Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.
Well yes, but no. There's also open-weight models, and literally all of the listed above are not used anymore, at least by most end users and developers as far as I'm aware.
No study of ai can ever be done or be relevant because ever couple of months they are a new number to the name of the model thus invalidating all work around model behavior
Yes, you are right. Sorry, I missed that out. It's just that all the open-weight models mentioned were... One year old or older. I just forgot that, firstly, such research is rarely done on frontier models because it takes time (you start with Llama 3.3, but look, one month later there's Llama 4), and secondly, there's also a publication delay. I think I'm just too used to the world of software, where everything moves at lightning speed. Sorry : )
Millennials delenda est. Or maybe Gen X. But definitely millennials. I am stockpiling champagne for when performative profanity goes to the grave with the silent generation against which it is still rebelling 70 years later. I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a cheeseburger. But yes, you should build a website.
You don’t always get to choose the restaurant. Sometimes your friends drag you places. Sometimes your sister in law wants to go take a photo of the Castro Theater and then get a cookie, and you find yourself in Hot Cookie calling a chocolate chip a Basic Bitch. I just think that these kinds of "perfect agency" gotchas ignore the tradeoffs of living an actual life.
What is the tradeoff in the scenario you described? You were enjoying time with your sister in law, you called a cookie a bitch, and then…? You weren’t having fun with your sister in law after that?
I think the cost of having to say something humiliating is at least equal to the cost of the cookie, so I want it for free. Of course I had fun with my sister in law, even if I rolled my eyes at the business. That's beside the point. Making you say this stuff is a tiny, petty act of domination. Say it or you don't get the cookie, or you look unfun. Anyway, it's the same argument people have been having forever about not wanting to say 'grande' at Starbucks. A war we won. And we will win this one.
> I think the cost of having to say something humiliating is at least equal to the cost of the cookie,
How is 'bitch' any worse than ordering a Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity? Is anyone really focing you? Point and grunt if it makes you feel better. Odds are good that the wage slave taking your order doesn't care what you call it. Whatever indignity you feel you're suffering in the ordering process is nothing compared to what the employees have to endure.
They’re exactly as cringy as each other actually, but your self-righteous point is well taken. Sure, agreed. I have class consciousness now. I am awakened. As if I would ever make this some random cashier’s problem.
What makes it humiliating? To me, it's just words, a little childish but still.
I'm a Brit though, and I feel we have a much more lax attitude to swearing over here.
Do your friends and family know that calling a cookie a bitch is humiliating to you? That’s a pretty strong feeling, so I would be pretty mad if I communicated that and people close to me still dragged me to those places anyway. I wouldn’t be mad at the business, though, I’d be mad at the people that are knowingly disrespecting my boundaries.
I don’t think that I’m going to read a Claude summary of this very short conversation that I’m currently having, but if you asked a chat bot to write some text about how the act of calling a cookie a bitch is a humiliating display of subjugation, I am sure that it did that.
Anyway I’ll just say that if you haven’t explained to your friends and family that calling a cookie a bitch is humiliating for you, you should do that. If you have done that, you should do it again. Hoping that all of the Eggsluts and Hooters etc. go out of business is a terrible strategy, especially in the latter case because in that scenario all of those places could close tomorrow and you’d still be surrounded by people that will find one way or another to make you call a cookie a bitch.
Sorry I touched a nerve. For a less personal response to your sharing about being humiliated and dominated at Hot Cookie: you can just order chocolate chip there. I’ve been there, it’s a busy bakery and they do not have a policy of wasting time forcing customers to say swear words before accepting their money.
> Making you say this stuff is a tiny, petty act of domination.
An intentional lie? I’m trying to imagine going from “the crux of my problem is that they force you to do that” to “obviously they don’t force you to do anything” that quickly.
Wait no, I see what’s happening. I am sorry. Deeply and I mean it. I was cruel to you. When a person does what you just did it is itself typically a dominance move. Those questions scream passive aggression. They are too close too early to be anything else. I read concern trolling. I read elaboration as escalation. I missed confusion and concern. And I was drunk on how annoying I found that to be, because getting into it on a forum can be thrilling. And when you replied to something so simple and dripping with sarcasm with complete earnestness, it snapped me out of my stupor, and made our conversation clear. Yes, I have called a cookie a basic bitch. I found that somewhat grating. It is conceptually true that you could avoid it. There are social pressures that disincentivize avoiding it. Everything else is drama and joke and rhetorical flourish. Recast in this light, I am embarrassed by what I have said to you. We have barely been speaking the same language because the language is the layers as much as the words.
with all due respect - just because your friends occasionally want to go someplace with questionable names doesn't mean they aren't good friends.
I'm not going to ditch the friends who let me sleep on their couch for weeks at a time during periods when I was homeless and jobless just because they occasionally want me to accompany them to a stupid restaurant.
I don’t really think that’s a proportionate solution to a minor annoyance. So far the advice I’ve gotten has been:
- restructure my relationships
- say something psychotic like “let’s go to a different neighborhood so I don’t have to say two words for dessert”
But you are all misreading this as a cry for help or advice. It is a bit. I even say the goddamn fucking words! I just think they’re cringey and I was commenting on my distaste for that feeling. I don’t have a cellarful of champagne either. I have bad news about the Easter bunny.
“You sound like a whiner”. Get a sense of humor maybe? Or failing that at least display the self composure and grace I so lack and pound sand.
Ironically, this kind of performative outrage (over a performative thing or not) is also very Gen X or millennial-coded. I can’t even. Take a chill pill.
While I'm perfectly capable of writing professionally, I have a mouth like a sailor when I'm speaking with people who are close to me. I sometimes choose to write the way I speak and I appreciate when others do so as well, assuming it comes off as genuine.
I think this person cares that much and wanted to convey their frustration. It worked for me. I thought it was excellent.
what is a "performative profanity"? A profanity which only goal is to be performed, said out loud? What other goals does a profanity have? I guess to hurt feelings of another person?
Basically to get the attention of others and distinguish oneself from the stiff formality of previous generations. It's a very common trope in the titles of self-help books written by millennials:
Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It’s not fucking musical. It doesn’t fucking enhance the fucking thought or it’s the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the fucking material. It’s just fucking there.
Well all the assets are with the old asses so the only thing left for the younger gens is creativity and humor. I’d make you eat a sloppy toppy burger too you little burger slut boomer bitch <3
This is clever but it’s self defeating because it’s tasteful. It’s a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.
What do you want the title to be? "Have a Website"?
No, that's missing the emphasis. "I Strongly Encourage Businesses to Have a Website"? There we go. That sounds bland enough to be regurgitated by your LLM of the week.
Enjoy your war on adjectives, I guess. It's certainly going to make the world more interesting. Jesus fucking christ.
'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it doesn't mean anything.
I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.
>A.I. had become so good at writing code that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more. Now Claude Code does the bulk of it.
is a little overstated. I think the brownfield section has things exactly backwards. Claude Code benefits enormously from large, established codebases, and it’s basically free riding on the years of human work that went into those codebases. I prodded Claude to add SNFG depictions to the molecular modeling program I work on. It couldn’t have come up with the whole program on its own and if I tried it would produce a different, maybe worse architecture than our atomic library, and then its design choices for molecules might constrain its ability to solve the problem as elegantly as it did. Even then, it needed a coworker to tell me that it had used the incorrect data structure and needed to switch to something that could, when selected, stand in for the atoms it represented.
Also this:
>But A.I.-generated code? If it passes its tests and works, it’s worth as much as what humans get paid $200,000 or more a year to compose.
Isn’t really true. It’s the free-riding problem again. The thing about an ESP is that the LLM has the advantage of either a blank canvas (if you’re using one to vibe code a startup), or at least the fact that several possibilities converge on one output, but, genuinely, not all of those realities include good coding architecture. Models can make mistakes, and without a human in the loop those mistakes can render a codebase unmaintainable. It’s a balance. That’s why I don’t let Claude stamp himself to my commits even if he assisted or even did all the work. Who cares if Claude wrote it? I’m the one taking responsibility for it. The article presents Greenfield as good for a startup, and it might be, but only for the early, fast, funding rounds, when you have to get an MVP out right now. That’s an unstable foundation they will have to go back and fix for regulatory or maintenance reasons, and I think that’s the better understanding of the situation than framing Aayush’s experience as a user error.
Even so, “weirdly jazzed about their new powers” is an understatement. Every team including ours has decades of programmer-years of tasks in the backlog, what’s not to love about something you can set to pet peeves for free and then see if the reality matches the ideal? git reset --hard if you don't like what it does, and if you do all the better. The Cuisy thing with the script for the printer is a perfect application of LLMs, a one-off that doesn’t have to be maintained.
Also, the whole framing is weirdly self limiting. The architectural taste that LLMs are, again, free riding off of, is hard won by doing the work more senior engineers are giving to LLMs instead of juniors. We’re setting ourselves up for a serious coordinated action problem as a profession. The article gestures at this a couple times
The thing about threatening LLMs is pretty funny too but something in me wants to fall back to Kant's position that what you do to anything you do to yourself.
I spent ~6hrs with Claude trying to fix a web worker bug in a small JS code base Claude made. In the end it failed and I ran out of credits. Claude kept wanting to rip out huge blocks of code and replace entire functions. We never got any closer to a solution. The Claude hype is unreal. My 'on the ground' experience has been vastly different.
Yes, you can get a project with claude to a state of unrecoverable garbage. But with a little experience you can learn what it's good at and this happens less and less.
That isn't my experience. My code and bug tracker are public, so I have the privilege of being able to paste URLs to tickets into Claude Code with the prompt "what the fuck?" and it usually comes up with something workable on its own.
Regarding LLM's performances on brownfield projects, I thought of Naur's "Programming as Theory Building". He explains an example of a compiler project that is taken over by a team without guidance from the original developers:
> "at [the] later stage the original powerful structure was still visible, but made entirely ineffective by amorphous additions of many different kinds"
Maybe a way of phrasing it is that accumulating a lot of "code quality capital" gives you a lot more leverage over technical debt, but eventually it does catch up.
No there's an alternative to countersignalling LLMs by pretending to be dumb. Since LLMs reproduce all of the worst of English modernity, overrelying on the PMC mush register, the business casual of English, with all the agreed upon casualisms that have rotted out the language like "there's" before plurals and “because noun”, there's an easy way to ensure no one mistakes your writing for an LLM's: use the constructions of the formal register or early modern English.
Roll thine eyes all thou wish’t but this I promise thee, if thou art lucky there will come a day on which thou shalt speak the single most important sentence in thy life, and that sentence will contain the word “thee”: “With this ring I thee wed”.
Always a great story. It's worrying that people are starting to turn to LLMs for indeterminate problems like interpersonal and relationship advice.
A big difference between the whispering earring and LLMs is that ostensibly the whispering earring has an actual model of the people around you that it can draw on to influence your decision making, whereas LLMs only know you.
So it's a bit like "talking" to a Cosmopolitan article.
My project depends on over 150 external packages. We just do integration testing or manual testing. Update your dependency, check the feature that depends on it.
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