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Thanks. I went looking for how to actually verify myself as I would love to get access to Fable again. This post confirmed it, it's not relate to Fable at all and has been around. Thanks.

Interesting perspective but don't you think it's too late? Opus 4.8 can already replace most developers. Companies are already cutting the bottom half of the work force, since Opus on a cron can churn out bug fixes.

Maybe there's some hope that if we stop here, we'll still need senior level developers to guide the models and step in where they (occasionally) fall short? Maybe Mythos/Fable was the first time where that was no longer really true?

I'd disagree. I saw plenty of really mediocre work from Fable, especially in various niche programing endeavors (graphics comes to mind). It doesn't strike me as the "end to all programmers" yet... though fast forward 10 years and it seems inevitable that all of our salaries will be halved, if not more.


I was a highly active boy, who really struggled in my youth to find interest in school and therefor found studying hard, etc.

At multiple points I was told I had ADHD but I knew that wasn’t right at all.

I have tons of interests and no struggle to focus on those. Ask me to sit and learn about something irrelevant like Native American basket weaving and I will tune out.

Also missing for boys is physical exercise. 1 hour of PE twice a week in high school is absolutely ridiculous. All that energy has to go somewhere. Pills work but at what cost?


I doubt it. There’s a very hungry work force ready to take any job available.


You will literally build nothing but the most primitive of devices unless you accept black boxes. In fact I'd argue its one of humanities great strengths that we can build on top of the tools others have built, without having to understand them at the same level it took to develop them.


I'm not just talking about the user

Its not like anthropic can just set a breakpoint in the model and debug


I have been able to build plenty of stuff with a pretty plain emacs + ghci for years...neither are black boxes. Except maybe my brain driving them.


They run on an operating system you probably don't know all the inner workings of.

And that runs on a chip with trillions of transistors.


Yeah so? Claude isn't an OS. It's the thing making my code. I don't want my codebase to be some bytecode adjacent thing that LLMs operate on.


So you stand upon a big pile of black boxes.


Black boxes aren't inherently bad. But if they don't have well defined mappings of inputs to outputs, they aren't good black boxes. That's the problem with Claude Code imo.


not really. Most of the technology is not black box but something of a grey box. You usually choose to treat it as a black box because you want to focus on your problems/your customers but you can always focus on underlying technologies and improve them. Eg postgresql for me is a black box but if I really wanted or had need I could investigate how it works.


True, you can understand an ICE engine all the way down to the chemistry if you so chose. An LLM isn't even understood by its inventors so users have no chance to understand it even if they wanted to.


Those black boxes are usually deterministic.


Yeah someone should’ve told that to Donald (Knuth)

/s

For those who don’t know, Knuth implemented the typesetting system TeX just to make sure his book’s typesetting was correct.

You can pretty much only innovate when you reject the blackbox and decide to make a better one.

Otherwise you’re likely implementing something you could probably get off-the-shelf, which is ok, but also something that you could just… not implement.


There is a huge difference between greenfield development and working with an existing codebase.

I'm not trying to discredit your experience and maybe it really is something wrong with the model.

But in my experience those first few prompts / features always feel insanely magical, like you're working with a 10x genius engineer.

Then you start trying to build on the project, refactor things, deploy, productize, etc. and the effectiveness drops off a cliff.


This has been my (admittedly limited) experience as well. LLMs are great at initial bring-up, good at finding bugs, bad at adding features.

But I'm optimistic that this will gradually improve in time.


The only regularity I can discern in contemporary online debates about LLMs is that for every viewpoint expressed, with probability one someone else will write in with the diametrically opposite experience.

Today it’s my turn to be that person. Large scientific code base with a bunch of nontrivial, handwritten modules accomplishing distinct, but structurally similar in terms of the underlying computation, tasks. Pointed GPT Pro at it, told it what new functionality I wanted, and it churns away for 40 minutes and completely knocks it out of the park. Estimated time savings of about 3-4 weeks. I’ve done this half a dozen times over the past two months and haven’t noticed any drop off or degradation. If anything it got even better with 5.4.


Thanks for the counterpoint, interesting to hear that things are better than I have experienced so far. :)


they are not. "scientific code" should give you a hint.


Ooh, I feel the burn. Care to elaborate? Are you just negging science in general, or ... ?


I’ve had good, alternative experience with my sideproject (adashape.com) where most of the codebase is now written by Claude / Codex.

The codebase itself is architected and documented to be LLM friendly and claude.md gives very strong harnesses how to do things.

As architect Claude is abysmal, but when you give it an existing software pattern it merely needs to extend, it’s so good it still gives me probably something like 5x feature velocity boost.

Plus when doing large refactorings, it forgets much fever things than me.

Inventing new architecture is as hard as ever and it’s not great help there - unless you can point it to some well documented pattern and tell it ”do it like that please”.


This isn't the case. I basically did an entire business/project/product exploration before building the first feature.

Even after deleting everything from the first feature and going back to the checkpoint just before initial development, I can no longer get it to accomplish anything meaningful without my direct guidance.


Is there anything unique here happening for the video aspect or is it just taking snapshots over and over?

I’ve been looking for a good video summarizing / understanding model!


Nothing unique, it's just taking a snapshot when it's processing the input. Even processing a single image will increase the TTFT by ~0.5s on my machine, so for now, it seems to be impossible for feeding a live video and expecting a real-time response.

In regards to the video capability, I haven't tested it myself, but here's a benchmark/comparison from Google [0]

[0] https://huggingface.co/blog/gemma4#video-understanding


I totally get these are very hard problems so solve and that we're on the bleeding edge of what's possible but I can't help and wonder when someone is going to crack real video understanding.

sure, maybe it's still frame-by-frame but so fast and so often that the model retains a rolling context of what's going on and can answer cleanly temporal questions.

"how packages were delivered over the last hour", etc.


Can someone explain what one might use this model for? As a developer with a casual interest in biology it would be fun to play with but honestly not sure what I would do


You can get your feet wet with genetic engineering for surprisingly little money.

This guy shows a lot of how it's done: https://www.youtube.com/@thethoughtemporium

Basically you can design/edit/inject custom genes into things and see real results spending on the scale of $100-$1000.


We actually did this in my highschool genetics class back in 1999! We made bacteria change color by splicing in a gene. Awesome stuff.

The (public!) school had a grant from one of Seattle's biotech boom companies.


Is there something like this in text/readable format?


My main concern is using fungi. If it ends up in my lungs I'm most likely screwed, right?


Yes, but most students produce their best work while infected.


This is the classic meme https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/mmv2ig/lab_strains...

Lab strains of things tend to be extremely sensitive and not human adapted. You shouldn't study and modify human-infecting organisms in your basement anyway. While you shouldn't ignore protective equipment and proper procedure... paranoia about infecting yourself with a lab leak isn't warranted.


I'd love to experiment with this stuff, just literally have no idea how it would be safe to start.


What do you mean when you say “do a gut cleanse”?


From the company that brought you the Lung Brush.


I mean a program (series of herbal supplements) that can cure gut inflammation and help with digestion, and in some circumstances get rid of parasites. Herbal medicine, things that other cultures have been doing for thousands of years. Do I have to prove that turmeric lowers inflammation in the body? What is going on in this thread lol.

“gut cleanse” obviously is a trigger phrase on HN it seems.


Don’t have to prove it to me… I was asking genuinely.


fenben, ivermect. herbs like blackseed oil, blac walnut, even organic cloves


I sacrifice a houseplant to baphomet as an alternative


Why do you do in production?


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