And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent?

Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encountered managers that think like this before. "We don't need expensive, brilliant, developers, we just need good processes for the cheap inexperienced developers to follow." I think what keeps this idea alive is that it sort of works for simple CRUD apps and other essentially "solved" problems. At least until the app needs to become more than just a simple CRUD app

For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing. You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future, that was sci-fi, it was awesome.

But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only time people use voice controls is when they can't use other controls, i.e. while driving. Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. There's a reason every society on the planet shifted from primarily phone calls to texting once the technology was available!

It's similar with vibe coding. People like Yegge are extremely bought into the idea of being a hyperpowered coder, sitting in a dimly lit basement in front of 8 computer screens, commanding an army of agents with English, sipping coffee between barking out orders. "Agent 1, refactor that method to be more efficient. Agent 5, tighten up the graphics on level 3!"

Whether or not it's effective or better than regular software development is secondary, if it's a concern at all. The purpose is the process. It's the future. It's sci-fi. It's awesome.

AI is an incredible tool and we're still discovering the right way to use it, but boy, "Gas Town" is not it.

I'm not sure its even that, his description of his role in this is:

"You are a Product Manager, and Gas Town is an Idea Compiler. You just make up features, design them, file the implementation plans, and then sling the work around to your polecats and crew. Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is to make tasks for it. That’s it."

And he says he isn't reviewing the code, he lets agents review each others code from look of it. I am interested to see the specs/feature definitions he's giving them, that seems to be one interesting part of his flow.

"I implemented a formula for Jeffrey Emanuel’s “Rule of Five”, which is the observation that if you make an LLM review something five times, with different focus areas each time though, it generates superior outcomes and artifacts. So you can take any workflow, cook it with the Rule of Five, and it will make each step get reviewed 4 times (the implementation counts as the first review)."

And I guess more generally, there is a level of non-determinism in there anyway.

Rich people use voice because they have disposable income and they don't care if a flight is $800 or $4,000. They are likely buying business/first class anyways.

Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights.

The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't have enough fuck-you-money to not care for prices.

> Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights.

Delegating to a human isn't the same as using a voice assistant, this should be obvious, unless you believe that managers are doing all the real work and every IC is a brainless minion. Maybe far in the future when there's AGI, but certainly not today.

> The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't have enough fuck-you-money to not care for prices.

You can order crap off Amazon for the same price as you would through the website with your Alexa right now, but Amazon themselves have admitted approximately 0% of people actually do this which is why the entire division ended up a minor disaster. It's just a shitty interface in the same way that booking a flight through voice is a shitty interface.

"In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks"

Its up to you to decide how to behave, but I can't see any reasons to completely dismiss this. It ends with good guidance what to do if you can't replicate though.

When the bubble has burst in a few years, the managers will have moved on to the next fad.

In terms of prototyping, I can see the benefits but they're negated by the absurd amount of work it takes to get the code into more maintainable form.

I guess you can just do really heavy review throughout, but then you lose a lot of the speed gains.

That being said, putting a textual interface over everything is super cool, and will definitely have large downstream impacts, but probably not enough to justify all the spending.

LLMs are not simple deterministic machines that automate rote tasks like computers or compilers. People, please stop believing and repeating that they are the next level of abstraction and automation. They aren't.

That reads like mission statement of HN.

"Project the need 30 years out and imagine what might be possible in the context of the exponential curves"

-- Alan Kay

And th Alan Kay quote is great but does not apply here at all? I'm pointing out how silly it is to compare LLMs to compilers. That's all.

Or by using a managed language with dynamic compiler (aka JIT) and GC. They are also not deterministic when executed, and what outcome gets produced, it is all based on heuristics and measured probabilities.

Yes, the quote does apply because many cannot grasp the idea of how technology looks beyond today.

You are quite right; the former is probabilistic while the latter is not.

To paraphrase Babbage;

"I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a [comparison]."

Are you also from the US like the other commenter on this sub-thread?

I guess that since it was a foreign word the physical connotation of the term was simply lost, and "a floppy" was just the disk that your computer used.

Seriously? If these were open source tools that anyone could run on their home PC that statement would make sense, but that's not what we are talking about here. LLMs are tools that cost massive amounts of money to operate, apparently. The tool goes away if the money goes away. Fossil fuels revolutionized the world, but only because the cost benefit made sense (at least in the relative short-term).