As much as my first gut reaction to this article was to be excited about its conclusion, I can’t say my experience matches up. Are LLMs perfect? Absolutely not, but I can point to many examples in my own work where using Codex has saved me easily a week or more—especially when it comes to tedious refactors. I don’t agree with the conclusion; the real-world improvement and progress I’ve seen in the last year in the problem-solving quality of these agents has been pretty astounding.
The reason for my excitement about the conclusion is obvious: I want programmers and people to stay in demand. I find the AI future to be quite bleak if this tech really does lead to AGI, but maybe that’s just me. I think we’re at a pretty cool spot with this technology right now—where it’s a powerful tool—but at some point, if or when it’s way smarter than you or me… I'm not sure that's a fun happy future. I think work is pretty tied to our self worth as humans.
Sure thing. I work on a few projects for my company. The main one is an Android and iOS audiobook-media-player app. I had to update the Android side to use the Google Media3 library instead of the legacy ExoPlayer library. In a typical app this would be pretty straightforward, but we’ve mixed in a lot of custom elements that made the transition quite challenging. I actually attempted it manually back in the day and probably spent three or four days on it, but I simply didn’t have time to finish, so I shelved it. A few months ago I tried again in Codex; within two prompts it was done flawlessly and starting from the beginning.
Another example: I also maintain the back-end API for these apps. There was a lot of old utility code that was messy, unorganized, and frankly gross. I had Codex completely reorganize the code into a sensible folder structure and strip out any functions that weren’t being used anymore—something like 300-plus functions. Doing that by hand would easily have taken a day or more
I could go on, but those were the two initial “aha” moments that showed me how powerful this tool can be when it’s used for the right tasks.
Not the OP but I just got done with a codebase-wide re-architecture (driven by a need for a complex data migration) in a little ~2.5 weeks. 800+ files changed, 60k+ line diff.
Without AI it would have taken me several months, and that is only if I managed to avoid burnout. The vendor quotes we got just to see if we could outsource the work were all six figures.
Ya migrated about 50% of a code base to a new architecture from a legacy architecture. I've seen a massive speed improvement in my app since doing this and significantly less bugs. The code base is probably on the order of 150,000 lines of code or so. This refactor took about a week with AI... this would have taken easily a month or more if I did this myself. I also had AI write me a bunch of tests that never before existed in this codebase. Obviously these tests aren't perfect, but neither would mine be if I wrote them by hand.
> Any decent IDE can do that refactoring instantly.
its an interesting point that got me thinking: at what point does all of this just boil down to dev ux/ide features, and does this need to run on the server (as economic rents) vs just locally?
> Any decent IDE can do that refactoring instantly.
The refactoring? Sure. But IDEs don't read your code and logically categorize it into folders. From what I understand, they are saying that they outsourced the thinking part as well.
Ya that’s a solid point. Though many startups give their employees equity options… so you have to factor that in too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since many people that join startups are looking for a totally different energy than a large corporation, so it seems reasonable that there’d be a big drop off of that talent as soon as it gets acquired… especially if the vision is not aligned
It’s unclear to me from the article if these volumes had never been discovered before or if the editions of these volumes are unique? Meaning are there wholly unique stories that have been discovered?
Disney only adapted a single Grimm tale, Snow White, in 1937.
Other Disney fairy tale moves were based on other sources like Charles Perrault (Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty). Grimm also have variants of these tales, but they are significantly different.
Well the Brothers Grimm themselves let politics ruin the good stories, e.g by removing sex and turning evil mothers into evil stepmothers.
It is probabaly unavoidable that a retelling of a folktale will reflect the biases of the storyteller. It is just that politics which align with ones own tend to be invisible. Like when having a black stormtrooper is considered political but a white isn’t.
Do me a favor. Go back and rewatch Dumbo (1941) and prepare a few thoughts regarding its treatment of hot-button issues like miscegenation (hint: what kind of elephant has big ears?). Then, comment again on Disney’s recent discovery of “politics.”
That is an absurd level of reading things into a work. Unless you have actual primary sources which say that's what they intended, I'm calling bullshit.
Look, the other elephants start out the stork delivery scene declaring they’re part of “a proud race” and end it gossiping about “what would Mr. Jumbo think?!?” and “Jumbo? More like dumbo…”
We also see what happens to certain black men in the world, during “Song of the Roustabouts” (“when other folks have gone to bed / we slave until we’re almost dead,” “boss man hounding / keep on pounding / ‘grab that rope you hairy ape’”)
Afterwards we see the cruel and arbitrary nature of those who mock the poor kid, contrasted to the universal experience of family (“Baby mine don’t you cry”). Eventually the kid ends up with a bunch of (black) crows, including one Mr. “Jim Crow,” who make fun of him, before his buddy from Brooklyn calls them out on how people make fun of them for being different too, and they feel real bad; after finding friendship there, he earns social acceptance for his athletic feats (flight) and later through participation in the armed forces (“Dum-bombers for victory!!” read the newspapers.)
You sayin’ that this isn’t about race at all, and the whole storyline is just a coinkydink? Ha! Tell me another one. Disney’s been at this stuff for longer than your parents have been alive.
For a good introduction to the problematic social and political content of many Disney films - Dumbo definitely included - I highly recommend Lindsay Ellis' video "Woke Disney" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU1ffHa47YY
Speaking of that, there ought to be a streaming service that uses bittorrent and has only old, public domain movies on it. Like popcorntime, but with only legal stuff on it. Internet archive just isn't the same.
They mention the prints are unique and presumably the footnotes they found are ... but I agree, the question of content is surprisingly not mentioned at all.
Really interesting read. I’ve had this exact thought but not in a well defined sentence before. Especially regarding entities like turboTax or DoT (Departments of Transportation) where they will expand highways even though it’s a well known empirical fact that this typically causes induced demand or more traffic.
It’s really nice to have such a well defined principle to this idea.
Ya honestly that’s a great question. I think more public awareness would be helpful and pressure on state representatives. But honestly you see where it can go badly wrong in Austin TX. A majority (as far as I’m aware) are against the DoT highway expansion and have proposed alternative plans for light rail… but the DoT has over ridden this majority and gone ahead with the highway expansion anyway.
Maybe if the engineers that work on these projects are skilled in planning rail projects too… there’d be less myopic focus on roads. Just a thought.
I don't understand how people perpetuate that induced demand stuff. It absolutely falls apart if you think about it at all. So we shouldn't expand highways because it "induces demand/traffic"? So all of our cities and states should have kept their original one lane dirt roads and never improved on them, because expanding the dirt lanes would have induced demand and caused more traffic? Our transportation system would have been better / more effective with a couple of dirt roads and never expanding? It doesn't even remotely make sense.
I think the argument of induced demand is not so much we should never build or expand road infrastructure, that’s obviously asinine, but rather we should consider alternative transportation investments. Rail, dedicated bus lanes etc all increase rider density dramatically over cars. Induced demand will happen regardless of the mode of transport, but cars allow for an extremely low ridership density per lane. That’s really the point being made.
And if you look at the economics of road infrastructure it’s far inferior to other modes when you look at raw cost per person who can and will use it.
Lastly from an environmental, and safety perspective there are several other modes of transport that are far superior
I find it a bit disheartening that the new wave of “open source” with regards to AI is open weights. That’s like giving someone compiled and obfuscated binaries and saying that’s open source.
I generally agree with this. And so much of modern dev… especially in the app/web dev space is just pattern recognition and hooking up different systems to each other. That’s not to discount its difficulty… but you can be good at several disciplines. I actually think being a generalist (to some degree) can actually be helpful, because it allows you to think in multiple modalities, where as someone who specializes in something is less likely to be able to break out of their thought patterns.
> I actually think being a generalist (to some degree) can actually be helpful, because it allows you to think in multiple modalities, where as someone who specializes in something is less likely to be able to break out of their thought patterns.
GP mentioned the two-part "jack of all trades", but there's a relatively modern third part to it that expresses this sentiment: "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one"
Agreed. Additionally taxation in our modern Fiat currencies is a farce, since the central banks can literally take as much buying power as they want from you. Taxation is literally just an illusion to make you feel like you are directly paying for government services.The real taxation is inflation.
Really interesting read. Thanks for posting. Pretty sad how many people seem to not have enough close friends, but it is understandable the more self isolated and individualistic our culture gets.
The reason for my excitement about the conclusion is obvious: I want programmers and people to stay in demand. I find the AI future to be quite bleak if this tech really does lead to AGI, but maybe that’s just me. I think we’re at a pretty cool spot with this technology right now—where it’s a powerful tool—but at some point, if or when it’s way smarter than you or me… I'm not sure that's a fun happy future. I think work is pretty tied to our self worth as humans.