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Comment on Prediction: AI Will Collapse

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The actual post doesn't really match the title, unless we're talking about AI stocks, which it didn't go into much.

The real point is that AI agents, for people rather than for coders, must be 100% bulletproof. As the post said, people have to be able to use them while drunk. They have to be able to use them while distracted.

Coding agents? The users are, presumably, both sober and paying attention. The general public? They won't be.

The real point is that AI agents, for people rather than for coders, must be 100% bulletproof

Seems wrong. Nothing is 100% bulletproof. We'll just adapt our social structures to deal with agent mistakes the same way we deal with human mistakes.

Exactly this. The point of human management is not to do subordinates' jobs, rather to ensure that subordinates are performing their jobs to some standard of adequacy.

Yes, I don’t know where this frame came from. Humans adopt useful systems. Providers attempt to limit exposure to liability. Society will navigate the opposing pressures and fallout in differing ways according to local jurisprudence, customs, and norms. AI is just too damn useful (and fun for now).

Coding agents? The users are, presumably, both sober and paying attention.

This user is tired of clicking through to allow trivial commands to run, while being less and less engaged with the task at hand, but left with no alternative given the volume of changes others ram through.

That's the thing. I was once that guy who was meticulous about reviewing code and later making sure to approve every little change an agent wanted to make. But I mostly gave up because of the business demand to use AI to ram as many features through as fast as possible. I don't go full blown YOLO, but I do run agents in highly controlled VM instances and keep them fairly autonomous. Being asked questions or for permission every few minutes like the carpenter from that Seinfeld episode is a recipe for insanity.

You can take a more involved approach to AI assisted development. Work at the line/function completion level, rather than vibing inside a harness. Zed offers a lot of this style of development out of the box, and you can use Copilot inside VSCode for a similar experience, or use a regular harness inside a terminal pane in VSCode but discipline yourself to small, targeted edits. As a human you have the strongest right to be the loop. Be the orchestrator.

The users are, presumably, both sober

heh... the Ballmer Peak is still going strong, even with AI.

Now I wonder if my agent(s) can detect when I'm coding drunk.

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