In its current incarnation, superlogical is exactly the same as the new herdr, with the same gaps. A TUI does not appear in their backlog either. They are a native app.
Yes, but Rex is built on libghostty with the multiplexing and agent integration built in, built by people I trust who don’t let the LLM write all their docs.
These days, I constantly find myself filled with a kind of techno-dysphoria, where not only do I not want to use the tech in the way it’s being packaged/sold, but I’m filled with dread and disgust by the idea of people who do so breathlessly anticipate and proselytize its arrival.
The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.
Thank you! This is a huge sticking point for me. There is no knowing the code without experiencing the code. If nothing else, you have to read the tests to know they verify what you think they do. Even then, you might know it does what you want, but can’t know it doesn’t do anything it shouldn’t.
This is a wildly online take. Humans highly value authenticity and many professional writers still write their first draft with a pen or pencil.
David Foster Wallace famously described writing with a pen and paper instead of a word processor because it forced him to slow down enough to think deeply, which I find very relevant to this whole debate.
There is no substitute for slow thinking. Your brain can’t really “move up the stack” until you understand the layer you’re on. All abstractions paper over important details. All shortcuts are cut short. You cannot produce quality writing without doing the slow, dlaborious work of choosing your own words.
I think devs and people on HN way overestimate how much the average person knows about or cares about or desires to interact with a computer. Whatever the job becomes, if you like talking to the computer and know how to get it to do anything besides show an email or youtube, you’re ahead of the curve and can likely stay there.
I think you are underestimating. Before this was true, but school curriculum for computing has changed a lot over the past decade and they now teach Scratch at primary schools and Python in middle school. This was pushed by Bill Gates and other people in tech who told everyone that there is a shortage and anyone can learn to code. I would find it strange if someone by age 16 has never programmed before. Obviously having done programming and being good are two different things but the field has become saturated at an entry level at least.
Many people in the field now aren't nerds anymore either but people who are just incentivised by financial prospects.
Sure the kids get "exposure" to Scratch but they're not really teaching it. It's not like the teachers are programmers. They just let the kids make little scrapbooks. It took me to show my kids triggers, messages, and loops.
I went back to college to switch careers. We all had to take a class to learn what a folder is and how to save a file because a lot of today's youth doesn't know this.
I waffle on this a lot but I come down on this side more often than not. Similar to “Everyone has a kitchen but people still go out to eat”-type thinking.
Yes, as the cost to build falls, teams may shrink or businesses might just choose to get more done (don’t we all have ever-growing backlogs?). Additionally, companies that couldn’t afford a team of developers might be able to afford one developer assisted with AI, or a company that could only afford one or two developers can now operate at a much higher level.
The same way indie developers have always outmaneuvered larger companies. A number of my favorite apps are built by a single developer (Overcast, Callsheet, Carrot, Widgetsmith, Octal) or small teams focused on building a good product. Caring. That might seem simplistic and it's not to say no one working at a larger company cares, that's clearly not true, but there is an attention to detail and craftsmanship, not to mention soul, I find lacking in most software produced by larger companies.
I have a product that competes (or rather they compete with me? I was "first to market" for all that matters) with a product produced by a company (no clue the size, but I'm 1 person, they seem to employ multiple people). I think my product is better because I "Sweat the small stuff" and spend more time working on improving the experience than they do.
Perhaps I'm delusional. Maybe people think their product is better but the people who have switched don't seem to think so. I don't solicit information about them from their previous clients but I've heard enough "This is so much easier/clearer" or "That's it? The old tool required XYZ!" to believe it.
I think there are two different kinds of "winning" here. One is to be the biggest there is, and we see a lot of examples of that. More, more, more. Gigantic headcounts. Think Google now.
And we have countless examples of that working. Small company invents a neat thing, big company sees that, allocates 10x the resources on it, and small company is lost.
But we also see that that titanic companies are difficult to maneuver, and a little speedboat team can end-around and run for the goal line. Think Google back then.
It would be as if everyone had a cook but it could only put out bland, generic, but nutritionally complete, meals. Some people would tweak their home-cook to produce more flavorful, exciting dishes. Others would buy templates/recipes from people who wanted to spend their time doing that. And others still would just go to a restaurant where the entire process is handled end-to-end.
I do love straining an analogy. :)
I'll grant you that your future is possible. If "searching" via LLM for a tool just offers to build it for you, I'm not sure what that does to the software market. But I have a feeling that even with more people "building" instead of "buying" there will always exist a majority of people who don't want to bother with "building". Heck, there are people in this industry that I would never call a "builder" and there are plenty of people across all industries that simply don't have the drive/interest/etc in building, even when it's easier. I bet if you grabbed someone from the dawn of computing and plopped them down just pre-LLM they would be amazed and flabbergasted "Why isn't everyone writing software custom for their needs?? It's SO much easier than it was when you had to learn punchcards! The web (how very interesting by the way!) offers free courses to learn programming that you can do on the device you carry in your pocket!".
It seems that no matter how easy we make programming, there will always be people willing to pay others to "manage" that process. See also: YouTube has videos for anything you might need to do home-maintenance-wise, and yet the trade jobs are in incredibly high demand [0]. Perhaps with LLM + cheap robotics + unlimited/cheap energy this changes but we are still 2 parts away from that and even today's LLMs are just starting to show fruit w.r.t. controlling robots.
[0] PS: If you are leaving tech, go into this. Respond to people's calls, even if you can't get there _today_, respond and put them on a schedule. Use your tech skills to help automate/manage this. I've considered this every time I've needed just about anything done and gone through the miserable process of getting ghosted by multiple people before finally getting someone out.
> It would be as if everyone had a cook but it could only put out bland, generic, but nutritionally complete, meals.
Bro, good engineering IS boring and it's supposed to be.
The whole reason that Software Engineering is not actually engineering is because the field is too young for there to be established, rigorous engineering codes that must be adhered to. Can you imagine if every bridge you went over or every elevator you rode in had been built with arbitrarily chosen technologies by uncertified "engineers" using the latest fad in engineering?
I think one of the outcomes of this great shift where most programming output is being produced by LLMs is that we're going to start seeing much more consistency across software implementations. It will be boring. And honestly that is probably going to be a good thing.
I agree the core logic should be boring, the user experience is another story.
There are a number of open source tools that have the same, on paper, features as a paid product. And yet the paid product still exists. Is it because Pixelmator Pro produces a better "blur" than GIMP? No, it's because Pixelmator Pro is more enjoyable to use, has a better user interface.
So yes, your auth/RPC/whatever should be incredibly boring, and now that LLMs can handle that aspect reliably we can focus (if we choose) on improving other aspects of the software and that will be the differentiating aspect.
I think you underestimate how many people would be willing to battle a computer if it meant doubling their salaries. Think of all the teachers with STEM degrees being paid $60k, if someone offered them $120k to prompt a computer for a while I'm sure many would come running.
The most passionate, intelligent people 1. aren’t spending a lot of time on smartphones, video games and crypto and 2. aren’t as much smarter or better at predicting the future as the barely above average people who mistakenly count themselves in their ranks like to think.
It has been generally agreed since at least Plato that it’s up to people making a positive assertion to present evidence, not up to skeptics to prove it’s not possible. N.B. Russell’s Teapot Analogy.
You have to prove it is/can be conscious, not the other way around.
The author is trying to positively assert that it’s impossible that AIs have consciousness.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find even the most ardent of AI proponents claiming AIs are _definitely_ conscious. They are almost always claiming something weaker, which is that it is possible.
"look these things are intelligent; they solve novel problems, have an incredible breadths of knowledge, can pass the turing test and in some fields perform to the standards of professionals."
"They can't be intelligent as they lack consciousness"
"Ok then how does intelligence require consciousness? What is consciousness? How could one prove that someone or something has consciousness?"
"That's on you."
No, no it is not. If consciousness is a prerequisite for intelligence or moral patience, then it is on the proponents to define exactly what that is and how to prove it.
On matters of moral patience especially, we should err on the side of caution, because the cost of getting it wrong is catastrophic.
The original article said that not having a consciousness makes the AI model uncapable of intelligent judgment, so in this case it's fair to ask those who are asserting such connection to prove their point.
That is not the argument. The argument isn't "AI is impossible", it's "the thing you call AI doesn't actually have intelligence." Of course we can't explain what intelligence is, but neither can you, so the impasse is where the advocates say "intelligence is what this weird annoying thing we made does" and everybody else says "no it isn't, that's no kind of explanation".
I feel like the AI debate is our last best chance to agree that human values are more important and have higher long-term utility (to humans) than pure financial maximization. I think it’s very very likely that money does not capture or convert to a large subset of morally good choices we can and should make to be happy.
I can’t tell if you’re defending this as good or just hypothesizing about the underlying cause but “appeal to nature” is one of the many freshman-level logical fallacies that seem ubiquitous in AI hype circles. Just because it’s what our animal brains do, doesn’t mean it’s going to be good or advantageous to our current evolutionary context.
Our energy conservation system also encourages us to eat as much high fat, high sugar food as we can get down our gullets, but that turns out to be a big problem for modern humans.
The blasé attitude with which people talk about “moving up the stack” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s the right thing to do or even an accurate description of what’s happening is easily one of the most disheartening aspects of this whole movement.
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