I do miss programming instead of reading code. But I enjoy designing and picking languages and tools. For me AI has been great (so far): I revived old projects and came up with new ones, including branching to hardware products. This would have never been achievable without AI. Not because a lack of skill. I'm sure I could have picked any of the projects and see it through. But I wouldn't have, because the time and effort wouldn't have justified the result. And I would never have been able to do so many of them. I would have needed to pick one, pour many, many hours of work into it and all the other things would need to wait. So I could have done a fraction, but in reality I would have hardly done any. So for me it's enabling.
Very impressive, and a lot more work than it looks from the outside (the DAgger loop especially). I built something similar in June, vibeSH, a shell that hallucinates the whole computer, but from the other direction: no training, just a frontier model and a long prompt, so maybe the comparison is useful.
The granularity is different though. You model keypresses and predict which rows change, I batch keystrokes and have the model repaint the whole screen each round trip. Non interactive cli programs work very good, but interactive cli programs like vim, less and top do work, but it feels like SSH over a 1996 modem, you type a burst, wait, and the screen catches up. Yours is going to be a lot more responsive at that.
The big model buys consistency, for as long as the session fits in the context window. Files come back the way you wrote them, python output is usually right instead of guessed, nested paths stay where they are. The price is an API call per round trip and a cost that grows with the session (and it's not 208 MB and doesnt run offline).
Mine offers an @ai prefix that talks to the director instead of the machine, so mid-session you can say "@ai make this a haunted Solaris machine from 1996" and the filesystem, the motd and the error messages all change to match, and the directives stick.
Your hardest problem and mine are the same one I think. For you it's a 360M model losing track of state, for me it's the context window filling up, after which the box gets amnesia and old files have quietly rewritten themselves. I decided early not to fight that completely and made it canon (the box has bad memory), your DAgger setup is an actual fix for it, which I don't have.
GHCi is super useful for quick checks (is `round 3.5` 3 or 4, what is `(-9) div 2`, what's the type of `(.) . (.)`, ...). But its slow to start and a huge install. rhci is a small version of GHCi that exactly matches GHCi semantics.
rhci runs standalone on on x86 and ARM on Linux, Windows, macOS and the BSDs via a cosmopolitan compiled mruby. Or anywhere CRuby runs via a single .rb file.
While GUIs have some legitimate use cases, I prefer TUIs if I can get away with it. Its just text, ssh friendly, constraint in a beautiful way that still allows endless possibilities.
What do you mean with "became bad"? It started out with a 140 characters limit in 2006 and kept that for more than 10 years. So its the other way around: it became worse, when the character limit increased. Though I don't think its due to the character limit either way.
It was bad long before they increased the character limit.
Saying shitty/toxic stuff can be done concisely. Giving a nuanced response is simply not possible. So people respond with jokes/sarcasm/counter toxic stuff. And the cycle continues.
I always did this on all my projects. Until I switched my approach and forced myself to do it the other way around: do the thing first and improve the workflow late. Better to do something annoying one time too often before improving the workflow, than to only improve the workflow and not do the thing.
I'm still a little worried that I'll stop posting on my blog soon, but it's actually been going better than expected. Rooting for Ben to keep posting.
For the longest time I was completely at a lost for how I was able to complete stuff for my employers but when I decided to do something I could never finish it...
Now I think that a big part of it is that my employers couldn't care less about "how the sausage is made" and were solely focused on results, at least that has been the case with some fantastic project managers I've had.
> do the thing first and improve the workflow later
It's not that I couldn't have. I wouldn't have.
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