I think what a lot of AI critics are missing is that they're judging an LLM by its first draft. This is *not* what terrifies me about these machines.
What terrifies me is that you can ask them "find bugs in this PR." Or "find performance flaws." Or really anything.
Then have 3 agents (with different models ideally) vote on the result. Then have another fix it. Repeat until all bugs are clean.
If you haven't tried this experiment then you haven't reached the dark night of the soul that I have.
I've definitely had PRs that required like 5-10 rounds of reviews like this until the PR was sparkling clean. But the scary part is that it didn't really need me in the loop at all. Honestly you just needed a monkey to keep typing "make it better" and eventually it would.
If that entire process burns a ton of energy and water then that's all atrocious, but it's likely still less than an engineer's salary. And my body requires energy and water too. This is what scares me ultimately.
@nolan Yeah, though that line of thinking is a false equivalence, since the point of the water and energy for us is to live, and ideally live well. The point of work ... is not. It’s a step to enabling each other to live and work well.
We can't equate human resource use like that because the purpose is different.
@nolan Yeah :| It's so easy.
That idea is also ambient, because that's a thing that Sam Altman said too. It's easy to end up parroting his words. It's the key losing the plot we're in danger of. The goal is good lives for people — which to be clear, includes achievement — but if we start measuring the achievement instead of the good lives, we go to the bad place very quickly.
Nolan Lawson
Mx. Aria Stewart