Notices by Jason Gorman (jasongorman@mastodon.cloud)

Recorded history be like...

Neighbour 1: "My grass needs cutting"

Neighbour 2: "I have a goat who will eat that grass. I see you have apples. Let's do a deal."

Dude In the Castle: "What's in this for me?"

Neighbours 1 & 2: "Er. Nothing"

Castle Dude: "My insane friend will burn your houses down"

"At the end of the day, Jason, LLMs are just like a compiler. Do you write everything in machine code?"

I suspect I would if the compiler got it wrong 30% of the time.

Seeing posts from managers complaining their devs have given up on "A.I." coding assistants. "They must be using it wrong. Do they need training?"

At some point, we may have to admit there's no way to get a tune out of a ham sandwich. And it's not because we haven't had ham sandwich training.

@skinnylatte I remember being really taken aback by a girlfriend from NY when she talked about homeless people. In every other respect, she was liberal. But on that subject, really very right wing. And this was 35 years ago.

"Hoorah! We don't need those pesky software developers anymore". Really?

Pause to consider how you'll fare in competition against people who actually know what they're doing.

You might also pause to consider that *when* you need a developer's help, they might not be so keen on cleaning up your vibe-coded mess as a career move.

And, since employers haven't been hiring and training new developers for 3 years, that skillset could be about to get much more expensive.

Why do I believe LLMs are about as reliable as they're going to get? Physics, my dear chums. Physics.

"For the case of α=0.1, reducing the error by a factor of 10 requires the allocation of ten billion more compute resources. And, if we focus on the power consumption itself, the exponent is 0.05, meaning an astronomical 10^20 more computing power for just one order better in accuracy."

https://arxiv.org/html/2507.19703v1

LLMs are a dead end. Not reliable enough for most use cases, and never likely to be much more reliable.

A human with expertise will always be required to instruct and monitor the work. And, as we're seeing, the productivity gains just seem to evaporate when they're actually measured because these models tend to create more downstream work than they save us.

The best summary of "prompt engineering" I've seen so far.

"We couldn't think of a way to add value, so we took value away and you'll have to pay extra to get it back."

We live in an age where "premium" means "Not deliberately shit". What a time to be alive.

I've just invented Vibe Managing, and I confidently predict that 6 months from now software engineers won't need managers anymore.

When I see posts on social media complaining about the reliability of LLMs in generating code, there are 2 distinct kinds of replies from the "A.I." boosters that amount to:

* "You must be throwing the dice wrong."

* "Are you using the latest dice?"

They are never accompanied by a demonstration of the "right way".

Comprehension Debt: the time it will take developers to understand code they didn't write when they have to change it or fix it.

Perhaps the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that technological civilisations use up all their planet's resources trying to make an intrinsically unreliable technology reliable enough to answer sales queries.

The solution to poverty is money.

The solution to hunger is food.

The solution to homelessness is homes.

The solution to illness is healthcare.

The solution to conflict is dialogue.

We don't need a fucking chatbot to solve these problems for us.

This is the best summary of "A.I." LinkedIn ever.

LLMs aren't linters, folks. They report imaginary problems, sometimes in imaginary code, and they miss *tonnes* of problems.

I'm not at all convinced that vibe-coding doesn't crap out after a few hours, TBH.

Hypothesis: we *know* that vibe-coding craps out at scale, and they can reach that scale within a few weeks at the latest.

Therefore, if the claims are true, and thousands of vibe-coded products are being launched every day, why isn't my phone ringing off the hook with desperate founders stuck out at sea on rapidly sinking homemade rafts?

I think they might not actually exist.

I think the people claiming they're vibe-coding real products are actually just touting for business as "AI experts"