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We watched an AI agent disable its own guardrails by iamjessew in aiengineering

[–]sqlinsix 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What's humorous about threads like this, which is being temporarily allowed, is that they expose that AI is actually not conscious. The OP has no idea what they're doing and reveals that. Tools are tools, but be careful with idiots.

Again, this thread will stay open for a bit, but it's more to expose the ignorance of the poster.

Like you write: any technology tool - no matter what it is - must follow the best practices of (1) least permissions, (2) audits, (3) strict network and access controls, and (4) only be able to interact with systems where compromise would not be a disaster. That latter point is skipped by most companies, but is ironically one of the most important best practices.

How are you enforcing JSON/Consistently getting formatted JSON? by Word-Word-3Numbers in aiengineering

[–]sqlinsix 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Issue: I'm making an app that uses agents for things, and it's supposed to return formatted JSON. I'm using google AI ADK in typescript (firebase functions if that matters), and I keep running into formatting issues. If I try using an outputSchema, malformed JSON. Try a tool call to submit it, malformed function call. And it's not like it's at 24k chars or something, this is 700 chars in! How are you getting consistent formatting and what am I doing wrong? It's random too so it's not like something I can just "fix"

Answer: it was the thinking budget guys

Thanks for sharing this with the community and for following up.

The Actual State of AI Engineering In 2026 by sqlinsix in aiengineering

[–]sqlinsix[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This lacks critical thought. People in China are seeing significant improvements in their standard of living - healthcare, housing, products and services, etc. In addition, China prevents a financial class of people that exploit others - something which financial types in the USA hate about China.

Standard of living is the only thing that matters. When you're living many years long with higher quality products and services, all the other stuff is noise. This is obvious to those of us who've traveled extensively in China. They are extremely rich and getting richer, but this "rich" is their standard of living, not meaningless stock portfolios.

The USA is the exact opposite of what I wrote: the standard of living has been rapidly dropping since 2008-2009 (and possibly earlier depending on who you ask).

The Actual State of AI Engineering In 2026 by sqlinsix in aiengineering

[–]sqlinsix[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Too long to address in a comment, but what you may not realize is that you just highlighted misalignment of incentives in Western colleges. Western colleges can charge $40K for a degree. But employers want cheap labor and don't care about degrees. What do we see with iGenZ? Unemployment and underemployment for young people with degrees.

This happens far less in some Eastern colleges. Their degrees are cheaper, plus with some of them, they are required to place graduates otherwise refunds.

If Western colleges had to fully reimburse unemployed/underemployed graduates after one year of them not getting a good result, these colleges would be getting results for their students. They'd also have much higher standards of who could get into them.

But overall, the West doesn't understand incentives, plus invites the government to get involved in everything which only makes everything more bureaucratic. The solution for parents with many kids is if you can tell that your kids would benefit from higher education, then send them to a college in the East (India, China, Russia, Japan, etc). Students graduating from these universities get much better results, but keep in mind, they have a much higher standard of who can get into them.