Anecdotally,

In public transport I see almost as many people playing games on their phones as those watching videos.

Not necessarily. In go you often calculate the score and come up with a conclusion that by playing proper moves you will lose by a small margin.

So instead you launch a desperate maneuver in a hope to either turn the game around or lose by 30 points.

I see what you're saying; this is true for any game scored win/loss. Even gridiron football if you're down by 4 points with time almost out you won't kick a field goal (worth 3 points).

There are also objective measures for more fine position evaluation.

For winning/drawn positions: "What is the smallest program that can guarantee your side to win/draw" probably adding some time constraint.

I think program size is probably not a good measure since any heuristic you can put in could be discovered at runtime with a metaheuristic that searches for good heuristics. Time and memory make more sense.

Measuring the size of a model that produces a win?

Theoretically valid, but that's not going to be a very useful/diable.

No, but in practice centipawns reported by the imperfect engine are good.

But I want to point out that in theory there is also something more than pure win/ lose/ draw with prefect play.

That is a neat variation.

I think it's a bad analogy. For one - smoking does very high permanent damage to a car interior.

Two - the usage pattern was Shaun's toc but not obviously against the spirit.

More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want" And then going: Obviously I didn't mean driving to another coast on a highway

More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want so long as you don't drive to another coast on a highway" and then you drive to another coast on a highway and get mad when I won't give you my car next time.

No, it’s more like you have 10k km to drive in this car.

And then, after you actually drive it for 10k km on “unauthorized” highways, they ban you.

That’s why analogies are for fucking idiots. There is a true example — you bought access to use your account for n tokens, and google got pissy that you didn’t use the tokens in their spyware ecosystem.

For you analogy loving fucks, it’s like the arcades selling their proprietary 50 cent worth token coins, that only works on their machines, when they could just accept 50 cent coins.

Well, your premise is false because you do not actually buy access for a stated number of tokens. I used the analogy because you have trouble getting facts straight so indeed you fall into the category that you describe there.

They’re not banning for excessive use. They’re banning for use with unauthorized software. Big difference.

This exactly. I'm using 10% of my max plan on the weeks that I'm working a lot. Hit a 4-hour limit once over few months and never let it run overnight. And I'm very happy with my subscription

The ban hammer is the scary part.

I am afraid of using any Google services in experimental way from the fear that my whole Google existence will be banned.

I think blocking access temporarily with a warning would be much more suitable. Unblocking could be even conditioned on a request to pay for the abused tokens

No, it's more like stuffing your pockets in all-you-can-eat buffet

I don't know what is your bubble, but I'm a regular programmer and I'm absolutely excited even if a little uncomfortable. I know a lot of people who are the same.

Interesting, every developer I've spoken to is extremely skeptical and has not found any actual productivity boosts.

Ok that's not true. I know one junior who is very excited, but considering his regular code quality I would not put much weight on his opinion.

I am using AI a lot to do tasks that just would not get done because they would take too long. Also, getting it to iterate on a React web application meant I can think about what I want it to do rather than worry about all the typing I would have to do. Especially powerful when moving things around, hand-written code has a "mental load" to move that telling an AI to do it does not. Obviously not everything is 100% but this is the most productive I have felt for a very long time. And I've been in the game for 25 years.

Why do you need to move things around? And how is that difficult?

Surely you have an LSP in your editor and are able to use sed? I've never had moving files take more than fifteen minutes (for really big changes), and even then most of the time is spent thinking about where to move things.

LLM's have been reported to specifically make you "feel" productive without actually increasing your productivity.

I mean there are two different things. One is whether there are actual productivity boosts right now. And the second is the excitement about the technology.

I am definitely more productive. A lot of this productivity is wasted on stuff I probably shouldn't be writing anyways. But since using coding agent, I'm both more productive at my day job and I'm building so many small hobby projects that I would have never found time for otherwise.

But the main topic of discussion in this thread is the excitement about technology. And I have a bit mixed feelings, because on one hand side I feel like a turkey being excited for the Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I think the programming future is bright. there will be so much more software build and for a lot of that you will still need programmers.

My excitement comes from the fact that I can do so much more things that I wouldn't even think about being able to do a few months ago.

Just as an example, in last month I have used the agents to add features to the applications I'm using daily. Text editor, podcast application, Android keyboard. The agents were capable to fork, build, and implement a feature I asked for in a project where I have no idea about the technology. Iif I were hired to do those features, I would be happy if I implemented them after two weeks on the job. With an agent, I get tailor made features in half of a morning. Spending less than ten minutes prompting.

I am building educational games for my kids. They learn a new topic at school? Let me quickly vibe the game to make learning it fun. A project that wouldn't be worth my weekend, but is worth 15 minutes. https://kuboble.com/math/games/snake/index.html?mode=multipl...

So I'm excited because I think coding agents will be for coding what pencil and paper were for writing.

I don't understand the idea that you "could not think about implementing a feature".

I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer. Especially for the kinds of applications you mention.

Also it sounds less like you're productive and more like the vibeslop projects are distracting you.

I'm claiming it's both.

I produce more good (imo) production features despite being distracted.

The features I mention is something that I would be able to do, but only with a lot of learning and great effort - so in practical terms I would not.

It is probably a skill issue but in the past many times I downloaded the open source project and just couldn't build and run it. Cryptic build errors, figuring out dependencies. And I see claude gets the same errors but he just knows how to work around those errors. Setting up local development environment (db, dummy auth, dummy data) for a project outside of my competence area is already more work than I'm willing to do for a simple feature. Now it's free.

>I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer.

Yes. I'm my area of competence it can do the coding tasks I know exactly how to do just a bit faster. Right now for those tasks I'd say it can one shot code that would take me a day.

But it enables me to do things in the area where I don't have expertise. And getting this expertise is very expensive.

Out of interest, could you give me an example of a feature that it one-shotted that would have taken you a whole day?

The example from yesterday:

I have a large C# application. In this application I have a functionality to convert some group of settings into a tree model (a list of commands to generate this tree). There are a lot of weird settings and special cases.

I asked claude to extract this logic into a separate python module.

It succesfully one-shot that, and I would estimate it as 2 days work for me (and I wrote the original C# code).

This is probabaly the best possible kind of task for the coding agents, given that it's very well defined task with already existing testcases.

Seems reasonable, but if it's just copy pasting, doesn't seem like that would take you a whole day. Maybe on the order of an hour at most.

Were you exaggerating earlier or do you have more examples?

This is a two-day task for me. If you could do it in one hour, then you're a 10x programmer compared to me.

You can browse the code at <my_username>.com/slop/hn_tb/

I have also sloped the simple code viewer. So you can make your judgement if it looks like 1 hour task.

I think it's worth a read in current times of agentic models swarming the world.

It's the novel the whole biological life is wiped of Earth but the servers keep churming with (kind of) LLM agents. The LLMS find a way to keep their world going for centuries.

Basically a lot of use cases where you would hire a human without giving him access to your sensitive information.

From perfectly benign things like gathering chats from Discord servers to learn how your brand is perceived. To more nefarious things like creating swarms of fake people pushing your agenda.

build a personality that loves cats, gardening and knitting. Create accounts on discord, reddit and Twitter. participate in communities, upvote posts, comment sporadically in area of your expertise, once in a month casually mention the agenda.