Yeah. Our stuff is waaaaay toooooo dangerous! The model is soooo powerful that I have to write a long essay telling government to change the economic policies, to regulate hard, and to ban this and that. Well, now the government is indeed regulating for a claim that Dario has been warning about. This is exactly getting what he bargained for?
Did anyone feel that food in Europe and Japan are fresher and more safe? Many of my friends anecdotally felt that they felt better after eating in Japan or Europe than in the US.
Personally, I don't get why people blindly reject any collaboration with the military. I understand that they are pacifists, but I still don't get it. When I look at history, I see so many tragedies caused by being weak. Both Germany and the Soviet Union were able to invade Poland, for instance, and the Katyn massacre is a national scar. And who wouldn't want to defeat invaders like Genghis Khan? Have you ever heard of the Yangzhou massacre or the Three Massacres of Jiading? Why would we let civilization succumb to barbarism?
Don't get me wrong. I hate war. And never-ending wars like the Iraq War anger me to no end (and for that matter, I think G.W. Bush and his cabinet were truly evil). Of course, the danger is real; a military built for defense can easily become an instrument of tyranny or empire if left unchecked. That is why we must maintain rigorous civilian oversight and strict checks and balances over its power. But that does not mean the military, by default, is always evil, right?
It's because Americans and many Europeans under the shield of the U.S. military and have never in their lives felt a moment of fear about external threats.[1] They never have to meaningfully confront the central fact of their existence: that they enjoy a vastly disproportionate share of the world's bounty in a way that would be impossible without overwhelming military power. I suspect people living in say Ukraine don't talk like this.
The Colonel Jessup character was guarding a fence in Cuba. Seriously. Cuba. Imagine hearing that sanctimonious speech about "the manner in which I defend you" and then you find out it's a fence in Cuba.
There hasn't been an existential threat to the United States since the Civil War, and that one was self-inflicted. Obviously we need to maintain a military but 99% of what the current military does is either for economic goals or hollow national pride.
Cuba is less than 95 miles from Florida and was aligned with a hostile nuclear superpower. The possibility of using Cuba as a base of operations for an attack on U.S. soil is the closest the U.S. has ever come to a significant foreign threat.
And guantanamo bay is on the south side of Cuba, not even between Cuba and the US. There has never been fighting there over 100 years. These days it's most famous as a convenient legal location to do torture.
Aaron Sorkin unintentionally created some phenomenal performance art with the closing of that movie and various educated people seeing Jack Nicholson's character as some sort of hard defender of freedom.
It's relevant to the macho point of Jack Nicholson's character talking a bunch of shit about how he defends us. The Guantanamo base is irrelevant except, as previously noted, a convenient location to do torture.
Regarding the larger relationship.. bro, it's not the 1960s. Nobody is even trying to put nukes in Cuba and we could have easily established normal relations at any point in the last 50 years. The only reason that they are "enemies" is because we can't let go of a grudge going on 75 years that is completely irrelevant in today's world.
The scene between Colonel Jessup, Lt Jg Kaffee, and Lance Corporal Dawson and PFC Downey is about the nature of contradictory duties.
Everyone in that scene has a sworn duty to the United States as active duty military.
However, their duties sometimes conflict with each other (Jessup and Kaffee), and are even sometimes self-conflicting (Dawson and Downey).
Bad doesn't always come with a sticker labeling itself, and there's trauma inflicted even in peacetime in the maintenance of military strength (in broken bodies, training deaths, and emotional trauma).
To hold ones nose and pretend there isn't constant violence, even absent declared war, being perpetrated to militarily protect the US and Europe is to be ignorant, willfully or otherwise, of the foundation peace is built on.
Jessup is a tale of the distinction between the reality of war and the higher ideals and laws of war.
I understand and respect what you're saying here, but the fly in the ointment is that this posting (gitmo) was always bullshit and never actually mattered.
Jessup is missing the forest for the trees far more than I ever could because it's not my job. He's getting kids killed for a bullshit assignment while being a Colonel.
How do you think an Afghanistan or Iraq veteran would regard the Cuba assignment?
Soviet-allied Cuba was a military threat to the U.S. in 1986 which is when the movie is set. Don’t forget the movie was written before the fall of the Soviet Union. And even when it came out in 1992, it wasn’t clear to audiences that the cold war was really over.
Is Cuba a military threat today? No. But that’s because we have had a navel base there for more than a century, and the Soviet Union is long gone.
Isn't every nuclear bomb an existential threat to all human life? How can one say there are no existential threats while countries people consider "The Enemy" have enough nukes to kill all human life multiple times?
Also global warming is an existential threat. It's really telling how little people care about the world's problems not seeing their very own existence endangered.
In the case of Global Warming its happening to slowly for most people to perceive it as threatening. Even though it massively is.
For Nukes thats just a given nowadays, humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to constant threats. Not in the sense of being able to do something against it but to know it exists and not be terrified every single day. So many things can threaten human life that exist around us and yet we do not get scared after some time anymore atleast not constantly. Look at people living in Australia the entire ecosystem is basically a giant threat to anyone living there. Look at people living in earth prone regions of the world. People adapt and keep on living their lives. This is a fundamental human skill.
True! This is precisely what really annoys me about humans, because it makes humans not care about many things, and it's a skill I struggle with, which causes constant anger and helplessness on my side of things. But I guess it's what allows people to have hope and being whimsical, happy and whatnot.
>Isn't every nuclear bomb an existential threat to all human life?
No, of course not. It's a threat to people within 15 miles of the explosion plus people who are outdoors and turn to look at the bright light in the sky.
And there's never been enough nukes to kill all human life. That statement is based on a despicable calculation in which it is assumed that people would assemble packed shoulder-to-shoulder in circles of just the right size and there are no structures or land masses to deflect the blast and no clouds or fog to absorb the intense light.
More than half of US ocean shipping tonnages is to or from ports on the US Gulf Coast, and Cuba is in a position to cut off access to it if it gets helps from a bigger power.
In EU countries where war with Russia was seen as possible, for example, here in Sweden that is not the case.
The military preparations this fear leads to take a very special form though: investment in actual defence, commitment to stay behind and fight in case on an invasion, that sort of thing.
Obviously working on defence technology is part of this, but it also shapes the direction of the defence technology you work on. Sweden's forces have looked rather different from forces that intend to conduct offensive wars, especially historically. Tanks specifically designed for conducting ambushes are one example. Artillery emplacements designed to sink invasion fleets and to resist direct nuclear attack are another.
In this specific instance, this is the military of a country different from the one of the author. A country that is increasingly hostile towards its allies and does weird shit on the international stage that is difficult to justify.
Each military operation has a cool story in advance and a different cool story afterwards. Neither is ever true and if someone finds out the "truth" it usually isn't even half the story.
Usually if you go back far enough there is some guy with an obviously stupid idea. It then takes effort to keep the stupid idea alive and side shows become the main act.
This is an academic point. The US represents one third of the world's military spending because it uses force to further the economic interests of the elite. To work in a "defense" supplier is to support this.
Because most other countries don't even have a quarter of the military and resources the US has and there its usually about survival and defense of their borders with direct neighbors or at worst case region.
But with the US military, at least the years I was alive, it seemed to be never a real national security threat at the borders but very far away and for so not obvious reasons.
In the end however I agree with your "defense is necessary" and that's why NATO exists and should be developed further so its more strict and almost all nations worldwide join.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as a Christian, it's really quite simple: any death that you help cause is a black mark on your soul. Maybe you can repent for it, someday. But it's not something that will just be let go when the day of reckoning comes.
Incidentally, I'd feel the same way about killing someone in self-defense.
As someone from a Catholic country I always find hard how we mix that peaceful message with was was done in destruction to this day in the name of spreading faith since the ruling religions changed a few centuries ago.
I thought accepting and believing in Jesus as Lord was all you needed to enter heaven?
John 6:40 (KJV) 40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day.
Do you honestly think you're raising a novel point and not just being trite? If so, try reading Luther's Concerning Christian Liberty, where he dispenses with this argument. Or if you want a short version of what he says, if you just claim to "believe in" God but that doesn't affect your behavior in any way, then you don't really believe.
I'm certain I could not raise a novel theological perspective on Chrstianity even if I devoted my entire life to it. But from what I can tell, killing is not a black stain that precludes you from salvation. God is good, and He is forgiving.
OK, but part of repenting for something is genuine contrition, which is not really incompatible with knowing it's wrong but doing it anyway since you read that you can be forgiven.
You have to seek forgiveness and truly understand the nature of your transgression against your fellow man, not be like "welp, collateral damage is just part of the job."
Sure, I'd say that's a requisite for believing in Christ. But like I said, that belief can be sparked after what seems like any number of transgressions.
If you believe something, that will obviously have consequences on your actions, so there's obviously no inconsistency between the verse you quote and what he said.
Sure there is. They're a Christian, and think any action that causes death directly or indirectly condemns you to hell, and it's not given that you can repent. But scripture says belief in Christ will save your immortal soul, and that God is forgiving and merciful. That is not consistent with OPs views, who puts salvation as a "maybe" if you've caused death. If you find a genuine faith in Christ after the fact, you will be saved.
But scripture also says that many people will believe that they are holy and will be saved, and won't be, and this is one of Jesus's parables.
So it's far from clear. People who believe will have works, this is also something with scriptural support. So if you are doing harm, such as by killing people, you probably don't.
In a life-or-death situation, maybe a Christian could make the decision to take another life, then spend the rest of their life burdened by the guilt and sorrow of breaking the unambiguous 6th Commandment. There is room for repentance in this context.
That is *far* from the reality of the "defense" industry, however. Making widgets so that some dude at a computer terminal has an easier time drone-striking buildings full of kids halfway across the world is, essentially, evil.
I have thought about this a lot, and concluded that the peace we have today largely stems from all major powers having nuclear weapons, and leadership in each understanding that avoiding nuclear war is the utmost priority. All foreign policy choices are aligned to prevent military confrontation and avoid nuclear war. Thus there is an overemphasis to resolve disputes through diplomacy. But the plebeians do not understand this, they assume the peace today backed by nuclear weapons is genuine and permanent, they don't consider the nuclear weapons hidden underground, and advocate for policies like pacifism that do not reflect reality.
This quote sums up the current situation:
Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.
I use that quote alot too when it suits me but given we are actually talking about war and crisis isn't it more accurate to say:
"Hard times eradicate most of the population and some survive with heavy PTSD and regrets, then after the destruction some peace agreement is reached and so after many years of rebuilding the good times do come."
Economic interdependence is also a big factor. If you depend on someone selling you things or buying them from you, you have a lot more to lose by invading them.
It has some truth to it, but it doesn't survive looking at European history. In 1913 Germany and Britain were each other's largest trading partners, but a year later they ended up fighting each other in WWI. They fought again in WWII. Nuclear deterrence is a better explanation of post-WWII peace.
All this proves is that economic interdependence doesn't completely prevent war. Who knows how much more violent the 20th century would have been without it.
Yep. People want to believe this, because it means the world will generally become more peaceful as it becomes more integrated. But the numbers just don't hold up -- the closest trading partners are just as willing to go to war as anyone else.
Well to be correct also the parent said "is also a big factor" so Id say there are like 10 big factors (or dunno) and society should ensure countries are linked and allied by those factors.
>Personally, I don't get why people blindly reject any collaboration with the military
If you don't understand don't call it blindly.
If the country doesn't align with your world view at all there is no reason to fight for its military. Let those who like it the way it is do the fighting. If it is the complete opposite of what you would like you should fight against it. Aggression should scale with how offended you are.
Why would you blindly cooperate with some military?
> When I look at history, I see so many tragedies caused by being weak. Both Germany and the Soviet Union were able to invade Poland, for instance, and the Katyn massacre is a national scar. And who wouldn't want to defeat invaders like Genghis Khan? Have you ever heard of the Yangzhou massacre or the Three Massacres of Jiading? Why would we let civilization succumb to barbarism?
Well, what if people had refused to lend their talents to Hitler or Genghis Khan?
I don't wanna say but some people decide to do the unthinkable and that's how boulevards are filled with statues. You always have a choice, they just all suck.
There were quite some that refused due to principles and beliefs, but I guess not enough, and when there are not enough the first sacrificed for nothing.
Some places for other evil ideas that didn't reach global size, it means enough people stood up and they won.
Yes, that was already the first scenario presented. I was presenting a different one to help you understand how someone could reach the opposite conclusion.
Indeed, I hear you 100%. It may be painful to watch "your" military engage in wars that are not righteous, from one's perspective. Are there even "righteous" conflicts these days? But short of demand to abolish all state military, what is appropriate way to express one's indignation? Hopefully all can agree that such demand would be insane; but why, then, those "pacifist" performances, which effectively are calls to deprive military of the best weapons, people, thoughts, strategies, are not considered insane?
Agree or disagree with particular foreign policy or military action, why do people forget that the bulk of military is staffed with their fellow citizens? Many of whom aren't terribly privileged to enjoy ample alternative choices to elevate themselves socially or financially. It is exactly this lot who benefits the most from DEI policies, cherished by "pacifists", is it not? It is them who are the first and most massive direct casualties, caused by not having access to the best, superior materiel, doctrine and training on and beyond the battlefield.
I'll be the first to point that military and paramilitary forces attract many with unchecked lust for violence. That "pride", "honor" and "patriotism" are often terribly misused, to uphold goals of those with impure, malicious ambitions. Who, I grant it, also disproportionately represented in the command echelons of military and beyond. But if we are honest, that scum won't be shaken or taught a lesson by SotA technology being withheld from their use or corporation refusing cooperation. It is their subordinates, who, maybe naively, subscribe to "ideal", unquoted interpretation of Pride, Honor and Patriotism, will bear the brunt of being crippled (by the consequences of the withholding and refusal) on the battlefield, and pay with their lives. Don't their lives matter?
> Second, preventing or mitigating an incident early (even by just knowing the right feature flag to turn off) can save huge amounts of money: both immediate lost revenue during the incident and future lost revenue from customers who would have pulled their business or refused to sign pending contracts.
Not to be sarcastic but just to offer an observation: in a sufficiently large or bureaucratic organization, preventing an incident from happening can rarely get you any credit or visibility. Such achievement falls into the bucket of "what you're supposed to do". So, those who navigate company dynamics well would rather let the incident happen and then be loud on the follow-up action items. The trick is not to turn an incident into a diaster, so it's a dedicate act.
I learned this early in a conservative org. Preventing things is risky. Just keep the solution ready for when things go wrong because then you'll get approval.
Anecdotally I know of an engineer in the Excel team. They would keep around a list of low priority security bugs. When they wanted to do improvements on the system they would attach it to one of the security bugs “nearby“ because the change would become approved much more easily than just fixing the problem itself.
I've had this in my career also, I've had a solution that was deemed too risky to release by management but would have prevented an outage, but when an outage actually happened that was the first thing they wanted to try and it worked gloriously. I'm thinking that if it was released prior to the incident it would have not have had the same impact on my career.
Also, disaster is a good signal to the higher ups that there are problems in your org. If you keep putting out every fire with heroics, your boss will know (maybe), but his boss's boss's boss will see that your org is doing great and everything is all code green.
If you let a few things burn down, your boss's boss's boss will notice the fire, and things may improve. It's perhaps the easiest way you have of communicating with them.
Yeah, communicating upwards about potential issues and what you're doing about them is essential. When a disaster strikes, you'll look like a sage in the eyes of the higher ups.
Your great grandboss will not look favorably upon your grandboss passing blame downhill. Disasters are (hopefully) always the fault of the person in charge, which is why you'll notice that your bosses are unusually involved with meetings about how to avoid more disasters.
It’s about what people notice. In town governments I’ve heard of cutting popular programs that will provoke an outcry only to get credit for reinstating them, while possibly smuggling through other actions that are necessary but unpopular.
Craftsmanship does not have to die to have millions of software-engineering jobs displaced, right? I assume when people worry about the craftsmanship, they worry about that enough number of people would lose their jobs because AI coding has becomes sufficiently good.
> There's so much work in delivering products that will carry your brand, and then must be supported.
People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/B test, and revert the code. Boris alone merged nearly 300 PRs in the past week (or two?). So the top research labs seem have broken the productivity seal.
And then they talk about this recursively self-improving AI that is so powerful, so autonomous that they advocate that every company should be prepared to "pause" the effort. And their Fable/Mythos has this specific restriction as mentioned in their model card[1] that they are going to reject requests to tune and train models because, well you guess it, the models are too powerful to be used by mere mortals.
[1] We’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms. Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).
I think taking Anthropic or any company in this space at face value is naive at best though. AGI has been 6 months away for years now. Surely anyone can think this through: Anthropic knows what theyre doing with their public facing repositories, they know to make things enabled by their tech seem impressive. I would consider Bun etc. examples of this.
The disagreement in timelines usually comes from differences in the used definition of AGI.
Many who predict a 2026–2028 arrival define it as: 'the ability to perform any purely cognitive task a human can do.'
If we stick strictly to that 'cognitive-only' metric, we are arguably very close.
Plenty of people say vaccines contain microchips. Research is not linear so this simple linear regression I see people doing regarding capability scaling makes no sense. Nobody can forecast a breakthrough, what makes you believe you can?
I ahven't seen technology like this which affects me directly. But from past we know what disruptive technology looks and feels like. The weaving chair/loom disrupted an industry, energy, steam engine, internet.
Now we have the most generic technology an LLM/AI at a time were every major problem was solved:
We have the internet which allows for fast communication, we have very fast hardware, we have a supply chain which can react/act very fast globally and we have the richest companies on our planet investing into this technology unseen amounts of money. We have a local race between the richest companies on the world and a global race between the biggest world powers on our planet.
And we have the smartest people on our planet involved in this too. A lot of peple from academy went to the industry, some gave up their tenure for AI.
It would be very ignorant to assume that all of this can't lead to significant and fast change in our society.
It might not, but its like looking at a huge wildfire 50km away and just going to bed.
People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work.
Even if that were 100% true, it only collapses the coding effort to near zero. Anyone who's built and shipped a real product should know that coding is maybe 50% of the work, and on a mature product it can be much less.
And even when you can easily find the intended behavior, you need to trace the modules that relies on the current behavior, especially if the change is located near the core of the software.
Boris also says he stops using /plan, he writes loop to write prompt, and he simply asks AI to come up with solutions. He also said many times that his agents would comb their emails, slack channels, and Github issues to come up with things to do. When we combine what he has said, it's hard not to have the impression that he was implying full autonomy of their agents. The only that the engineers need to do is to build harness and to issue approvals, rejections, or suggestions.
Yes, there will always be some human bottleneck when it comes to abstract software
i also run loops that comb through slack / github to auto-propose a fix & have another agent auto-review, but you need the human to stamp, and they fail in subtle ways architecturally
I work on a toy project that has exactly one user (me). On its face it's fairly simple. It's a portal to my media server because I didn't like how Plex worked with regards to searching and filtering. I can look for movies or series by director, studio, publisher, etc. I can rate things, I can find highly rated things. It's great, and instead of bugging plex support to add new features, I just tell Deepseek to do it. I started it before LLms were prevalent and now that I have open code I've had Deepseek write and rewrite most of my code and implement new features.
But even with this toy project, and the target market being someone I should know very well (me), I often struggle to figure out what I want the app to do. When I go through brainstorming or grilling sessions it'll often ask me a question about how the product ought to work and I'm just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ give me suggestions and I'll let you know.
Genuine creativity is something LLMs struggle with and it kind of makes sense given their design. If you have a complete plan for a feature or even just an idea what the feature should do, that is enough for an LLM. But asking it to think and come up with a new feature idea by itself will always yield mostly extereme basic things you've already thought of. That creativity of "what" to build so it serves a purpose is still very difficult imo and LLMs are not good at it.
> People think otherwise with AI partly because Anthropic kept telling us that they didn't have to write code or review code any more for most of their work. Their agent swarms just comb through their github, slack and wikis to figure out what to do next, and another swarm of agents just review, test, merge, deploy, A/B test, and revert the code. Boris alone merged nearly 300 PRs in the past week (or two?).
Apart from many other issues with this, heavily subsidized subscription plans won't last forever, and if you start burning your own money on tokens in this way, you'll soon realize it's terribly inefficient.
> the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT)
Holy crap that is dark. I like learning about ML for fun, and now I have to assume that their model is intentionally misinforming me to sabotage my learning? It is absolutely bananas that somebody decided that was ok behavior.
I don’t see how that helps, unless you actually mean open source, rather than open weights like most people do. Without everything that goes into the model, including training data, these things are opaque.
The raw training data is so large that very few parties could host it for free even if there weren't copyright barriers.
But I think you could have a full open source training software pipeline that's set up to work with Wikipedia, Common Crawl, Books3, Library Genesis, Anna's Archive, and whatever other useful data sets people can name. There would just be a step where you have to provide your own copy of Library Genesis (or whatever subset of it you have managed to obtain).
That may very well be the case. In fact, I'm nearly certain that you're right. But it doesn't change the fact that open weight models are altogether insufficient on a number of important dimensions regarding freedom and transparency. And so often (such as the comment I replied to, I think), even technical people seem to just ignore the difference. Open weights are just weights. No amount of open-washing changes that.
Honest question, I wonder why that is? Surely we have smart humans that did not read and learn "all the books". Can AI not be trained by re-reading material multiple times to reinforce?
Start up a seti at home style of open source LLM training! Assuming there is an ability to merge the sub models trained on each user's home PC into a larger model...
That's not something that is known how to do in a reliable fashion, right? It sounds quite like the problem where transformers are unable to be updated/taught over time.
This comment is not entirely on point with your comment, it circles around and above it looking for lift though.
If you're not doing work that requires your code to stay in home nation data centres, Claude for Deepseek, Deepclaude (https://github.com/aattaran/deepclaude) is a great way to get better at using Claude like tools for software development. It even does a pretty good job of putting together cover letters for job applications...
Using Deepclaude is very much cheaper than using claude... For hobby projects, I've found it useful. A recipe (for cooking) management app I've made took a couple of hours to put together and cost $US 0.5. Claude is far more expensive.
The downsides of Deepclaude for many are:-
- DeepSeek is a Chinese corporation so the Chinese Communist Party may ask for data if it wants it.
- DeepClaude isn't as fast as normal Claude, though it's still pretty fast and I think fast enough (YMMV).
- DeepClaude might not be as optimised for various code issues that Claude may be able to solve more quickly or effectively.
- The same safeguards are probably on DeepSeek, but you won't be "wasting" as much money as you might on using Claude.
Inference focused hardware (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPqHoVSenE, AI generated speech) may in the medium future cause a large enough cost/energy reduction for LLM tools like Claude to make local LLMs more attractive.
Inference focused hardware would make running Open Source models like DeepSeek on local machines far cheaper and control over safeguards would return to the end user.
Hopefully this leads to a localised LLM provision market where local businesses provide varieties of these "local" LLM services. Here, local could mean on premise through to state or nationally based LLM services. Eventually, government orgs outside of the US may demand this kind of LLM use, in the same way governments legally require data to be stored within national borders for many critical government functions.
A bloke can dream I guess...
...Could affordable inference focused hardware also cause the bottom to fall out of these stock market bending valuations for AI corps and their datacentre obsessions?... Not to mention the societal costs caused by the AI super corps building these data centres. At the moment, they're nearly making a profit... They seem almost like speculative companies... Is that a term?
I’ve been wondering if “you’re not google” when learning about googles software dev process applies to Anthropic. Anthropic is a company that A. Has cheap unlimited access to its models and B. Is probably largely insulated from the types of tradeoffs that the rest of industry has had to observe in the post-ZIRP era.
Like did they break through the productivity seal? Or are they willing to spend that much more on it since they see their failure as a like existential threat to humanity. I doubt it our boss sees your software the same way.
It doesn't need to be an existential threat to humanity - it's an existential threat to their business. They need agentic workflows to work for their business to become profitable. So pouring money into the "no engineers write code anymore, only agents" model is at once R&D, QA, product development, and advertising. They can spend as much of their investors' money on this as they have to because if they can't (sustainably) sell this vision to other companies, their company collapses.
Zero interest rate policy. When interest rates are Near zero you can spend money like it’s free. A lot of what we thought of as like normal engineering culture were the result of interest rates being zero.
There's no doubt that LLM increases our efficiency, be it producing prototypes, generating production code, debugging our systems, or more. So, if there's no more demand or reduced work hours, some of us will lose our jobs. I certainly hope the Jevon's Paradox kicks in faster, as in months instead of years, let alone decades.
If we don't consider the potential loss of our jobs, on the other hand, isn't it great that we don't have to repeatedly do what we already know how to do? I mean, how many times can we feel the thrill by writing the same CRUD applications? How many times do we have to design the same idempotent APIs? It's also a relief that we could spend way less time figuring out mitigations or root causes when there is a production incident.
This reminds me of the scribes before Gutenberg's moveable-type printing press. They spent their life in scriptoriums copying the manuscripts by hand. They earned three times of the average income of their times. They were highly skilled labor. It required years of training, deep literacy, and a high level of domain expertise. Yet, history showed that even highly specialized expertise can be mechanically reproduced.
That appears to be exactly what LLMs are doing for us: automating the digital equivalent of manual transcription, such as setting up the repetitive boilerplate, sketching out the standard APIs, finding predictable bug fixes.
I'm not sure about others, but I have to face the same existential question today: as software engineers, where does our true value lie? Is it merely in learning, memorizing, and, reproducing patterns that others have already built. More often than not, patterns that an LLM can now piece together better and faster? Or is it in taking everything we’ve learned and applying it to solve entirely new, messy, and uniquely human problems? If our worth is tied to how well we copy the past, we are already obsolete. Our value has to shift from being human repositories of known solutions to being creators who venture into the unknown.
It is, of course, easier said than done. Hence I have likely the same level of stress as other software engineers.
But... software engineering was never about the boiler plate. Or adding the extra parameter.
It was about knowing how to fit the new use case into an existing code base, respecting the architecture, and sometimes rearchiteting the solution. How easy the latter was is really dependent on whether the code/arcitecture respected the low coupling, high cohesion principle.
Now, some of this can be coerced into LLMs but it takes work and careful study of the changes. Sometimes they get it right, many times they do not. So, you have to go back and forth with them. If you know what they should have produced.
SWE is far from dead. We just let too much slop into the codebase because we're overwhelmed by it and not incentivized by leadership to care. Code quality will likely drop to the point where even the leadership will notice and it will normalize again. There's nothing like a high profile customer calling out a problem that was vibe coded. It has started already and will be happening more and more.
> realized that novel intellectual work might be done by these models and I was shook.
I suspected it was more likely that the intellectual work had already been done in a similar way by a number of other people, and GPT-4 picked up that work.
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