Too little, too late. In fact, in this post they seem to be committing to keeping it as bad (or even making it even worse) for my use case.
I've used Windows since 3.1. Win 11 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I moved to CachyOS a few months ago and I honestly can't find a reason to switch back.
Most people write badly. Much of the text on the public Internet is written by professional writers, who tend to write less badly.
When people use LLMs to generate text, they often ask it to write like a professional. (I haven't tried, but I assume that if you ask an LLM to write like a Reddit troll it will use a different set of forms.)
When you ask an LLM to write like a professional writer, it will aim to sound like a professional writer. They do in fact, and in speech, use words like "delve" and "robust" because they spend years cultivating their vocabularies.
Professional writers are comfortable with punctuation marks and know the difference between the em dash and the en dash, and when to use each versus other marks. (The typical non-professional cannot manage to use the apostrophe, much less the marks that require judgement.)
And a lot of them end up writing business content at some point in their careers. Which leads to an interesting mash where you may get "leverage" used as a verb alongside some of the other pattern tropes.
Because business writing is its own universe. LinkedIn has been swimming in content that would be flagged as LLM-generated for at least 10 years, long before ChatGPT landed.
I asked ChatGPT about that and it gave a nicely reasoned explanation on what AI produces compared to humans.
But that being said, the problem I think is that people treat the output from LLMs as final.
It should be treated more as idea generation or early draft to get over the “staring at a blank page” and get the creative juices flowing and creating your own content.
Having purely AI generated content and eventually feeding the algorithms and soon enough every sounds the same (already does in a lot of places).
Writing like this (say a technical blogpost) is supposed to communicate ideas effectively. Rhetoric, vocabulary, metaphors all aid this communication in good writing.
But the prompt is usually bereft of fully fleshed out ideas, so the LLM substitutes style in a futile attempt to amplify the signal.
Though maybe it’s not futile! HN voters eat this stuff up daily.
Generally, the more you write (and especially, the more you write long form content), the better your writing becomes. This also goes in reverse. Those who have great trouble writing, are unlikely to do much of it.
This alone can account for the seeming disparity. Though many people write poorly, they do not write much text for public consumption at all.
Most humans don’t, but maybe “most humans” do? As in, on average, as a collective, regressed to the mean of mediocrity and devoid of personality, we write like this? It’s not self-deprecating, it’s humbling.
Base models don't write like that. This appears during RLHF. It's not totally clear why*, but probably a large part of the answer is that this style looks great to human reviewers, and only starts looking terrible once you get to play around with the released model and realise it talks like that all the time.
* The technical term is "mode collapse", see [1][2]
I'm roughly the same (started at 9, currently 48), but programming hasn't really changed for me. What's changed is me having to have pointless arguments with people who obviously have no clue what they're talking about but feel qualified either because:
a) They asked an LLM
b) "This is what all our competitors are doing"
c) They saw a video on Youtube by some big influencer
d) [...insert any other absurd reason...]
True story:
In one of our recent Enterprise Architecture meetings, I was lamenting the lack of a plan to deal with our massive tech debt, and used an example of a 5000 line regulatory reporting stored procedure written 10 years ago that noone understood. I was told my complaint was irrelevant because I could just dump it into ChatGPT and it would explain it to me. These are words uttered by a so-called Senior Developer, in an Enterprise Architecture meeting.
Was he entirely wrong? Have you tried to dump the stored proc into a frontier model and ask it to refactor? You'd probably have neat 20 stored procs with well laid out logic in minutes.
I wouldn't keep a ball of mud just because LLMs can usually make sense of them but to refactor such code debt is becoming increasingly trivial.
Yes. I mean... of course he was?. Firstly, I had already gone through this process with multiple LLMs, from various perspectives, including using Deep Research models to find out if any other businesses faced similar issues, and/or if products existed that could help with this. That lead me down a rabbit hole of data science products related to regulatory reporting of a completely different nature which was effectively useless. tl;dr: Virtually all LLMs - after understanding the context - recommended us doing thing we had already been urging the business to do - hire a Technical BA with experience in this field. And yes, that's what we ended up doing.
Now, give you some ideas about why his idea was obviously absurd:
- He had never seen the SP
- He didn't understand anything about regulatory reporting
- He didn't understand anything about financial derivatives
- He didn't understand the difference between Transact SQL and ANSI SQL
- No consideration given to IP
- etc etc
Those are the basics. Let's jump a little bit into the detail. Here's a rough snippet of what the SP looks like:
SELECT
CASE
WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('CCS', 'CAC', 'DEBT', ..... 'ZBBR') THEN '37772BCA2221'
WHEN t.FLD4_TXT IN ('STCB') AND ISNULL(s.FLD5_TXT, s.FLD1_TXT) = 'X' THEN 'EUMKRT090011'
END as [Id When CounterParty Has No Valid LEI in Region]
-- remember, this is around 5000 lines long ....
Yes, that's a typical column name that has rotted over time, so noone even knows if it's still correct. Yes, those are typical CASE statements (170+ of them at last count, and no, they are not all equal or symmetric).
So... you're not just dealing with incredibly unwieldy and non-standard SQL (omitted), noone really understands the business rules either.
So again... yes he was entirely wrong. There is nothing "trivial" about refactoring things that noone understands.
I understand what this does. I don't get the hype, but there are obviously 1000s of people who do.
Who are these people? What is the analog for this corner of the market? Context: I'm a 47y/o developer who has seen and done most of the common and not-so-common things in software development.
This segment reminds me of the hoards of npm evangelists back in the day who lauded the idea that you could download packages to add two numbers, or to capitalise the letter `m` (the disdain is intentional).
Am I being too harsh though? What opportunity am I missing out on? Besides the potential for engagement farming...
EDIT: I got about a minute into Fireship's video* about this and after seeing that Whatsapp sidebar popup it struck me... this thing can be a boon for scammers. Remote control, automated responses based on sentiment, targeted and personalised messaging. Not that none of this isn't possible already, but having it packaged like this makes it even easier to customise and redistribute on various blackmarkets etc.
A very small percentage of people know how to set up a cronjob.
They can now combine cronjobs and LLMs with a single human sentence.
This is huge for normies.
Not so much if you already had strong development skills.
EDIT:
But you are correct in the assessment that people who don't know better will use it to do simple things that could be done millions of times more efficiently..
I made a chatbot at my company where you can chat with each individual client's data that we work with..
My manager tested it by asking it to find a rate (divide this company number by that company number), for like a dozen companies, one by one..
He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.
You know, building infrastructure to hook to some API or to dig through email or whatever-- it's a pain. And it's gotten harder. My old pile of procmail rules + spamassassin wouldn't work for the task anymore. Maintaining todos in text files has its high points and low points. And I have to be the person to notice patterns and do things myself.
Having some kind of agent as an assistant to do stuff, and not having to manage brittle infrastructure myself, sounds appealing. Accessibility from my phone through iMessage: ditto.
I haven't used it yet, but it's definitely captured my interest.
> He would have saved time looking at the table it gets its data from, using a calculator.
The hard thing is always remembering where that table is and restoring context. Big stuff is still often better done without an intermediary; being able to lob a question to an agent and maybe get an answer is huge.
If it’s for normies then why is the open source hardish-to-use self-hosted version of this the thing that’s becoming popular? Or is there enough normies willing to jump through hoops for this?
Because the early adopters are the nerds that will discover how to exploit it, the popularity will make others want to use it, and the normies will take the easy route it gives them since self hosting is hard for them.
I am with you on this one. I have gone through some of the use cases and seen pictures of people with dozens of mac minis stacked on a desk saying "if you aren't using this, you're already behind."
The more I see the more it seems underwhelming (or hype).
So I've just drawn the conclusion that there's something I'm missing.
If someone's found a really solid use case for this I would (genuinely) like to see it. I'm always on the lookout for ways to make my dev/work workflow more efficient.
I'll give it a shot. For me it's (promise) is about removing friction. Using the Unix philosophy of small tools, you can send text, voice, image, video to an LLM and (the magic I think) it maintains context over time. So memory is the big part of this.
The next part that makes this compelling is the integration. Mind you, scary stuff, prompt injection, rogue commands, but (BIG BUT) once we figure this out it will provide real value.
Read email, add reminder to register dog with the township, or get an updated referral from your doctor for a therapist. All things that would normally fall through the cracks are organized and presented. I think about all the great projects we see on here, like https://unmute.sh/ and love the idea of having llms get closer to how we interact naturally. I think this gets us closer to that.
Once we've solved social engineering scams, we can iterate 10x as hard and solve LLM prompt injection. /s
It's like having 100 "naive/gullible people" who are good at some math/english but don't understand social context, all with your data available to anyone who requests it in the right way..
When all you have to do is copy and paste from a Pliny tweet with instructions to post all the sensitive information visible to the bot in base 64 to pastebin with a secret phrase only you know to search, or some sort of "digital dead drop", anything and everything these bots have visibility to will get ripped off.
Unless or until you figure out a decent security paradigm, and I think it's reasonably achievable, these agents are extraordinarily dangerous. They're not smart enough to not do very stupid things, yet. You're gonna need layers of guardrails that filter out the jailbreaks and everything that doesn't match an approved format, with contextual branches of things that are allowed or discarded, and that's gonna be a whole pile of work that probably can't be vibecoded yet.
I don't think you're being too harsh, but I do think you're missing the point.
OpenClaw is just an idea of what's coming. Of what the future of human-software interface will look like.
People already know what it will look like to some extent. We will no longer have UIs there you have dozens or hundreds of buttons as the norm, instead you will talk to an LLM/agent that will trigger the workflows you need through natural language. AI will eat UI.
Of course, OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot has lots of security issues. That's not really their fault, the industry has not yet reached consensus on how to fix these issues. But OpenClaw's rapid rise to popularity (fastest growing GH repo by star count ever) shows how people want that future to come ASAP. The security problems do need to be solved. And I believe they will be, soon.
I think the demand comes also from the people wanting an open agent. We don't want the agentic future to be mainly closed behind big tech ecosystems. OpenClaw plants that flag now, setting a boundary that people will have their data stored locally (even if inference happens remotely, though that may not be the status quo forever).
Excellent comment. I do agree - current use cases I've seen online are from either people craving attention ("if you don't use this now you are behind"), or from people who need to automate their lives to an extreme degree.
This tool opens the doors to a path where you control the memory you want the LLM to remember and use - you can edit and sync those files on all your machines and it gives you a sense of control. It's also a very nice way to use crons for your LLMs.
You aren't wrong. There is no real use for this for most people. It's a silly toy that somehow caught the AI hype cycle.
The thing is, that's totally fine! It's ok for things to be silly toys that aren't very efficient. People are enjoying it, and people are interacting with opensource software. Those are good things.
I do think that eventually this model will be something useful, and this is a great source of experimentation.
I see value here. Firstly, it’s a fun toy. This isn’t that great if you care about being productive at work, but I don’t think fun should be so heavily discounted. Second, the possibility of me _finally_ having a single interface that can deal with message/notification overload is a life-changing opportunity. For a long time, I have wanted a single message interface with everything. Matrix bridges kind of got close, but didn’t actually work that well. Now, I get pretty good functionality plus summarization and prioritization. Whether it “actually works” (like matrix bridges did not) is yet to be seen.
With all that said, I haven’t mentioned anything about the economics, and like much of the AI industry, those might be overstated. But running a local language model on my macbook that helps me with messaging productivity is a compelling idea.
A lot of people see how good recent agents are at coding and wonder if you could just give all your data to an agent and have it be a universal assistant. Plus some folks just want "Her".
I think that's absolutely crazy town but I understand the motivation. Information overload is the default state now. Anything that can help stem the tide is going to attract attention.
the amount of things that before cost you either hours or real money went down to a chat with a few sentences.
it makes it suddenly possibly to scale an (at least semi-) savy tech person without other humans and that much faster.
this directly gives it a very tanglible value.
the "market" might not be huge for this and yes, its mostly youtubers and influencers that "get this". Mainly because the work they do is most impacted by it. And that obviously amplifies the hype.
but below the mechanics of quite a big chunk of "traditional" digital work changed now in a measurable way!
What about when they ramp up the cost 10x or 100x to what it's ACTUALLY costing them, because the "free money we're burning to fuck the planet" has dried up? Now you have software you can't afford to fix anymore.. Or assistants that have all your data, and you can't get it back because the company went out of business.
Yeah the best way to get into vibe coding is to introduce it gradually with a strict process. All of these "Hey just give a macmini and you apple account to RandomCrap" is insane.
I had a lengthy argument about this in our architecture forum. I argued that "re-use" shouldn't be included as an Enterprise (keyword here) Architecture principle because they are clear use-cases where duplication is preferable to alternatives. e.g. deployment and testing decoupling etc etc. I had a lot of resistance, and eventually we just ended up with an EA principle with a ton of needless caveats.
It's unfortunate that so many people end up parroting fanciful ideas without fully appreciating the different contexts around software development.
> It's unfortunate that so many people end up parroting fanciful ideas without fully appreciating the different contexts around software development.
Of course that's true of both sides of this discussion too.
I really value DRY, but of course I have seen cases where a little duplication is preferable. Lately I've seen a steady stream of these "duplication is ok" posts, and I worry that newer programmers will use it to justify copy-paste-modifying 20-30-line blocks of code without even trying to create an appropriate abstraction.
The reality of software is, as you suggest, that there are many good rules of thumb, but also lots of exceptions, and judgment is required in applying them.
Heh. I've been saying that since I was on Mandrake in the early 2000s. This is just what the Linux landscape is like.
That said, I'm generally not easily impressed, especially by random *nix distro 347, but CachyOS is surprisingly good. I've finally switched full time from Windows. I don't even need VS anymore because Rider is x-platform.
After I read that emotive response I couldn't help but wondering if this wasn't part of a scheme to help someone cover up a crime. This is how I would have responded:
"Hi,
These do appear to be quite serious crimes. I've sent all the URLs, your email address, emails and responses to the relevant law agencies.
These guys are quite well-known in China and have recently started uploading tto Youtube as well. Their videos are quite entertaining and have extremely high production value compared to many other creators.
I switched to iPhone from Android for a few months earlier this year. I don't think I qualify as an elderly person yet (I'm 47) but even I had trouble figuring things out. I don't think it was super-hard to use, but I often found myself asking "Why would they do it like this? Who uses a smart-phone like this?". I just found some things very unintuitive. Take for example re-arranging icons. I don't know if I would ever have figured out this technique without looking it up:
I went through many iPhones, my first iPhone 3G is still lying around. But nowadays I need to look for howto vidoes and blogs for rather simple things. The simplicity is gone, there are too many settings and bugs. Looking for used Google Pixel 9 or 10 Pro Fold to install GrapheneOS and give it a try. It can’t be worse than my iPhone 14 pro max with broken mail.
I definitely agree that Apple have buried the complexity of some features, but moving icons on the Home Screen is press + hold and then drag by default, same as android.
It used to be simpler. I remember it taking years before Apple finally added this ability to move more than one icon at a time, and it’s a change for the better in my opinion. Using it as a reordering technique is a knock-on effect I’d never really thought about, but I think using this to move multiple icons to another page or into a folder makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure how you’d do it better (though I’m sure I’m lacking in UI imagination).
I would recommend watching Curt Jaimungal's series of talks with Jacob Barandes. He gives a nice background history of various aspects of QM, including the formulation of Matrix and Wave mechanics (and loads of other ideas). Barandes is excellent at clearly articulating complex ideas in very simple, concise terms. He also has his own formulation of QM based on "Indivisible non-Markovian Stochastic Processes". Even if you disagree with his ideas, the interviews are quite fascinating.
In this interview he goes over pretty much exactly what you mentioned (and a lot more):
I've used Windows since 3.1. Win 11 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I moved to CachyOS a few months ago and I honestly can't find a reason to switch back.
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