The title is either a letdown or clickbait - I'm unsure which. You could say "Blah. Using It Well Takes Skill." for any value of Blah.
"The transmission in your car: Using It Well Takes Skill."
Further, Claiming AI is a tool is overly reductive. It's as much a tool as a full self driving car is a car.
You can treat the full self driving car, as a car, driving it with full attention and effort like you would have a Camry but then you paid for features you're not using. Also, some full self driving cars might not even have the steering and braking controls as a Camry. That's not the point of a full self driving car and this warped perspective will make you lose out to people who use a full self driving car well, to its utmost, safe capability.
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So what is the "AI" we are so excited about currently?
That "AI" is most likely an intelligent (semi-autonomous?) agent.
Depending on the intelligence, it can be as useful as a dog, scanning your camera feed for threats and identifying real threats for you, separating activity from tree leaves moving due to the wind or a moving shadow cast by a flying bird.
Or it can be your co-founder, interviewing potential customers, finding and exploring their pain-points, helping you figure out if there's a gap in the market you can build a business around.
I would go even far as to say, AI is having such a moment because AI are cheap intelligent agents - anything else that's remotely close are likely humans that cost atleast a few dollars an hour.
All of these require skill on your part - there's nothing special or unique about AI that makes skill special just like operating the transmission in your car requires skill.
> You’ve gone from extreme to another. From “it’s just a tool that be skillfully wielded” “to it’s an agent which do the task you gave it”.
I'm responding to your comment because I need your help in rephrasing my comment above to make my point more clear, because the way I wrote it obviously misled you.
No, I didn't say the extreme (what would the extreme even be?).
What I literally wrote down is what I said, which is that using anything (be it a tool that is not autonomous or a fully autonomous agent like a very smart, capable human being) requires skill.
Imagine you and I are working on a team project together. In majority of real-life situations I'm not just going to point at a writing with my fingers to you and from there you figure out what needs to get done and you would magically do it without any further feedback. That's not how anything remotely useful and productive in this world works.
What's more likely to happen is we have a conversation, figure out how to break the task down, together, how to coordinate, how to cooperate, and how to stitch our results back together to complete the job.
As you can see this requires skill at every point.
Hence, the point I was making is that the article is either clickbait or the author doesn't understand how the world works: anything remotely useful and productive in this world requires skill (be it the use of a dumb tool like a welding torch or cooperation, working with something as smart as a very capable autonomous agent or human being).
> because I need your help in rephrasing my comment above to make my point more clear
Sure. The bulk of your post reads as sharp criticism of “AI is a tool and needs requisite skills to operate”, promoting the idea that “AGents will do the thing for you”. Suddenly
the last paragraph landed with “both AI and tools need requisite skills to operate”. By the time I got to the last paragraph I already made up my mind about your message and the contrast between two positions was far too small to jolt my attention.
The key improvement you can make is to spell out juxtaposition earlier.
Reverse engineering your original argument, and with benefit of your second comment, the juxtaposition is that the skill of wielding a hammer and the skill of operating AI are on the opposite ends of control / cooperation spectrum. The distance is in fact so huge that using hammers at starting point is naive at best and clickbait at worstt.
This brings me to my second point. Both of your comments are emotionally charged with incredulity. This did not put me, or you, into the mode of curious thinking.
As to the substance. If we were to stick with the frame of control / cooperation I would take a position closer to yours. The author is not clueless, they are early in their “journey” from left to right. We all are early, meaning that no matter where you are there is someone else right of you.
However, I found that frame far too constrictive yand left it behind about a month ago. I’d be happy to elaborate if you’re still reading. :)
> This did not put me, or you, into the mode of curious thinking
Touche. Guilty as charged. I have been very frustrated with a lot of writing that seems to put forth "AI" as something all new on its own.
I cannot imagine why. To me, it's just cheaper labor and all the baggage that comes with that.
I have been hiring and working with outsourced talent for decades and the progression of "AI" has been eerily the same. Around 2000, quality of outsourced talent was poor with a few exceptions. They had a hard time producing a good product unless micromanaged. Their error rates were frustratingly high and it required a lot of late nights (for me) and back and forth.
Outsourced talent from the exact same cities and countries are now a night and day difference. It's like talking to a co-worker - the work quality is now on par but the price has gone up significantly too.
This transformation took about 26 years.
This is why to me, "AI" is just cheaper labor and all the baggage that comes with that. It's following the same trajectory, on an expedited basis.
We’re all grappling with a good mental model to navigate this new world.
Your model is outsourced labor, moving from micromanagement to co-worker.
My model is a genius intern, who needs tools to exceed me in some areas and lean on me in others.
The authors model is wielding a hammer and moving to a press.
The diversity is shaped by a dozen factors - we solve different problems or even types of problems, under different constraints, amount of time invested so far, past experience and so on.
We’re not taking face to face, so forgive me if I guess wrongly… I guess your frustration comes from trying to coax wide variety of behaviors into a single framework. I’d given up on that, so I just try to pay attention. To results people achieve to reset my expectations of what is possible. Naturally I’m heavily biased by my mental model, and it has to be that way or else I will go insane.
OpenFatigue is a game changer. It's truly Open and Elon agrees, so its true.
I'm surprised about the lack of Elon's approval on the site. Maybe because it's spanking new and he's just too busy running 20 companies at the same time?
I showed OpenFatigue to my manager who has an MBA from Harvard. She fed the website into Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok immediately before the last of the letter "e" could even leave by mouth. The three bots concured: This is a game changer - the ultimate solution we have been waiting for. The missing link.
Three bots concurring isn't a mistake, it's a guarantee. Human review is suboptimal at that level of agreement. The probability that all three bots were making the same mistake was astronomically low.
In a flash of inspiration, she then asked Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok to write quick, precise emails in a technical format and Slack, Teams messages to blast to her superiors to bring this crucial discovery to their immediate attention. Within a minute of those messages, their agents responded, concurring that yes, indeed, this was worth paying attention to. Worth setting up an in person meeting in the big meeting room reserved for tactical management brainstorming sessions.
Within five minutes, the Big Tactical meeting room was reserved, swamped with all the high-level executives typing furiously into their keyboards, to their AI agents, asking for what they should do next, how to react and integrate this fascinating discovery into the company's ~AI~ SI fuelled workflows.
I eavesdropped, hoping to pass off as an IT technician dropping by to ensure the ~AI~ SI powered cameras were at peak performance, worthy of the meeting of minds about to take place.
My manager looked at me and I froze. She might blow my cover - after all, I had been her direct report for 3 years now, ever since she joined the company fresh off her MBA to manage all the software engineers. 5 years ago, my employer used to hire 1 maanger with an MBA per 10 engineers. In the age of ~AI~ SI though, all you need is 1 ~AI~ SI powered manager with an MBA to manage 100 engineers. Her GrokBot creates 150 tickets on JIRA a day, every workday and another GrokBot personally follows up on every engineer to figure out why didn't they close atleast 10 tickets. Are there blockers?
She asked me if she knew me, and I said unlikely, because I just had an MBA from University of Phoenix. She smirked dismissively, and asked me to be the scribe for the meeting in case the ~AI~ SI agent hallucinated again. I nodded. I couldn't risk her bot opening another JIRA ticket and asking for my name to put as the assignee. There couldn't be an audit trail documenting my transgressions.
The first slide was whether to reallocate token spend from all the engineers to OpenFatigue instead. My heart stopped ...
> I truly believe its unintended positives are somewhat worthwhile.
If the point you're making is that solving complicated, synthetic programming challenges helped built your stamina and mental endurance, is there another way you could have built the same but in a much more productive and pleasurable manner?
Perhaps in a manner that would also have resulted in the improvement of your community or humanity as a whole instead of being the millionth person to "solve" the same exact problem?
That might work for end user facing services but isn't the best fit for infrastructure. For infrastructure, you need something that people in the business understand well, are comfortable using, speaks the same language of operations so that vocabulary is well understood, and battle tested in production.
That's why Kubernetes has gained a lot of traction, not because 99% of companies need the scalability of Kubernetes, but it is a well understood concept, suite of services, and the vocabulary is very common now and well understood.
Nomad is a great fit for most compared to Kubernetes but failed to gain adoption because of these reasons.
An accurate title would be "IBM archives the IBM-HashiCorp Boundary Community Edition repo".
That "HashiCorp" in the title is a farce. The "Hashi" of the HashiCorp is far gone. IBM and "Corp" are redundant.
Community Editions don't make sense to the MBAs at IBM unless killing those off would create a global backlash (loss of goodwill for no positive revenue outcome is not good to an MBA. If loss of goodwill however, results in positive revenue, that's a good thing to an MBA. This is a well regarded, well studied and highly respected, revenue boosting MBA concept called "enshittification"). MBAs know that anything that doesn't directly translate into either viral growth or revenue next quarter is a waste of investor dollars. That makes anything else a risk to their own careers.
Boundary is past its viral growth stage, so the MBA needs to see revenue next quarter. Boundary fails the test there, so off with it!
HashiCorp was an innovative company founded by two engineers that built a lot of foundational, transformational infra products. Then, in a growth frenzy based off the traction of these tools they raised tremendous, vast sums of money and subsequently ~lost control of their vision~ hired MBAs, and the company went down the drain as well, or as MBAs call it - got acquired.
What remains of those tools are a BSL that focuses on maintenance operations and feature requests that strictly ride along a highly scrutinized cost-benefit decision matrix of rent seeking behavior off IBM's contracts with organizations that had already embraced those tools.
Billions of tokens have been burned in creating PPTs and Excel sheets, and emails discussing them, about why the Boundary Community Edition should be archived and abandoned.
I feel like I’m seeing a sleeper cell come to life. Your account is 5 years old with a handful of comments. You’ve been lying in wait for years only for today to be the day you get activated to eviscerate big corporate tech culture… and I love it. Billions of tokens writing reports, then another billion summarizing them, then another billion creating a followup, then another billion…
No. Infisical is headed the same direction. Most of the secrets management and PAM bits that matter are not even in the open source repo, you need a paid license to get access.
Infisical was really amazing. It did precisely what I needed and any missing pieces would go in as a PR that would be quickly reviewed and merged. Then came talk about raising more funds, signing up more enterprise customers. Then came refactors to "improve the architecture" and "increase security". All the core pieces I depended on were moved behind an enterprise license.
Want Infisical to support Forgejo logins or runners via keys minted by step-ca? Enterprise license. Special secret cubbys or enclaves? Enterprise license.
Anything outside a toy usecase for a home user - Enterprise license.
A year ago I spent ~3 focused weeks ripping out every piece of Infisical in my infra and replacing it with a mix of Keycloak, Conjur and Age/SOPS. They are ugly, hard to work with, setup and debug - I'm not proud of this monster but I won't have to deal with what's going to happen to Infisical.
Infisical has every right to do this, I'm not complaining about that. I'm simply mentioning that we have seen this movie before, including the company in the title, so at this point, the tells are clear.
what does an 100% automated economy look like?
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