Well llms are imperfect tools that provide a lot of value (they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words). They are here to stay.
Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train. It’s a wild ride and I just hope we’ll get through it OK.
I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human. They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
I think what he needs is a personal fine-tune, something I suspect will become more prominent when we start getting multi-tenant LoRA and can use fine-tunes on a per-token cost basis.
A co-worker commented that he thought the models performed worse after being "embarrassed," suspect it is an artifact of how some conversations progress in the training data.
Reminded me of someone saying that taste will become an important factor wrt AI tools/ things built with AI. Something like that.
edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet:
Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.
Modern internet ruined forums and google search sucks hairy balls, and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. Its literally impossible to find anything meaningful on the internet nowadays. What else can we do besides asking an LLM these days?
I think that the argument is not that it happened before LLMs. Rather, assuming I'm understanding the parent correctly, they are arguing that, due to the enshittification of search and the internet, LLMs are the only way to get information from it. That has definitely been my experience as well.
I agree in sentiment, and really a lot of this is Google's doing. It's been around a decade since they switched to approximate results and started encouraging people to search via sentences. I believe this is the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird
The internet for all of its activity is becoming harder to index because the classic dumb search engines were turned into personalized semantic people pleasers.
The classic model for knowledge discovery still exists, though. You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with.
Go to a library, ask your coworkers. If you put in the ground-work, it's possible to do that. For seeds of knowledge outside of your local network, at this point you have to find the indexers that work for you.
Personally, I am in the process of writing the infrastructure for my own search engine, and maybe I will share the tech broadly one day. For now, I'll keep my inventions to my closer personal circles.
In general, I think people should be able to more easily maintain their own offline indices, and share knowledge graphs peer-to-peer rather than relying on a centralized one, in my opinion. This tech has no monetization opportunity, though, so I'm guessing that's why it's relatively under-developed, but luckily for me I have enough money and now enough time to develop and release it (and similar tools).
You appear to be confusing "avoid" with "never interact with".
If your professional life has required you to spend enormous amounts of time working very closely with people you don't like and/or don't trust, then -unless it has made you enough money to retire after a few years' work- please accept my condolences.
For reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority.
A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.
Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
What makes this a luxury? I've met many people in my life, and this gives me the opportunity to pick-and-choose with whom I do business. It's a matter of degree.
Plus, I've been on the receiving end, too. Is this not simply adulthood?
I don’t like them. They talk to me in this grating LLM-voice, an uncanny valley of talking to a real human.
This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like.
They confidently bullshit me - often giving me useful, helpful answers. But also just making stuff up with the same assurance - and with only a veneer of fake remorse when I call them out on it.
Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you means you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.
This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like.
This doesn't work by, effectively, Anthropic's own admission. CC's concise mode tells Claude to wind its neck in every turn. That is significantly more than changing the prompt.
What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both?
Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?
Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
I worked for twitter and there was a guy like this. I made a big stink that "yo, everything this guy says just needs to be in a linter" and they actually implemented it.
If you don’t have style rules baked into the PR process, you should. Tabs vs. spaces is a team decision and needs to be matched by everyone to reduce code churn. It’s correct to reject a PR if it violates the team style guide (although it should be automated and have tooling locally to enforce it as well.)
The distinction is even easier to make these days -- brogrammers aren't actually programmers.
There is an emerging coterie of people whose entire approach to software startups is to vibecode an MVP, raise enough seed to hire a real programmer (or get one interested enough to become their "cofounder") and move on to the next MVP. Doing one company at a time in the era of LLMs to be a sucker's game.
Indeed. Very disappointing given what figure is in question. Simple GH pages behind CF would do which is something people starting learning IT this week can do.
Yet I would find using GH pages even more disappointing. Maybe we can have a disappoint-off and measure who bristles more at the varying technical decisions for a personal blog?
I can't believe HN has changed so much that we are now mocking people for not hardening their blogs against traffic spikes. The comment used to just be "hugged", but now, if the author has anything critical to say about AI, it's this same snarky, elitist quip every time.
I know we're not supposed to complain about HN "changing", but, shit, it really hurts.
I mean, this is also Martin Fowler, a luminary in the field. His site should be able to handle the HN hug of death, particularly if he's bashing the latest-and-greatest tools. As is, he looks like an old man shouting about cars being bad while his horse drops dead at the side of the road.
I personally don't see the correlation between what he's been saying about AI and his blog site's reliability requirements. It's a blog, not some high availability service.
Also, was Henry Ford asking for regulation because his cars may destroy our civilization as we knew it?
In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.*
*This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?
yes they are incredibly unpleasant to work with. Like the most annoying coworker you ever had.
For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.
One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained.
I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias."
And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience.
Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean.
I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society.
I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.
I have great success in specifically asking LLM tools for academic literature after describing the problem or field I would like to get some insight into.
It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers.
They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers.
It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now.
But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.
yes! I've had it even help me with looking and buying homes. I ended up catching things in a contract that would have screwed me over. there's so many use cases outside of software
Youtube music, GitKraken, 1password, Parallels -- i've canceled subscriptions to all of these because either I've replaced them or have had help from LLMs enough to find different options that are either free or cheaper.
I think this is a very even-handed reasonable position. and it's true - LLMs can be unpleasant to talk to. the day it feels like a magical delightful experience is the day we'll probably be out of jobs, though.
While the article is fairly broad (it talks about "our profession", which ostensibly is coding, but then talks more about LLMs and their conversational style which is something that everyone has opinions on), it's worth pondering what his professional relationship with coding is today.
Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority?
Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.
Fundamentally I don’t think we have a choice about riding on the AI technology train.
It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.
It surprises me a little bit that we still don't have a personalized agent.
I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company.
It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.
Kinda funny that one of the biggest software engineering “influencers” of all time can’t host a blog that survives HN front page traffic. Maybe try LLMs Martin.
He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.
Love the totally conflicting statements in that post.
- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize
- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.
So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).
Well llms are imperfect tools that provide a lot of value (they offer leverage in form of agents to put it in Naval Ravikant words). They are here to stay.
I think what he needs is a personal fine-tune, something I suspect will become more prominent when we start getting multi-tenant LoRA and can use fine-tunes on a per-token cost basis.
A co-worker commented that he thought the models performed worse after being "embarrassed," suspect it is an artifact of how some conversations progress in the training data.
He says this in the post almost word-for-word. Are you agreeing with him? The opening "Well" confuses me on what tone you're going with.
This comment doesn't make sense as a response to anything the author said.
As an aside:
This is a confusing use of attribution. It's sort of like saying, "as Naval Ravikant famously said, AI can be very useful."
i would expect that when you cite someone by name, the sentence being cited should at least be significant and meaningful to the slightest degree
you thought this was some sort of insightful rebuttal that you uniquely thought of?
Reminded me of someone saying that taste will become an important factor wrt AI tools/ things built with AI. Something like that.
edit: Not exactly as I remembered, but it's a PG tweet: Prediction: In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make.
https://x.com/paulg/status/2022604692178522562
Modern internet ruined forums and google search sucks hairy balls, and most of the content is SEO optimised ad ridden crap. Its literally impossible to find anything meaningful on the internet nowadays. What else can we do besides asking an LLM these days?
That was the case long before LLM's even existed though.
I think that the argument is not that it happened before LLMs. Rather, assuming I'm understanding the parent correctly, they are arguing that, due to the enshittification of search and the internet, LLMs are the only way to get information from it. That has definitely been my experience as well.
An LLM that is now serving ads! And also sucks up to you. And also is wrong confidently.
I agree in sentiment, and really a lot of this is Google's doing. It's been around a decade since they switched to approximate results and started encouraging people to search via sentences. I believe this is the one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hummingbird
The internet for all of its activity is becoming harder to index because the classic dumb search engines were turned into personalized semantic people pleasers.
The classic model for knowledge discovery still exists, though. You find a blog you like, and use that as a thread of knowledge. You join a community and talk with someone and share resources together. Join a small group chat and post with those people. Your knowledge sharing comes from people you share interests with.
Go to a library, ask your coworkers. If you put in the ground-work, it's possible to do that. For seeds of knowledge outside of your local network, at this point you have to find the indexers that work for you.
Personally, I am in the process of writing the infrastructure for my own search engine, and maybe I will share the tech broadly one day. For now, I'll keep my inventions to my closer personal circles.
In general, I think people should be able to more easily maintain their own offline indices, and share knowledge graphs peer-to-peer rather than relying on a centralized one, in my opinion. This tech has no monetization opportunity, though, so I'm guessing that's why it's relatively under-developed, but luckily for me I have enough money and now enough time to develop and release it (and similar tools).
following this advice would have made most of my professional life impossible, what a luxury it would have been to be able to.
Some people aren't very self aware of their own bubble and how luck plays a role in their life.
People who say that tend to make their own bad luck and not get nearly as far in life.
Not that luck doesn't have a role, but everybody gets it.
Pointing to luck renders all advice meaningless.
Luck can mean opportunity, but doesn't reflect on capability, availability,or outcome.
Much advice is meaningless, baseless post-mortem correlations from people trying to justify their own success.
"Buy more lottery tickets!"
no, it's "buy lottery tickets to exclusive lotteries".
the ability to enter such lotteries is where success lies. either through connections or ability.
who's to say OP hasn't suffered or otherwise disadvantaged himself in upholding that moral?
You appear to be confusing "avoid" with "never interact with".
If your professional life has required you to spend enormous amounts of time working very closely with people you don't like and/or don't trust, then -unless it has made you enough money to retire after a few years' work- please accept my condolences.
For reasonably skilled people, it's often more just a matter of priority.
A lot of people get wrapped up in pursuing compensation opportunities or prestige brands as their top priority, only to burn themselves out or wallow in a domain/culture that doesn't suit them, but if you're willing to deprioritize pay or dinner table cred, you often end up with a lot more flexibility on other work factors. And sometimes, flourishing in those better-fit environments pays off bigger in compensation and career growth in the end anyway.
Granted, Fowler was able to do very well on more axes than many of us, but most competent mid- or late- career people have plenty more flexibility on worklife than they admit to themselves.
What makes this a luxury? I've met many people in my life, and this gives me the opportunity to pick-and-choose with whom I do business. It's a matter of degree.
Plus, I've been on the receiving end, too. Is this not simply adulthood?
This takes about 30 seconds to fix permanently. You can prompt them to use any tone , be as concise or verbose as you like.
Only people with flimsy epistemological underpinnings feel threatened in this way. Everyone makes mistakes, and gets fooled by AI (as we’ve been fooled by historians and scientists), but to write off AI because you feel it’s constantly misleading you means you lack proper foundations. Most of my fun conversations with AI are bending it back into proper grounded truth.
This doesn't work by, effectively, Anthropic's own admission. CC's concise mode tells Claude to wind its neck in every turn. That is significantly more than changing the prompt.
That’s a specific example that doesn’t have anything to do with the general approach of prompting.
I’m simply exhausted at needing to refute incorrect LLM answers professionally.
Even AI would have provided a more insightful response than this.
Yeah but what about when you have to read code by others who didn't care for this? At this point, code comments have lost all meaning
I hate to break it to you, comments were mostly useless.
What is the Silicon Valley brogrammer subculture? Is it the same as the Silicon Valley subculture? What defines both? Are LLMs really the product of brogrammers?
Brogrammers are in it for the love of money. Programmers are in it for the love of programming.
what if you're in it for both? I like solving puzzles and want to extract the maximum amount I am due for making a company profits.
Good, then you're not a scab!
I can count on one hand how many people I've met that are into programming for the love of it.
For most people it's a job, and that's ok.
That's surprising to me. It's been a majority of people I've worked with. I guess perhaps it depends heavily on where you work.
Maybe? Dev job at a non-tech F500 company. All these guys have kids and houses in the suburbs.
even people I know who are supposedly in it for the love of programming inevitably care about the amount of money.
I don't have enough fingers.
We hang out in different crowds.
Hello! I hope you have an extra finger, because now you've met another. The money certainly doesn't hurt, but I love what I do.
You may need to find a place with a better culture.
Sure, and that's a big shift in industry culture over the last several decades.
While there had long been perfuctory white collar programmer analysts filling the ranks at some dry divisions at IBM, it used to be way more common to have a software engineering department full of Asimov-steeped Omni-reading nerds who had genuinely passionate interest in the field that had taken hold even before they started working in it.
But later the career increasingly came to be treated more like law, medicine, or finance and you started to see those rooms fill with people that were often generally bright but not really "called" to the field in the same aay.
What sorts of places do you hang out in, or how old are you?
People who did programming for the love of programming was extremely common in the sortof hacker subculture that existed from 1990-2010is or so.
normal guy that wants to provide for his family: bro
autistic guy that rejects your PRs because you used tabs instead of spaces: pro
I worked for twitter and there was a guy like this. I made a big stink that "yo, everything this guy says just needs to be in a linter" and they actually implemented it.
If you don’t have style rules baked into the PR process, you should. Tabs vs. spaces is a team decision and needs to be matched by everyone to reduce code churn. It’s correct to reject a PR if it violates the team style guide (although it should be automated and have tooling locally to enforce it as well.)
On the contrary, the pro is likely to prefer tabs—you can adjust the display-width for better ergonomics.
Love doesn't pay the bills and this industry will kill any love a normal person has for programming.
The distinction is even easier to make these days -- brogrammers aren't actually programmers.
There is an emerging coterie of people whose entire approach to software startups is to vibecode an MVP, raise enough seed to hire a real programmer (or get one interested enough to become their "cofounder") and move on to the next MVP. Doing one company at a time in the era of LLMs to be a sucker's game.
Have you watched HBO’s Silicon Valley? Does a surprisingly good job at defining that subculture
maybe use the LLM to help you keep your site working under load?
it is a tool after all.
Indeed. Very disappointing given what figure is in question. Simple GH pages behind CF would do which is something people starting learning IT this week can do.
Are you implying that Martin Fowler is a highly respected figure or something? He just comes off as a grifter from what I can see.
Yet I would find using GH pages even more disappointing. Maybe we can have a disappoint-off and measure who bristles more at the varying technical decisions for a personal blog?
I can't believe HN has changed so much that we are now mocking people for not hardening their blogs against traffic spikes. The comment used to just be "hugged", but now, if the author has anything critical to say about AI, it's this same snarky, elitist quip every time.
I know we're not supposed to complain about HN "changing", but, shit, it really hurts.
I mean, this is also Martin Fowler, a luminary in the field. His site should be able to handle the HN hug of death, particularly if he's bashing the latest-and-greatest tools. As is, he looks like an old man shouting about cars being bad while his horse drops dead at the side of the road.
I personally don't see the correlation between what he's been saying about AI and his blog site's reliability requirements. It's a blog, not some high availability service.
Also, was Henry Ford asking for regulation because his cars may destroy our civilization as we knew it?
Turns out, people here are just as opinionated and snarky as anywhere else. It's grounding, really.
In some ways I miss the early LLM days before RL and system prompts (I assume this is the difference) made them all sound the same. They would say weird stuff. They got better at being useful and worse at being fun.*
*This sadly also describes me as a 31 year old man.
hugged. https://archive.is/LahHs
archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?
yes they are incredibly unpleasant to work with. Like the most annoying coworker you ever had.
For my own sanity ive wrapped my pi setup in some strict bubble wrap and it is basically exclusively an LOC generator. I have no need nor desire to "converse" with the LLM, it is there to do exactly what i need when i need it.
One of the I dunno, weird things about LLMs, is that their search space feels exceptionally constrained.
I'm sure I can sort of prompt it to try to give the answer I want but some people talk about "I don't want an LLM with a political perspective, just provide all the perspectives equally and without bias."
And to a certain extent they have to be constrained. Anything more than a 500 word response I'm probably not going to read, particularly if I want to go deeper on something I want to navigate the conversation. But it means that tuning things like sycophancy just create sort of extremely simple mitigations. Even when I say "May" or "slight chance of" I'm often corrected "Be careful to make too blanket of a statement." I wonder if part of this has been the move towards optimizing towards the agent experience.
Likewise a bias towards "Say things equally without bias" is an exceptionally poor way to actually explore the nuances of an idea, with this sort of regression to the mean.
I don't know if they'll be able to solve this problem broadly. I mean, LLMs probably shouldn't be therapists/coaches/philosophical gurus. But I could anticipate a growth in sort of groupthink and regression to the mean in terms of perspectives broadly speaking as a society.
I find them useful. Maybe it's better I find them distasteful to talk to as well.
I have great success in specifically asking LLM tools for academic literature after describing the problem or field I would like to get some insight into.
It's usually the first step I take when writing research. I don't even read the analysis, just go straight for the papers.
They usually provide me with very relevant seminal papers and I can then easily expand from the bibliography in those papers.
It basically solves discoverability, whereas in the past I would spend days and would need to ask colleagues and librarians for help, to achieve what I can get in minutes now.
But again, I value the actual output of the LLMs at bellow zero factually wise because I need to check everything they say if I want to internalize it and use it for any end. Pointing me to sources is the perfect use case. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how little I trust the text LLMs produce, I actively avoid reading it because I really don't want to risk ingesting spurious information that I might later repeat or rely on for any reason.
Yeah, I think part of it is - I want LLM's to do I think what they're promising to do which is like provide new perspectives on things.
But they're response is kinda always.
"Python? Have you considered that some people prefer, javascript?"
To your point, I think I'm asking too much, and would have a better time if I adjusted my approach.
https://archive.ph/LahHs
LLMs have helped me a ton and have allowed me to replace all my apps that I was paying for. They're internal, so they don't have to be perfect, but man they've saved me money. That's just my experience.
What were you paying for?
Turbotax.
I've had these AI things also help out with my US taxes. Has held up to review as well.
yes! I've had it even help me with looking and buying homes. I ended up catching things in a contract that would have screwed me over. there's so many use cases outside of software
Yep. I have crazy tax. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself.
Also - lowkey legal documents.
Youtube music, GitKraken, 1password, Parallels -- i've canceled subscriptions to all of these because either I've replaced them or have had help from LLMs enough to find different options that are either free or cheaper.
For use cases like this, how is the LLM different from a Google search?
It isn't, but the history of profitable software has been repackaging the same data in different UIs.
I don't like hammers, either. But I wouldn't try to build a house without one, now that they've been invented.
Reasonable stance, though not sure it will remain viable.
I think this is a very even-handed reasonable position. and it's true - LLMs can be unpleasant to talk to. the day it feels like a magical delightful experience is the day we'll probably be out of jobs, though.
While the article is fairly broad (it talks about "our profession", which ostensibly is coding, but then talks more about LLMs and their conversational style which is something that everyone has opinions on), it's worth pondering what his professional relationship with coding is today.
Is he actively coding...anything? Any projects? And engagements? Or is he a coding influencer now, giving hot takes and opinions, and riding on the XP inertia as a relevant authority?
Because if it's the latter, and I strongly suspect it is, his opinions on LLMs and coding are close to worthless. There are loads of "I'm now an influencer" giving these sorts of hot takes now, and they all seem...detached and irrational with the real world.
It's amazing how effectively tech leaders have indoctrinated people to give up their power and give the tech people free reign. The same thing has happened in the socio-political realm. Assertions of powerlessness are seen as wisdom.
It surprises me a little bit that we still don't have a personalized agent.
I def want to finetune my llm responses and yes sure Claude has some type of memory but its too early to just bet on one horse and while i use claude at home through claude.ai i also use claude through an api at my company.
It might start feeling better when they solve the issue of forgetting things they already got right before.
Kinda funny that one of the biggest software engineering “influencers” of all time can’t host a blog that survives HN front page traffic. Maybe try LLMs Martin.
He is of course entitled to his opinion on the topic, but I’m personally not going to put too much weight on it considering he hasn’t written software for a living in probably decades.
I for one am excited to move past the whatever-martin-fowler-thinks era of infrastructure "best practices".
Many of his ideas are trendy nonsense that have caused more harm than good
Love the totally conflicting statements in that post.
- When we think of AI agents, we shouldn’t anthropomorphize
- ...my visceral dislike of interacting with an LLM that’s not just making a pretense of being human, but also posing as the kind of human I walk away from.
So he's anthropomorphised the LLM as being like a human himself (rather than forcing it to act as a machine via its prompt for example).
Maybe he should have had an AI check his post :D