>If you build your platform well, then you can execute fast, but also safe.
this is extremely true, but it seems less and less like anyone wants to invest in a solid platform and just wants to jump to executing fast and unsafe. and then pretends that ai can definitely do both when the experience is quite a bit different.
I have seen at least one example develop in real time. You typically spent years building before you had a platform, then lack the enthusiasm from senior leadership to invest the next 12-18 months with no new features and hard to quantify - maybe no - returns. Then you get displaced by newcomers who are "platform native"; what this really means is their engineering misteps haven't been discovered yet, or even if they guessed correctly the world has turned and made their previously correct solution now a failing one. And now we have something called "AI-native" that is going to solve this once and for all with some sort of magic, and you can't lead these companies unless you truly believe in the magic.
“ You typically spent years building before you had a platform, then lack the enthusiasm from senior leadership to invest the next 12-18 months with no new features and hard to quantify - maybe no - returns.” —> this is failure from the team and especially people who should do product management job on that team.
none of these types of pieces of content focus on what was created for users, its always about how sky high their "shipping" metrics are (PRs merged, LoC, etc). it makes it extremely hard for me to care, as they all boil down to "im a dev who made some loops on loops on loops that writes a lot of code and spends a lot of tokens."
i will say, at least this article says "we merge 5x more and our revert rate has stayed the same." so thats at least a metric i can start to respect
Any good product leader will tell you, sometimes not building something is actually good for the customer. Slower dev cycles have you the ability to take time with decisions and make adjustments. The obsession with shipping more code is making things worse for users and I would argue, damages the company in the long run.
Eveyone has a backlog. What happens when you clear it in a month? Do you suddenly have better ideas about what you want to build? Do you suddenly have better intuitive designs? Do you have more users or the same users using the product twice as much? In most cases, the answer is no.
AI gives you the speed to execute when you need to, but knowing what to build and how will still remain a bottleneck.
Now the real question is "is the revert rate the same because you still have the same process, or do you fix-forward more often now, so your revert-rate is because of higher-severity incidents?"
I mean we (huge tech company with ~2000 devs) literally never actually revert anything, in my 2 years here I have quite literally never reverted a commit. We have a staging/release cycle that means nothing ever needs a revert, you just fix issues in followup commits on trunk
This is another one of the infinite meaningless metrics that AI cash burners love to use without context
When that happens we revert immediately. But to be fair, this kind of commits have to be looked at in detail, and you often need the CI export because those yaml files are a pain to write...
well, i did go check out the company spawn from the article. its certainly interesting how hands off their process is and how much they ship, but holy shit the games were fucking horrible. there was a direct WoW ripoff (right down to the assets) that was unplayable, a racing simulator where my controls stopped working 10 second in, and some sort of RPG that i started and just never loaded. so i will take what they are saying with the heaviest possible grain of salt.
Yes exactly this is my standard for everything now. You can spend an unbelievable amount of tokens doing all kinds of things that are interesting as processes in their own right.
at the end of it: is anything of value delivered to customers? the company might say "well users make the games with AI, we just serve them and host the multiplayer." okay, but again, what value was created? they brag about being one of anthropic's top customers; congrats you are handing VC money to anthropic. why should i care? theres no answer for why anyone should care, because to them the system and clout is the product, the product doesnt actually matter.
at least thats my read on it. i dont know how else to understand whats going on here.
>The problem for me is that it's really hard to project what this industry is going to look like 6 months from now, let alone 6 years.
i keep thinking how crazy it is we went from ChatGPT releasing in 2022 to multi-trillion IPOs 4 years later. the industry still hasn't agreed on how to generally use anything. crazy times ahead.
interstingly i think what you are talking about is pretty apt, but not the way you are framing it. knitting and sewing were impactful things in their time; clothing has been something humans need for a long time and more skilled craftsmen were able to produce hgiher quality garments. new techniques increased durability, wearability, comfort, etc. machines commoditized that and made it mich faster to produce garments, so turned these into hobbies and the odd artisan fpcused and made new improvements, but not as often as before.
programming will likely be the same. fewer people who care to be craftsmen, more hobbyist, a few artisans who really dig deep and make new patterns (we still dont see AI sampling out of distribution).
>reduction of the job to a hobby takes that away from them.
this is your personal feeling. they never had anything in the first place, just that the market was valuing a certain skill for what it could output. the perspective you are posting is purely a construct.
Sure it is a construct (it's how I feel at least).
I didn't mean to say sewing and knitting weren't impactful - on the contrary, they are analogous to programming: they were impactful but now they're basically hobbies. Maybe there are more developments left in the clothing making process - not sure.
i dont meant to come across as too harsh, but that is something that you will have to figure out. if companies are less inclined to give salaries for technical skills, then its on us to figure out how our current skill sets become marketable.
even the job of freelance engineer is customer relation. how good are you at extracting product requirements? understanding a clients workflows? these take relational skills and are often what freelancers are paid for, beyond the ability to produce code.
I think the success of expanded offshoots (OSRS, TurtleWow, Ascension, etc.) showed there is plenty of demand for games that add new features to older, slower, and more sociable games. many features in wow forever are lifted directly from some of these offshoots. blizzard leaning into things like sd models, no flying mounts shows this is beyond just nostalgia bait (something wow classic has been poked for) and indicates that these older iterations that had less streamlined experiences can still have a lot of juice if brought in new directions.
only on the surface, plenty of places have moved out of the big tech ecosystem to models hosted at smaller providers or even self hosted. its not the majority of work but is growing.
At the individual level any mathematicians can, but the social group of “mathematicians” will not unless drastic social changes are made, because that's not how the system works today. Drastic social changes usually take decades, and funerals, to occur, so the reasonable hypothesis is that it's not going to change fast enough.
Mathematics belongs to all of us. If mathematicians get depressed about it, I don't give a hoot. Five years of guided computer-aided math could improve billions of lives or solve global warming outright through cheap clean energy.
This is a litmus test for the effective altruists in AI labs: fashion or conviction? The social pressure is to slow down and let the guild keep its norms a few more years. But what's clearly best for humanity is to push forward violently and leave them in the dust. A Fields medalist's feelings are not more important than the wellbeing of the planet.
> Mathematics belongs to all of us. If mathematicians get depressed about it, I don't give a hoot.
They are depressed because what's being destroyed is mathematics, actually.
> Five years of guided computer-aided math could improve billions of lives or solve global warming outright through cheap clean energy.
This is complete BS, math doesn't solve climate change or save life, that's a category error. The purpose of math is to help us build understanding of the mathematical objects and that's it.
Sometimes, after much distillation to the academic world, this understanding is later being leverage by other scientific field, but that's a very rare event when it happens. And it's not how other science progress.
> This is a litmus test for the effective altruists
EA has always been a lie to justify short term individual greed by hypothetical shared future benefits.
youre not wrong, but i think you are missing his base point. tao is saying that mathematics is a practice that the group collectively builds. students and new methods are built on top of what has previously been done, so its a community effort of research, experimentation, and knowledge sharing.
his core argument that is LLMs (and specifically LLMs owned and gated by corporations was my read), while able to solve problems, do not contribute to this practice of knowledge building. solving problems is just one piece, and the mathematics community ingests problems and new methods, iterates and thinks on them, and then produces new ideas, methods, etc. this is what he is defining as progress, and solving things like millenium problems are markers of this progress.
this is extremely true, but it seems less and less like anyone wants to invest in a solid platform and just wants to jump to executing fast and unsafe. and then pretends that ai can definitely do both when the experience is quite a bit different.