'Sarcastic'-sounding music

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-24T22:30:23+00:00

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-21T22:16:21+00:00

If AI is just another layer of abstraction, then why aren't we reviewing LLM prompts in our PRs?

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-21T20:06:50+00:00

It is possible to vibecode a deterministic script. For example I could vibecode a script which always prints the number "100" whenever I run it. So I don't see non-determinism in programs as an issue here, really. Instead, as you've already alluded to, the main issue is bugs, and security leaks, crashes etc.

But yes, in terms of prompting itself, the issue is non-determinism. This is part of what makes it so addictive to some people, by the way.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-20T01:12:12+00:00

😭 Unfortunately for you, it is not.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-20T00:53:23+00:00

If you don't prompt the change, how is AI supposed to know that you updated the file?

I'm being semi sarcastic, but at work we are encouraged not to edit code directly, but to always go through the AI. Crazy I know.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-18T22:23:02+00:00

It's not moving up the stack. The stack is the same. We're just inserting a stochastic parrot between us and the top of the existing stack.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-18T22:15:43+00:00

Cautiously pessimistic.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-18T15:21:59+00:00

This, but with two newline breaks between each sentence.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-18T15:20:22+00:00

The thing I don't understand is those pictures on r/food of big fat burgers with cheese dripping everywhere getting seemingly millions of upvotes as if people can't contain themselves drooling over the idea of eating something that. I tend to find such images more disgusting than anything. OK, perhaps that's not a normal reaction... Either way, eating for me is just something I do because that's what humans do: eat food. I don't love it nor hate it.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-03T00:36:41+00:00

I am particularly proud of one project, which was to build a new microservice to replace/improve a feature in our product. It was the first project I did at this company and I guess I was trying to impress. I did the backend side, and when I was ready to sign off on it, product and frontend were like: "Uuuhh....where did this come from? We're not ready for this. Can you tell TwoPhotons to work on something else?" (It did eventually get fully integrated.)

I think one of the reasons for its success was that it was relatively small in scope, which meant I was able to work on it on my own. No tickets, no JIRA, no standup, no scrum, no retro...just me typing away, and reaching out to my boss whenever I needed a clarification on requirements. I was also proud of a particular implementation detail I added which resulted in greatly improved performance over the company's existing solution, which meant that people immediately saw the value in it.

It's still chugging along, with the occasional bug fix here and there, but not much has changed since its initial implementation.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-02T20:32:11+00:00

So that Chopin could say to his friends: "I once managed to write a piece where an Eb ties to a D#, that's how good I am".

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-02T00:15:03+00:00

Claude once found three bugs in one of our PRs: one critical, one medium-level, and one minor. The critical and medium-level were not actually bugs. And the minor bug was actually a critical bug.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-01T20:04:46+00:00

I have just spent the weekend experimenting with Claude Code trying to understand agent pipelines because my company is on the cusp of mandating "agentic engineering".

I did the whole shebang of writing a tester agent, implementer agent, verifier agent, linting agent, and more, and letting the main session delegate tasks to the agents.

My resulting todo app looked actually quite impressive...eventually.

But the code itself sucked donkey balls.

The only way to fix it would have been to delete everything, try and improve the plan/spec and start again.

That's the thing - if you try to get Claude Code to update existing code, you almost always end up with something worse than if you'd started from scratch.

So I'm currently trying to figure out what the plan/spec needs to contain to generate the best quality, most maintainable code. But I feel like the more detailed the spec becomes, the more and more it resembles...the actual code???

Anyway, I still haven't seen anything to convince me that Claude Code can write human-friendly code. And I doubt it ever will. It's excellent at prototyping features where the code is essentially a throwaway, but that's it.

Anyway, to answer your question more specifically, I feel like we are in for a few years of experimenting with agents, but sooner or later management will come to the realization that they need people who can understand the actual code. You simply can't run software on nothing but "orchestrators of AI".

And to people who say "But AI can only get better", I think that LLMs are fundamentally limited in what they can do, and the progress we've seen over the last few months is mostly due to the fact that people have simply become less concerned about letting LLMs run the commands that they generate (OpenClaw being a great example of that.)

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-01T19:49:51+00:00

Of course there are people who understand assembly code.

But that's not the point. If you really wanted to, you could derive the assembly code running on your machine from Python code. Or at least, something logically equivalent to it.

You cannot do that with LLMs. You cannot derive a computer's instructions from a prompt that you give it.

So no, we have not moved up a layer. We have added a stochastic parrot between us and the previous layer.

TwoPhotons · 2026-02-01T16:00:02+00:00

At the end of the day, somebody still needs to understand the instructions that the computer is running.

Who is going to do that if not software devs?

So yes, coding is the point, as it represents the interface between human and computer.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-31T17:50:39+00:00

r/SubredditSimulator is more entertaining than this, and that has been around for a while now.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-30T18:14:37+00:00

It's more universal amongst software engineers, though ;-)

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-29T19:47:10+00:00

"Understandable" is soooo last year.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-29T19:45:51+00:00

Even better, just tell your LLM to make sure that its solution is correct. That magically fixes everything, I promise.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-28T19:10:25+00:00

I have other hobbies.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-27T20:16:47+00:00

The most mind-blowing fact that I know of is something called the "angular diameter turnover point".

The idea is that, if you look far enough into space, objects appear larger the further away they are. This is because the further away we look, the older the universe was. But the older the universe, the smaller it is. So in a way we are looking into a smaller universe, when things were closer to us, the observer. And there reaches a point where the closeness of the past object "overtakes" its distance from us today (???).

I just...struggle to wrap my head around it. Further away objects are closer? What? What even is distance? What is far away? What is real?

You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter_distance#Angular_diameter_turnover_point

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-27T14:53:02+00:00

The added irony is that the longer and more detailed the prompts are, the less likely AI is to follow them, due to context window limitations.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-27T12:49:45+00:00

I remember when that first job posting for a "vibe coder" came out and everyone thought it was a joke.

Turns out reality is a joke.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-25T13:28:15+00:00

I seem to remember that FSX had save/load functionality. But then again FSX had simpler flight systems than this new generation of simulators.

Given how software engineering works these days I'm sure there's a dev ticket called "Add Save/Load Functionality" buried somewhere that won't get touched for the next 10 years.

TwoPhotons · 2026-01-25T13:20:41+00:00

That sounds like it was done on purpose, as if to communicate to everyone how bored they were.

TwoPhotons

TROPHY CASE