I wonder if we could then have released the *stressor in a few months then...

I’d love to see someone try.

Though using AI to build the devtools we used for signal analysis would have been helpful.

My highlights were the Edward Ashton books « Mickey7 » and « Antimatter Blues » (sequel to the first).

Haven’t seen the movie adaptation yet but the books are such delightful dark humor SF, loved them

For a minute I was like (spoiler alert) « wow the creepy sci-fi theories from the DEVS tv show is taking place »… then I looked up the video and that’s just video generation at this point

That's where this is headed, though. That's the end game.

This should be interesting then: we’ll finally be able to assert whether time is deterministic and the future and past can be modelled/predicted (if you’ve seen the show you know what I mean)

I think that's actually already provably false if you're bloody-minded enough. I think the proof lies somewhere like Cantor's diagonalization but applied to reality, something like "if you could produce a model sufficiently complex enough to model the future perfectly it wouldn't fit into this current reality because it would require more than this reality's information"

I'm not saying it couldn't be locally violated, but it seems straightforward philosophically that each nesting doll of simulated reality must be imperfect by being less complicated.

Bighead is back! « Fart Alert »!

> As software engineers we…

That’s the thing. People exposing such rude behavior usually are not, or haven’t been in a looong time…

As for the local testing part not being performed, this is a slippery slope I’m fighting everyday: more and more cloud based services and platforms are used to deploy software to run with specific shenanigans and running it locally requires some kind of deep craft and understanding. Vendor lock-in is coming back in style (e.g. Databricks)

Yeah, I get frustrated by cloud-only systems that don't have a good local testing story.

The best solution I have for that is staging environments, ideally including isolated-from-production environments you can run automated tests against.

Whenever I have to work with such systems, is usually when I do have to write an interface and have a mock implementation. Iteration is much faster when I don’t have to worry about getting the correct state from something I don’t have control over.

Yeah that’s what I do also when I have to (and it can be done, not everytime).

But it requires some advanced local testing setup and knowledge to do so, hence my initial remark on this type of developers not being real professionals in the first place…

> I also think it takes a lot of the fun out of the whole thing.

I used to say that implementation does not matter, tests should be your main focus. Now I treat every bit of code I wrote with my bare hands like a candy, agents have sucked the joy out of building things

Can we also take into account the mental cost associates with building software? Because how I see it, managing output from agents is way more exhausting than doing it ourself.

And obviously the cost of not upskilling in intricate technical details as much as before (aka staying at the high level perspective) will have to be paid at some point

It is pretty hard work huh! I was surprised. In my case, I was doing a personal project but in the end I felt a little crispy although the result was succesful.

Honestly now I only use agents for very narrow surgical scopes to avoid feeling numbed. It removed the fun of actually dreaming and building things

If only for the initiative driving the work behind delta-rs, I’d say it was well worth it!

> We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). We don't need a digital god. We just need software that works.

Yeah, I think the days of working software are over (at least deterministically)

Matches my experience also. Bothered only once to setup a proper CLAUDE.md file, and now never do it. Simply refering to the context properly for surgical recommendations and edit works relatively well.

It feels a lot like bikeshedding to me, maybe I’m wrong