s just devs writing code. Or why use any jargon to describe workflows when it's just devs writing code.

[AndrewKemendo]

Because like every other large social group it’s actually a collection of dozens of subgroups that have an overlapping interest

You’ll see those subgroups come out in threads like this and you’ll see other subgroups come out in different threads there is no singular version of hacker news that is always existing it is a collection of sentiments that from time to time align interests around specific topics

[wahnfrieden]

Sure. Let me rephrase - why do these particular posters and their upvoters …

[bogzz]

You gotta just use more tokens, more tokens means better everything.

[AndrewKemendo]

I’m sorry but this response is just absolutely ridiculous and is not giving anything near the respect to the author that you should have.

You’re just rambling and ranting about philosophical things and have basically nothing to say about the technical or engineering points that the author wrote.

This is a entirely emotional appeal and doesn’t actually engage the author where the author is engaging in the audience.

If you look further down thread there’s dozens of comments that are engaging with the content and not being hyperbolic about all this cyber shamanism or whatever you wanna call it

[SimianSci]

When someone is expected to be wizened and does not have the knowledge to keep up with the needs of those around them, they in turn become Shamanistic in their practice.

The speed of improvement on these models has been incredible and has outpaced the learning speed of humans and put many experts into these Shamanistic roles.

I think the operative means of addressing this is to recognize that we can only learn so quickly, but we are still called to improve our knowledge and understanding to a higher level. Since the improvement of these models is neither logorithmic, nor exponential, we currently occupy a space in time in which the models are currently smarter on average than we are as a collective whole.

[watutalkinbout]

Algorithms and data that emulate responses aren't smart.

A 5 year old knows if you want to wash your car, you need to take it to the car wash.

[coldtea]

Can a 5 year old write a substantial program on spec, that passes the requirements and given tests, in a few minutes?

If not, then perhaps this comparison is not the be all end all.

"A ship is useless, it can't drive over land..."

[dominotw]

5 year olds and ai both have jagged intelligence.

also its AI not "artificial code generation intelligence" . Ship is your view of the product to shoehorn into something specific.

[JBits]

But it demonstrates that LLMs struggle with basic reasoning. A criticism of LLMs is that they're imitating without a understanding of what they're doing and without a clear plan, so this inability to solve a simple logic puzzle is very relevant. If LLMs didn't struggle with reasoning problems then something like ARC-AGI wouldn't exist.

[Eisenstein]

Its a question designed to fool the AI. It's like saying that a person doesn't understand the limitations of reality when they fall for a magic trick.

[watutalkinbout]

These aren't the same thing.

You can't fool an AI because it isn't using its own judgement.

[watutalkinbout]

You're describing a tool.

Tools can do very useful things, but they aren't intelligent.

[FarmerPotato]

referring to John Woolridge's recent talk? "the car wash is only 200 feet away, should I drive or walk?"

His slide showed Opus 4.6 saying "walk". I couldn't get 4.6 to do that.