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> I use Claude Opus (4.5, 4.6) all the time and catch it making making subtle mistakes, all the time.

Didn't we make subtle mistakes without AI?

Why did we spend so much time debugging and doing code reviews?

> Are you really being more productive (let’s say 3x times more)

At least 2x more productive, and that's huge.


I think you’ve forgotten about the context of OP’s post. He said he uninstalled vscode and uses a dashboard for managing his agents. How are you going to be able to do code review well when you don’t even know what’s going on in your own project? I catch subtle bugs Claude emits because I know exactly what’s happening because I’m actively working with Claude, not letting Claude do everything.

The code is still visible if i want to review it.

But since I have a strong rule about always writing unit tests before code, my confidence is a lot higher.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/code-proven-to-work/


>The code is still visible if i want to review it.

I agree that the test harness is the most important part, which is only possible to create successfully if you are very familiar with exactly how your code works and how it should work. How would you reach this point using a dashboard and just reviewing PRs?


Are you getting paid 2x more?

Even as a principal engineer, there is an infinite number of things you don't know.

Suppose you get out of your comfort zone to do something entirely new; AI will be much more helpful for you than it is for people who spent years developing their skills.

AI is the great equalizer.


The scary thing is that Amodei only opposes to domestic mass-surveilance.

He doesn't seem to care if the DoW uses his AI for international spying.

That's one more reason why Europe needs sovereign tech.


"When our time traveler peered into the windows of these shops, the first thing he'd notice was how large all the watches were."

My only question about this entire essay is... where did this time traveler came from???

"Our" time traveler was never mentioned until this line.


Not true:

> The best way to answer that might be to imagine what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine. [...] The first thing he'd notice, if he walked through a fancy shopping district, is that all the prominent watchmakers of the golden age seem to be doing better than ever.


Clearly, the time traveler went back in time to get inserted into a paragraph that GP overlooked the first time.


It was several paragraphs before that, where pg said "[...] what someone from the golden age would notice if we brought him here in a time machine."


Although PG isn't wrong here, people also have larger wrists nowadays that are able to comfortably support larger watches compared to ~50 years a go, never mind at the 1940s or 1950s.


To run Llama 3.1 8B locally, you would need a GPU with a minimum of 16 GB of VRAM, such as an NVIDIA RTX 3090.

Talas promises a 10x higher throughtput, being 10x cheaper and using 10x less electricity.

Looks like a good value proposition.


> To run Llama 3.1 8B locally, you would need a GPU with a minimum of 16 GB of VRAM, such as an NVIDIA RTX 3090

In full precision, yes. But this talaas chip uses a heavily quantized version (the article calls it "3/6 bit quant", probably similar to Q4_K_M). You dont even need a GPU to run that with reasonable performance, a CPU is fine.


What do you do with 8b models ? They can't even reliably create a .txt file or do any kind of tool calling


Exploration, summarization, classification, translation


The possibility that anyone can easily replicate any startup scares A16Z.


This is what always confused me about VC AI enthusiasm. Their moat is the capital. As AI improves, it destroys their moat. And yet, they are stoked to invest in it, the architects of their own demise.


Don't you have that backwards? If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left?


> If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor, will capital like money and data centers be the only moat left?

If AI gets good enough to replace all human labor then actual physical moats to keep the hungry, rioting replaced humans away will be the most important moats.


Did you see those Chinese robots from last week? I’m pretty sure they’ve got their moats covered


Which is bought by money in the first place, see billionaire doomsday bunkers. The poor will not have such a bunker.


Unless they intend on generating their own oxygen to breathe, I don't see how these bunkers stand a chance.


Fortunately they do.


For how many weeks? Or months? Or years? Then what?


Money is useful mostly for hiring human labor to outcompete others, e.g. Satya Nadella has 100K employees under his command, you don't, so you can't realistically compete with MS today - this is their main moat.

If AI renders human labor a cheap commodity (say you can orchestrate a bunch of agents to develop + market a Windows competitor for $1000 of compute), what used to be "Satya + his army vs. you" now becomes mostly a 1:1 fair fight, which favors the startup.


Frankly, you have a pretty good chance of displacing windows right now. You should go for it.


How powerful is the device you wrote this comment from? On prem or self hosted affordable inference is inevitable.


There’s no alternative, they can’t collectively freeze out all AI investment and force it to die.


I don’t know about that. I’ve looked at things like the rise of AI protects those who currently have capital. They won’t need labor or as much of it. So maybe it is what they want - to retain power permanently. Isn’t that the tech oligarch Curtis Yarvin fantasy - to replace democracy with themselves as a permanent ruling class?


The incompetent have always pantomimed the competent. It never works. Although the incompetent will always pay a huge amount to try to achieve this fantasy.


You're joking. Most startups are the incompetent. Throwing enough money at sales and marketing can make anything work.


The irony is that the outage was caused by a change from the "Code Orange: Fail Small initiative".

They definitely failed big this time.


Engineers have been vibe coding a lot recently...


The featured blog post where one of their senior engineering PMs presented an allegedly "production grade" Matrix implementation, in which authentication was stubbed out as a TODO, says it all really. I'm glad a quarter of the internet is in such responsible hands.


It's spreading and only going to get worse.

Management thinks AI tools should make everyone 10x as productive, so they're all trying to run lean teams and load up the remaining engineers with all the work. This will end about as well as the great offshoring of the early 2000s.


there was also a post here where an engineer was parading around a vibe-coded oauth library he'd made as a demonstration of how great LLMs were

at which point the CVEs started to fly in


Matrix doesn't actually define how one should do authentication though... every homeserver software is free to implement it however they want.


the main bit of auth which was left unimplemented on matrix-workers was the critical logic which authorizes traffic over federation: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/server-server-api/#authorizat...

Auth for clients is also specified in the spec - there is some scope for homeservers to freestyle, but nowadays they have to implement OIDC: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/client-server-api/#client-aut...


Thats a classic claude move, even the new sonnet 4.6 still does this.


It’s almost as classic as just short circuiting tests in lightly obfuscated ways.

I could be quite the kernel developer if making the test green was the only criteria.


Wait till you get AI to write unit tests and tell it the test must pass. After a few rounds it will make the test “assert(true)” when the code cant get the test to pass


No joke. In my company we "sabotaged" the AI initiative led by the CTO. We used LLMs to deliver features as requested by the CTO, but we introduced a couple of bugs here and there (intentionally). As a result, the quarter ended up with more time allocated to fix bugs and tons of customer claims. The CTO is now undoing his initiative. We all have now some time more to keep our jobs.


Thats actively malicious. I understand not going out of your way to catch the LLMs' bugs so as to show the folly of the initiative, but actively sabotaging it is legitimately dangerous behavior. Its acting in bad faith. And i say this as someone who would mostly oppose such an initiative myself

I would go so far as to say that you shouldnt be employed in the industry. Malicious actors like you will contribute to an erosion of trust thatll make everything worse


Might be but sometimes you don’t have another choice when employers are enforcing AIs which have no „feeling“ for context of all business processes involved created by human workers in the years before. Those who spent a lot of love and energy for them mostly. And who are now forced to work against an inferior but overpowered workforce.

Don’t stop sabotaging AI efforts.


Honestly i kinda like the aesthetic of cyberanarchism, but its not for me. It erodes trust


Forcing developers to use unsafe LLM tools is also malicious. This is completely ethical to me. Not commenting on legality.


I dont like it either but its not malicious. The LLM isnt accessing your homeserver, its accessing corporate information. Your employer can order you to be reckless with their information, thats not malicious, its not your information. You should CYA and not do anything illegal even if your asked. But using LLMs isnt illegal. This is bad faith argument


You're talking about legality again. I'm talking about ethics.

Using LLMs for software development is a safety hazard. It also has a societal risk, because it centralizes more data, more power, more money to tech oligarchs.

It's ethical to fight this. Still not commenting on legality.


You're not forced to work there and use those tools. If you don't like it, then leave the job. Intentionally breaking things is unethical especially when you're receiving a paycheck to do the opposite.


It may be illegal, but it's not unethical.

Doing unethical things because someone pays you would still be unethical. Opposing those while someone pays you is still ethical.


Again, no one is forcing him to be there. He's breaking something on purpose. I think you should read up on ethics because this take "I don't like it therefore whatever I do is ethical" is juvenile.


That's quite the strawman. The reason it's ethical is not that LLM's are unpopular or someone dislikes them. It's ethical because LLMs introduce safety hazards, i.e. they cause harm.


Sounds like what an LLM would post if it were tasked to advertise LLM coding abilities. Nice manipulation of human emotions, well played.


I see someone is not familiar with the joys of the current job market.


That's extremely unethical. You're being paid to do something and you deliberately broke it which not only cost your employer additional time and money, but it also cost your customers time and money. If I were you, I'd probably just quit and find another profession.


That's not "sabotaged", that's sabotaged, if you intentionally introduced the bugs. Be very careful admitting something like that publicly unless you're absolutely completely sure nobody could map your HN username to your real identity.


I'm not sure if this is real account or AI slop -- possibly a mix of both.

But the US is a f*cking dystopia at this point.

How come the richest country of the world - the model of capitalism - allows so many of their citizens go homeless?

It's mindblowing.


> the model of capitalism

They've got capital, but I'd argue that they're long way from model capitalism since some time. There's both over- (regulatory capture) and under regulation (consumer and environment protection) that goes against this and companies have enough sway to influence the law and consequently the market. Free market in the original sense of "free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities" is not even a goal anymore.


What about freedom from starving in the streets?


That's not a freedom.


It’s a special kind of delusion that thinks being dead is more free than being alive.


You're wrong, in two ways:

- bodily autonomy; people do have the freedom to sign DNRs, which is death being more free than being alive, as it's about choice

- freedom isn't to do with people giving you things; it's about being able to choose things. It's not "freedom from"; it's "freedom to"


Freedom to die by one’s own choice is indeed a freedom.

Stupid semantic games. “Freedom to” not die in the streets works just as well.


You seem to be implying that to fail to enforce the right to sustenance nets negative freedom. It's not clear whether you've weighed the loss in freedom required to enforce this right. Can I presume you believe this right is worth forcing people to give, forcing by threat of armed expropriation or incarceration?


Microsoft fell into this trap in the 90s -- they believed that they could hide the DOS prompt, and make everything "easier" with wizards where you just go through a series of screens clicking "next", "next", "finish".

Yes, it was easier. But it dumbed down a generation of developers.

It took them two decades to try to come up with Powershell, but it was too late.


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