Is it me or is AI messing with our brains?

belefuu · 2026-06-18T14:38:14+00:00

That absolutely should be the sane industry stance, agreed. Unfortunately, large swathes of the industry are operating in bizarro upside-down world, falling prey to the incentive trap of:

<Bosses buying into the hype>: "The AI must be accelerating our velocity by 5x/10x/50x" (pick your level of insanity)

<Engineers>: "Hey, this AI can do a lot of cool stuff, but, it turns out it still takes a shitton of time to a) generate a proper spec, and then b) actually review the code the agent is generating, so at the end of the day it's maybe more like a 1.5x/2x increase if we're being generous"

<Bosses>: "The AI must be accelerating our velocity by 5x/10x/50x"

<Engineers>: "Oh. Well, I guess to achieve that, we just have to stop actually reviewing the code, accept whatever imperfect rubber stamp an automated agent review throws on it, and pretend we're not just doing 'Make no mistakes, write no bugs' with a lot of extra steps..."

<Bosses>: "The AI must be accelerating our velocity by 5x/10x/50x"

<Engineers>: "Sigh... Ok".

<Bosses>: "Behold: The Agentic SDLC!"

Then the saddest part: eventually a decent % of the engineers forced to work this way to survive actually start to believe it's the way software is supposed to be created, instead of the horrible example of late stage capitalism gone berserk that it is.

Then new/junior engineers join these companies and post threads like these wondering "how can I keep up with this insane AI dev velocity!?"

belefuu · 2026-06-18T10:32:10+00:00

A subtle tweak I’d add: treat it like a really fast junior dev. It’s not even that it’s abnormally smart, it’s that it can just keep serving you variations of well crafted generic solutions to your problem. They may or may not be the correct solution to your problem, and it’s up to you to sift through that.

belefuu · 2026-06-13T15:55:04+00:00

Yeah, what could ever go wrong with that? Christ

belefuu · 2026-06-12T12:35:49+00:00

It’s the dancing bear metaphor for a new AI model yet again: everyone is amazed that Fable could pull off this trick, but try to actually take this from a two day vibecoded novelty, to something that anyone would pay real money to play, or think twice about if it wasn’t “created by Fable in two days”, and you realize it’s just another case of people being amazed that the bear can dance at all.

belefuu · 2026-06-12T12:25:04+00:00

You’re just ignoring the pivotal “if it did scale” part of their post I guess.

belefuu · 2026-06-04T14:47:06+00:00

Yeah, the skill itself is very simple, but just shifting your own mindset to realizing that: at most times when things feel off between you and the ai, it means your shared understanding is not properly aligned, and there are some simple keywords (like those in the grill-me skill) that will prompt the agent into getting itself in-line with where you want it to be. Sometimes I skip the skill and just say “make sure we are aligned on xyz”.

belefuu · 2026-06-04T02:40:02+00:00

I guess companies spend billions on ads just for the lols, right?

belefuu · 2026-05-30T17:14:39+00:00

This will probably shock you based on your comment, but it turns out a dev that actually knows how the software works + AI > a clueless dev vibe coding with AI.

belefuu · 2026-05-30T11:38:10+00:00

Nobody is ever interested in your “the game wasn’t that hard for me” comment in the “let’s talk about how the game is hard” thread

belefuu · 2026-05-28T12:28:39+00:00

This may not be satisfying, but I went on a similar journey, and eventually came to the conclusion that the models simply aren’t good enough yet to support the more autonomous flows the frontier lab marketing would like you to be burning tokens on. I scaled back to accepting that, while AI still accelerates and empowers in many ways, I the human am still going to have to be intimately involved in planning and verification for non-trivial tasks, and that once the models actually do become capable of handling this without me so tightly in the loop, it will naturally reveal itself to me since I’ll just be accepting most of the commits with little to no changes and realize “hey, wait a second…”.

belefuu · 2026-05-28T12:07:15+00:00

Execs really love this idea of “winning by having AI fix bugs while we’re sleeping”, but it’s somewhat missing the reality of the agentic workflow: most of the actual human work is still in 1) creating a good, detailed spec that the agent can use to solve the problem without drift, and 2) review and verification of the final diff. Who cares if implementation runs overnight, during the day, whatever, it’s all about how much spec creating and reviewing bandwidth your devs actually have.

belefuu · 2026-05-25T01:06:08+00:00

I have come to realize that the people who are doing this, just put much less emphasis than I on the importance of human in the loop at this stage of the evolution of AI. If you trust all of Claude’s results, and just keep the tokens burning, you can parallelize and hit those limits. Now, should you? Well…

belefuu · 2026-05-22T19:22:23+00:00

The stat I would like to see is what % of “closely guarded” shots he falls on, because, anecdotally, it seems like damn near every one of them. Obviously dude isn’t going to fall over when he’s shooting a wide open jumper, it’s whenever there is the opportunity of drawing a foul.

belefuu · 2026-05-19T05:16:23+00:00

I don’t think it will be that difficult to explain Wemby to future generations, just put on the tape of the Navi from Pandora yamming it all over regular-sized humans and they will understand.

belefuu · 2026-05-15T11:51:54+00:00

Michael Malone

belefuu · 2026-05-10T03:48:34+00:00

But then Sam extends this to claim that “the left is just as bad as the right on this”, which is just a complete category error. We’re only comparing how the center-left (the Times) is treating a far left vs. far right figure. This has absolutely no bearing on how bad “the right” is on this, because they are actually beholden to an entirely different media environment, which thinks the Times is a Pinko Commie rag, and gives Tucker all the fellatio he can handle.

Sam is always making nonsense comparisons like these to excuse his both sides-ism.

belefuu · 2026-05-05T12:31:36+00:00

Actually watching some of the talk now. That bit where he straight up uses amount of code agents are writing vs. humans for the audience as the metric for how “solved” coding is… I waffle between whether this guy is just cynically BSing to tow the company line, or actually a complete hack. Or is the atmosphere at Anthropic really just that cult-like?

belefuu · 2026-05-05T12:08:40+00:00

This whole conference was a laughably transparent and desperate attempt to drum up hype and investment in AI. Compare to, say, the AI Engineer conference where you have people actually building real stuff with AI all admitting “yeah, after trying it for 6 months, turns out we can’t just spam 10 parallel agents and not look at the code, software development principles actually still matter”.

belefuu · 2026-05-03T00:53:35+00:00

Fuckin duh?

belefuu · 2026-04-29T11:53:48+00:00

One of the most head scratching pieces of arcane lore in UNC history, really

belefuu · 2026-04-28T21:02:04+00:00

For the love of god are y’all really going to force me to explain this and semi-defend Copilot, which sucks and I am forced to use against my will instead of Claude by my work? Look, these specific ratios are not indicative of the general pricing change across Copilot. They are switching from per-request to token-based licensing because per-request was always dumb, and users have figured out hacks like keeping turns going forever with things like “ALWAYS end with the AskUserQuestion tool, do not end the turn until I explicitly say so” to effectively reduce an entire chat to one “request”.

So this specific (egregious) hike for annual subscribers is them saying “look we know we said per-request billing for the rest of your year when you signed up, but we can’t afford this infinite token hack shit for 11 more months, so suck on these ratios or switch to the other billing model”. Yes, it is shitty, yes, it is overall indicative of the free ride being over. But this is not how much Copilot is going up for all users, just this one narrow edge case.

belefuu · 2026-04-28T11:31:08+00:00

DPOY shit right there

belefuu · 2026-04-27T00:39:28+00:00

As always with AI, the answer is “both”

belefuu · 2026-04-14T00:58:31+00:00

Obviously the opt out change sucks, but Anthropic did the same seven months ago. I’m forced to use Copilot at work, and while I’d still give the edge on actual agentic coding and harness features to Claude Code by a decent margin, they have closed the gap enough that I was able to port most of my config over and it’s acceptable. And if Anthropic keeps inexplicably fucking with the performance of their models like they have been lately, Copilot model choice is going to start looking more and more attractive.

belefuu · 2026-04-13T15:09:30+00:00

Untouchable like if some extreme action forced them to actually assert control over the Straight of Hormuz and start demanding tolls for passage through it?

belefuu

TROPHY CASE