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Presumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.

AI to write - code is buggy and not what I asked for

AI to review - shallow minutia and bikeshedding

AI to edit - wrote duplicated functions that already existed

AI to test - special casing and disabling code to pass the narrow tests it wrote

AI report - "Everything looks good, ship it!"


Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?

Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.

IANAL but this sounds more like trademark territory.

You can also trademark a character if it’s used as a brand identifier in commerce.

There are far more characters protected by copyright than trademark.


> once you have a community at critical mass around a reasonably good tool, that trumps most other things

This matters a lot less in the age of AI. AI doesn't need a massive number of community-built libraries, it can just write its own. It doesn't need a million tutorials floating out there on the interwebs because unlike most programmers, it will actually read the spec and documentation (tutorials are just projections of the docs/spec anyway). AI doesn't have to avoid languages with no job market because it just needs to do the job at hand, not build a career. This makes it easier for small languages and DSLs to gain usage where they never would have before.

I think AI might spell the end of the language monoculture (top 20 are mostly slight variations on languages circling the same design) that has persisted in programming.


It's the opposite and has been recognized for years. AI depends on training data and this nearly freezes the use of languages that were popular at the time of inception. Hopefully that is not true.

AI needs community libraries if there is to be interoperability and baseline quality between systems. At least at this level of quality and development.


> Hopefully that is not true.

I'm here saying this "PL ossification theory" is probably wrong, that it's not going to be the case at all. Yes, AI depends on training data, but that doesn't imply that AI can only use those programming languages or only reason in languages that existed at the time of their training. In fact the AI is able to reason able new languages the same way humans can -- by drawing inferences to the next closest language that it knows, pattern matching to things that are different from other languages, and also figuring out the semantics and reasoning through execution itself where it doesn't have training examples.

> AI needs community libraries if there is to be interoperability and baseline quality between systems.

Not everyone is looking to do the kind of work you're doing, and that's my point. Up until now, programming languages have been written by and for people who want to do businey/mathy/sciencey things with computers. But there's a huge world out there of other stuff to do with programming languages that have never been considered because the proposition of making languages for those domains is daunting and outside of the wheelhouse of normal people.

Now, DSLs are sprouting up where they have no business existing because of AI, just proliferating all over the place. Some of them are going to find communities (of people, AI, or both) and they will flourish completely apart from the systems we are building now in the tech world. It's not going to be the case that AI writes in Python for the rest of time because it writes in and was trained on Python today.



Dennis: I think we made every single one of our Paddy's Dollars back, buddy.

Mac: You're damn right. Thus creating the self-sustaining economy we've been looking for.

Dennis: That's right.

Mac: How much fresh cash did we make?

Dennis: Fresh cash! Uh, well, zero. Zero if you're talking about U.S. currency. People didn't really seem interested in spending any of that.

Mac: That's okay. So, uh, when they run out of the booze, they'll come back in and they'll have to buy more Paddy's Dollars. Keepin' it moving.

Dennis: Right. That is assuming, of course, that they will come back here and drink.

Mac: They will! They will because we'll re-distribute these to the Shanties. Thus ensuring them coming back in, keeping the money moving.

Dennis: Well, no, but if we just re-distribute these, people will continue to drink for free.

Mac: Okay...

Dennis: How does this work, Mac?

Mac: The money keeps moving in a circle.

Dennis: But we don't have any money. All we have is this. ... How does this work, dude!?

Mac: I don't know. I thought you knew.


Great scene

You forgot the best line: "I don't know how the US economy works, much less some kind of self-sustaining one".

AGI is right around the corner, and we're all going to be rich, there's going to be abundance for everyone, universal high income, everyone will live in a penthouse...

...just please stop burning our warehouses and blocking our datacenters.


I think that "art" and "graphics on a book meant to sell merchandise to a fanbase" are different things and we have to start making that distinction more clear these days.

> It allows me to inject determinism into my workflows.

Did it though? Because if the model can just change underneath at any time and it breaks the determinism, then any determinism was just an illusion the whole time.


Hooks are hard stops. In theory the model must respect them, unlike Claude.md or agents.md so yeah, it helps a lot.

Yes, in theory. But these are inherently non-deterministic systems interpreting English prose. It's not the same thing as a real honest-to-God program that executes a deterministic algorithm to verify the output.

I can't believe we've sunk this low, to start complaining that the non-deterministic black box didn't respect "YOU MUST DO THIS" or "DO NOT DO THIS" commands in a Markdown file. We used to be engineers.


That has never been true.

I mean, skills also include calling python scripts. That's determinism.

Anything that can be deterministic, should be


Skills are not like hooks. Skills can and will inevitably be ignored.

Skills are not ignored if you use a router in front of them, and they are actually called.

The problem is the base harnesses don't call them aggressively enough. Not that they don't work.


No, you're supposed to make all your hours work hours. This is the way of AI.

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