Life in the era of the Business Idiot!

The Rust team adopting an LLM usage policy.

I think a recent post on the Rust blog sums this up quite well:

Technical products no longer indicate effort

It used to be that if an open source project got a polished, well-tested, detailed PR, that indicated that there was someone on the other end who had put time, effort, and understanding into the PR. […] With LLMs, none of these signals are reliable

Vibe coding is accepting changes from the model without reviewing them fully (or trusting models to do the verification).

She/he is presumably discussing ideas with Claude then reviewing any suggestions before integrating them.

This may still not be to your taste but it’s not the same as vibe coding. Whether or not they are actually reviewing everything is also a separate question!

Yeah the intelligence is still in the model. The promise of symbolic AI is about logic programming/ formal semantics not recursive loops.

To a large extent the idea has failed because it proved too hard to get non-experts to represent systems formally.

I still think there’s potential value in a hybrid approach - e.g. get language models to do the representation then let them use formal reasoners/ verification instead of hallucinating.

I poured hours into the original. I remember finally having to plan out my base for the final level on paper as there wasn’t a tile to spare!

I gather this is because AI assistants are inundating GitHub with requests. Their infrastructure must be drowning in slop.

I imagine it feels quite righteous to drop maxims like this. I too am reminded everyday how glad I am not to have to live in a fascist state.

That said I think this sort of superficial dismissal is really unhelpful.

I think the vast majority of Linux users will agree we don’t want to have to work with these laws but the reality is that we do. Far better we focus our efforts on minimising harm and promoting alternative mechanisms (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs).

Further I fear this righteousness actually serves to foster a toxic culture in the free software movement. And do you know what we call belligerent people who want to stifle dissent? Fascists!

No he doesn’t. We need to focus our anger on the legislators/ lobbiers (Meta in this case).

So kind of like a personalised learning assistant? I realise it’s different but this inverted instruct approach puts me in mind of Doctorow’s reverse centaur!

Don’t you find that the links you get are hallucinated though? Even if they’re not now you can imagine this collapsing into slop echoes…

I’ve tended to ask for examples to help me bootstrap new projects. A bit like getting customised docs. I certainly haven’t had enough success with generated code to think about automatically adopting it.

This is interesting and sounds like how I’ve been using it - basically like customised stack overflow answers.

Would you mind elaborating a little on your approach? Are you saying you provide it with guidance and links or are you asking it for those?

Haha yeah it’s great. It’s fast, portable, and has keyboard shortcuts from this century!

I have to say when I saw this headline I was bracing myself for AI “features”…

It looks like a Windows XP activation key!