> There are no virtuous participants in the artificial intelligence race

A bit of an insulting way to start the article.

Plenty of researchers and smaller companies would disagree, but they won't get articles written about them because they're not embroiled in DOW killbot drama.

We might not be in this situation if all of this money was given to them instead.

In a similar vein, a shout out to all my software homies out there who are just trying to fix data entry input field bugs instead of constructing the Torment Nexus.

This is a very well thought out prompt, the kind I wish engineers were writing.

I would not be surprised if you feed this into the latest builders and you'll get an acceptable app out of it.

I wonder why the author hasn't done this.

The president said they should cancel the elections.

If you go to https://www.war.gov/ it says Department of War. The person in charge calls himself the Secretary of War. Warfighters are being sent into Iran. Presumably to engage in warfare. People are gonna die.

What's cosmetic about this?

Agree, essentially the Department of War is the Department of Defense with a little less makeup.

It's cosmetic because it is business as usual.

And the DoW was the original name from 1789 to 1947.

I think it won't be too different once we see a few upgrades that are going to be required for reliability (and scaling up the AI assisted engineering process):

  - deterministic agents, where the model guarantees the same output with a seed
  - much faster coding agents, which will allow us to "compile" or "execute" natural language without noticing the llm
  - maybe just running the whole thing locally so privacy and reliability are not an issue

We're not there yet, but once we have that then I agree there won't be too much of a difference between using a high level language and plain text.

There's going to be a massive shift in programming education though, because knowing an actual programming language won't matter any more than knowing assembly does today.

> The engineer who pauses to deeply understand what they built falls behind in velocity metrics.

This is the most insidious part. It's not even that bad code gets deployed. That can be fixed and hopefully (by definition) the market weeds that out.

The problem is that the market doesn't seem to operate like that, and instead the engineer who cares loses their job because they're not hitting the metrics.

Of course, there are counter examples but there's a disconnect between the production of something and the selling of it with almost opposing goals. Given unlimited money and time, many engineers, arts, etc will write and rewrite something to perfection. Constraints are needed because the world doesn't operate in a vacuum and unless we all live in a utopia, we have to compete for customers and resources.

Constraints often result in better results. Think of Duke Nukem Forever and how long it took them to release a nothingburger.

I just watched a show called the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and the showerunners were given a limited budget compared to their cousin shows and it resulted in a better product.

Sometimes those metrics keep things on the rails

> Given unlimited money and time, many engineers, arts, etc will write and rewrite something to perfection

This is a common trope, but in my experience many engineers I met know that's not how a business runs. Dealing with the constraints and weighing them out is one of the essential skills of any engineer. Knowing when a product is just good enough is one of the things that make you senior.

The usual person that believe in the trope is the one that wants something with short-term budget, but with long-term quality. Lot of engineers know the triangle of budget-scope-time. But a lot of managers want to have the cake and eat it too. When they ask to reduce time and the budget and the engineer ask what to reduce in the scope, they get all vague and shifty.

Honestly though, would it help if those in charge voiced their honest opinions?

The current political climate is this is the kind of thing that will get you "investigated" and charged with crimes.

And the government has already threatened that it will commandeer these companies whether they like it or not.

If someone in charge wants to make a difference, there might be more effective things to do than to speak out in this instance.

Yes, it would help so much. Especially if a lot of people with money and power voiced their honest opinions at the same time.

The logic used in the treats is that it's a national security risk to not use Claude, but it's also a national security risk to use Claude.

We shouldn't expect these people to consider how the logic breaks down one step ahead when it never made sense in the first place.

Remember to vote in this year's midterms (Nov 3) if you're eligible. I don't think it's off-topic.

Keep in mind this forced parental control system in the OS is supposedly because of app stores.

So we're already pretty deep in the law deciding what shape of computing you're allowed to do. What makes you think it will stop here?