6 ms·

Errors compound, and making 1000 wrong decisions per hour, will not result in something useful. Maybe you‘ve tried setting up guardrails for good design or arch

by manmal 1mo ago

Errors compound, and making 1000 wrong decisions per hour, will not result in something useful. Maybe you‘ve tried setting up guardrails for good design or architecture at some point? I think it’s simply not possible to do that. It would certainly be an accelerator for people who know exactly what they want. And it would remove multi tasking, which I‘d appreciate.

Ericson2314 1mo ago
If your task has incremental rewards/feedback, you can push the "intelligence rate" simply by sampling the reward function faster. That's not fake, even if it not a substitute either. This is the "dumber but honest person that works harder" phenomenon, vs "lazy genius".
- gf000 1mo ago
  That's a good way to put it, but still my experience is that worse code bases are non-linearly harder to maintain and improve in the future, software tends to break down without a good enough base. Sure, in the future full rewrites and stuff like that will be just another "throw money at it" problem, but fundamentally software can get arbitrary complex and we barely know how to write large, maintainable code bases. Nonetheless, I think testing (and maybe proofs) will have its long-awaited time to shine, as being the "reward function".
  - Ericson2314 1mo ago
    I totally agree with you on the first bit, but I also think that I am way better at deciding on how to refactor code bases than the LLM is. Right now, I put models in low thinking mode during my refactors and hate waiting. I would much rather have a faster model that that maybe was slightly stupider, and I would wait far less long between prompts where it needs my valuable input. Models that are dumb, but humble and fast, can be fine.
momojo 1mo ago
I don't have a great answer but you pose a great question. Obviously a CTO is not going to walk away from the technology just because it's not good enough. That much more incentive for someone to create a powerful enough harness that can direct that power safely and productively. Like a nuclear core, we'll need to come up with the graphite rods and water tank. And if tokens are essentially free, why not, for every million tokens, spend 10x tokens on code review, testing, etc?
- manmal 1mo ago
  I do spend 5x more tokens on planning and reviewing, than for implementation. But architecture is still nothing I can delegate.

by manmal 1mo ago

Ericson2314 1mo ago

If your task has incremental rewards/feedback, you can push the "intelligence rate" simply by sampling the reward function faster. That's not fake, even if it not a substitute either. This is the "dumber but honest person that works harder" phenomenon, vs "lazy genius".

gf000 1mo ago
That's a good way to put it, but still my experience is that worse code bases are non-linearly harder to maintain and improve in the future, software tends to break down without a good enough base. Sure, in the future full rewrites and stuff like that will be just another "throw money at it" problem, but fundamentally software can get arbitrary complex and we barely know how to write large, maintainable code bases. Nonetheless, I think testing (and maybe proofs) will have its long-awaited time to shine, as being the "reward function".
- Ericson2314 1mo ago
  I totally agree with you on the first bit, but I also think that I am way better at deciding on how to refactor code bases than the LLM is. Right now, I put models in low thinking mode during my refactors and hate waiting. I would much rather have a faster model that that maybe was slightly stupider, and I would wait far less long between prompts where it needs my valuable input. Models that are dumb, but humble and fast, can be fine.

momojo 1mo ago

I don't have a great answer but you pose a great question. Obviously a CTO is not going to walk away from the technology just because it's not good enough. That much more incentive for someone to create a powerful enough harness that can direct that power safely and productively. Like a nuclear core, we'll need to come up with the graphite rods and water tank. And if tokens are essentially free, why not, for every million tokens, spend 10x tokens on code review, testing, etc?

manmal 1mo ago
I do spend 5x more tokens on planning and reviewing, than for implementation. But architecture is still nothing I can delegate.