HN is not your therapist, but possibly your decision making is driven by branding instead of judging technology on its merits? Easy mistake to make ;)

CircleMUD was my first intro to C and network programming. I was at a computer camp for 8-10 year olds that taught BASIC. One of the counsellors was doing their undergrad at caltech and pulled the students who were bored by BASIC into a separate group to learn C by editing CircleMUD.

Hacking up a pre-existing MUD was the perfect mix of immediacy / interactivity and fun to hook me. So thankful to that guy, wherever he is. He probably changed the course of my life.

I know nothing about the PhD candidate and professor who co-authored this, but I don't think this statement makes sense in general.

Typically CS labs at universities contain people who have not spent a significant amount of time exposed to large industry codebases and the corresponding complexity. I think the post would have more credibility coming from e.g. the platforms team at a tech company with a monorepo.

There is something to be argued about industry vs academic experience but this post has nothing to do with large industry codebases

Well, they’re also probably not scaling up in the same way as any of the commercial AI offerings, let alone the frontier labs. Faculty at Stanford probably have some decent hardware to play with, but they do not have data centers. I don’t doubt that they know their way around CUDA/PTX, but it’s not clear how relevant their message is given that their research code is very likely not being deployed in production, or at scale.

Disagree. The abstractions they are talking about aren't like, the y-combinator. They're talking about boring software engineering abstractions.

sounds like it might help to know something about the phd candidate and professor

Heh, not really

agents are unlike humans in many ways but they have their own limitations. it's magical thinking to believe that they are able to cope with zero software abstractions, especially as a codebase increases in size and complexity

and today's agents increase codebase size and complexity much faster than humans do via traditional software engineering methods, so this is likely to hit a wall faster than if human software teams were to do this experiment.

Just yesterday, for fun, I asked Codex to generate an “online e-commerce site” in ARM assembly. To its credit, it did actually generate a program that served up a webpage over a socket, but it really did not do what I asked. The program still pulled in a large number of shared libraries (something I’ve never really thought to try in assembly). And… it was not actually a functioning e-commerce site. Iterating on that initial prompt proved painful—the program was extremely brittle and now I had to review and talk about ASSEMBLY. Maybe we can dispense with abstractions someday, but holy cow, not yet. I would much rather write an e-commerce platform in C than try to vibe-assembly my way to one.

Enjoy setting thousands of dollars on fire for fun!

As long as they’re not my dollars, fine with me.

Your work lets you burn infinite tokens on hobby projects? That's wild. My work has no token limits per se, but we definitely aren't supposed to spend tokens on side projects.

Yes exactly.

"Why not bomb every square inch?", "Why would you ever let go of the machine gun trigger?", etc.

I assume there must have been moments in the history of war when such bad and desperate ideas were seriously proposed.

The fact that we're still in this profoundly ignorant era of LLMs is embarrassing.

No longer the case