@bodil@social.treehouse.systems
Post #880259
2026-04-01 08:47 UTC
Replies (21)
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@bodil@social.treehouse.systems 2026-04-01 09:13
You know, it isn't even that tools like this are useless. There are absolutely things they could be good at. I've personally seen Claude find stupid little bugs you'd spend an hour figuring out and hating yourself for afterwards with great efficiency. I tried the first iteration of Copilot, back when it was just an aggressive autocomplete, and while I had to stop using it because it was overconfidently trying to finish my programs for me without being asked, it was great for filling in boilerplate and maybe even a couple lines of real code for the basic stuff. We have models nowadays that are actually trained to find bugs and security issues in code rather than having the entire internets thrown at them to produce something Altman & Amodei can sell to the gullible as AGI. But there's the problem. The technology has been around for a while, we have a good idea of what it's good for and, more importantly, what it's not. "Our revolutionary expert system for finding bugs in your code" isn't nearly as marketable to the general public, and the CEO class especially, as "our revolutionary PhD level sentient AI that will solve all the world's problems if you only give us another couple trillion dollars, and also wants to be your girlfriend." And so we get Claude and ChatGPT and RAM shortages and AI psychosis and accelerated climate change instead of smaller, focused models that are actually good at their specialist subjects. Because those don't produce as much shareholder value.
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@photex@icosahedron.website 2026-04-01 08:59
@bodil 😁😅😭😭
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@mrt181@mastodon.social 2026-04-01 09:00
@bodil we're just holding the LLM tesseract the wrong way, right?
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@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io 2026-04-01 09:06
@bodil “you still need a human in the loop”, they tell me, while consistently failing to be at all effective when they’re the human that should be in the loop.
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@cargot_robbie@urbanists.social 2026-04-01 09:16
@bodil I imagine that the fact that no one has to dive into the spaghetti means they don't care about it. Treating it like bytecode or binaries, the optimization and maintenance of which are Somebody Else's Problem™. I've only just started reading about folks profiling the trash heaps these things spit out, and it doesn't look great.
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@oysteivi@snabelen.no 2026-04-01 09:38
@bodil I work in ops, not development, but those sound engineering practices and tight code reviews must be partly theater to guilt people into submitting better work in the first place, right? Too bad Claude code isn't a human with any sense of shame.
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@Landa@graz.social 2026-04-01 10:02
@hopeless Your explanation just restates the observation but it provides no reason for why it's supposed to be looking different. @bodil
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@mathis@metalhead.club 2026-04-01 09:44
@bodil Anthropomorphic is not maintaining sound engineering practices. It's just impossible at the speed they're pushing. The way the claude code tech lead talks about it it's clear that there's no tight code review. It's a company pushing the coding is solved, SWE is dead narrative. The last thing they want to admit is that even if the code is pretty good, you still need human in the loop
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@patrys@mastodon.online 2026-04-01 10:00
@bodil Oh no, the probability engine is producing average output. surprisedpikachu.jpeg
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@themipper@mastodon.social 2026-04-01 10:26
@bodil I don't get it either. It completely baffles me that anyone can look at the generated output and think "this is how it should be" or look at the anthropic leak and say "this is great engineering" And once someone has emotionally invested in LLMs being the future of their career it is really hard to get a honest conversation going. And when I test it and it doesn't deliver It seems to always boil down to: you are doing it wrong ... you are stuck in your old ways ... pre AI thinking ...
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@papageier@digitalcourage.social 2026-04-01 10:51
@bodil Indeed. Its good programmers are not susceptible to hubris. Otherwise, they'd probably react to a concept like AI by claiming that programming is a form of art that can never be managed by AI, that AI is crap and anything produced by it must also be crap - proven by the fact that AI uses the crap from crappy websites where crappy - eh - programmers have posted it, and they'd utterly fail to make any distinction as to where AI can be a useful tool and what should better be done manually. First and foremost, they'd scream defiance about the code quality of AI itself, amusingly ignoring the fact that this code has very obviously been written by programmers. But they'd be AI programmers, and therefore obviously worthless bastards. My, am I happy that programmers are so absolutely immune to hubris.
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@rhold@norden.social 2026-04-01 10:53
@bodil it gets even better: as the whole system is non deterministic you can always claim: the others are just promting it wrong. And there is no way to falsify or verify it. How convenient. (This drives me crazy)
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@brezelradar@norden.social 2026-04-01 11:02
@bodil > It's a good thing programmers aren't susceptible to hubris in any way, or this would have been so much worse. I've been told hubris, as well as laziness and impatience are the three great virtues of a programmer. https://threevirtues.dev/ The essential virtue is integrity and it's missing on that list. Without it, the original explanations would crumble. I guess it's either one of those off-by one errors - or it was a daft claim right from the start.
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@zappes@mastodon.online 2026-04-01 11:07
@bodil The "it's a tool and you just have to check its output" argument enfuriates me like little else does. Nobody ever fucking does that. People don't even take reviews of real code seriously, and I call bullshit on every sloperator who claims to have read and understood the output of their oversized autocomplete engine. And don't get me started on the asshats who also let the slopthing write their docs. Or their business emails. Or anything else, really.
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@Zamfr@mstdn.social 2026-04-01 11:28
@bodil It does seem to work though? A lot of users think that their product is good, or even the best, and that it keeps improving. It may be built from bubblegum and clotheshangers, but apparently that works just as well as good engineering. At least in short run. It may give them headaches in the long run. But a company like anthropic will be ecstatically happy if they make it to the long run at all.
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@mattesilver@101010.pl 2026-04-01 11:34
@bodil I use claude for programming and it takes a couple of iterations to get good code. This versus "lets just ship it" approach. It's the same copied-from-stackoverflow quality you previously got from some offshore teams. Passes functional requirements = done.
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@doragasu@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-04-01 11:38
@bodil I never use these tools, but yesterday I was using libcbor for the first time and decided giving chatgpt a try to generate a small snippet to decode a simple structure. It introduced two memory leaks (didn't call cbor_decref() on extra references it created). Told it if it shouldn't be calling cbor_decref() on those, and it confidently said you must not because those references were borrowed (wrong, and the documentation states clearly they aren't 🤷♂️).
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@JuliaRez@chaos.social 2026-04-01 11:42
@bodil It's not like we've all been cobbling stuff up in a hurry from StackExchange C&Ps for the last decade anyway. Because there's a point where no matter what yr fkn agile velocity, the far end of the backlog is red shifting towards some management event horizon, and it now hurts too much to think properly. So you do the thing that makes the pain go away because you are a thinking feeling human. Jira does not care and adds another ticket with a t-shirt size attached.
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@tychosoft@social.tchncs.de 2026-04-01 11:51
@bodil First you must realize Knuth could have subtitled "the art of programming" as the lazy art ;). So lazy, in fact, we create programs just to write programs for us. Now, artificial ignorance is spewing back from it's training, which is largely a similar pile of... On top of that pile, as information entropy suggests, there is even some degeneracy from that, which is why you can't have AI coprophagia. Rather than being a Yogi a little smarter than the average programmer, it is condemned to being a little dumber than the average of the training input. Simple physics.
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@alsvha@sunny.garden 2026-04-01 11:55
@bodil And considering "we" couldn't actually figure out to prioritise test before LLMs does not fill me with confidence that the test phase will be prioritised now. Because LLM introduction for most is about production velocity and cost cutting.
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@cms@fed.beatworm.co.uk 2026-04-01 11:55
@bodil I don't fundamentally disagree, but that raises another interesting point. Just how little those qualities have caused Claude Code any significant failures. Which is the other thing people say - if these tools can do anything of use where are the successful apps? Well kind of here, right? Claude Code is one of the most successful product launches of its kind, for quite some time. It works well enough to be considered a market leader. Apparently it's made of pure jank, but apparently, perhaps surprisingly, that doesn't matter so much? I mean, yikes. I don't like it all that much as a tooling approach, but it's coherent, performs well, and works reliably, when I have tried it. (I've put in a few dozen hours maybe) Me being one of nature's outliers forever, I think Claude desktop is a better product, whatever that's worth 🤷 - but I don't use that as a coding agent much either.