2 comments

  • nvch 20 minutes ago

    I’ll tell the missing part, what comes next: the team, with teammates and managers, starts making their product decisions. If the user was anywhere near the chat and wrote a mere “ok”, they will be recorded as “user's”.

    They will write tests. Lots of tests. Instead of removing any code, there will be 3 layers of backward compatibility, and tests that test presence of tests that test that backward compatibility.

    The reviews will find all possible edge cases, including those that can never happen, and make the UI gracefully handle them. With tests.

    The diff from any integration PR from team work will be over 10K lines, half of them bureaucracy. Zero chance to review even one – they will churn half-a-dozen per day.

    For anything outside of known shape, the original hard topics become quickly displaced with shortcuts and familiar patterns.

    Next, the app will break under load, and you will find that it’s caused by a quadratic sweep over the whole DB on any insert to prevent something irrelevant that you specifically told not to do.

    You will ask, “wtf? why is it there?”. “It’s load-bearing, you ruled it”.

    (That's not a joke. That's how I spent the summer.)

    • traktorn 4 minutes ago

      Lol, this was my summer too!

      I tried this approach and the agents just built tons of tests. The Agent in Charge ordered more and more tests. After two weeks it reported finished” and the end product was completely unusable.

      I really hope future models will do a better job at this. As it works be useful (if it worked).

    • simianwords 56 minutes ago

      Bitter lesson means all these tricks will not be needed in a year or two. Either labs will abstract it in harness or models will become good enough that it can do it by itself

      • normie3000 45 minutes ago

        So we should just ignore?

        • dannyw 23 minutes ago

          If you’re using models today, it’s worth it.

          Yes it’ll eventually get built into the harness/model/interface; just like how “work it out step by step” became thinking, but if you have work to do today, it can be worth trying to improve it.