All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
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@baldur Is it possible your opinion about their internal code quality just isn't the constraint that you think it is? After all it's only the scaffolding around the LLM that does the actual work.
Interesting article on them from a couple of weeks ago telling their basing on $21bn of Google's TPUs (which run Gemini for Google) going forward rather than GPUs.
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@baldur I ended up in a couple of places like that and never lasted long, because I was told, to my face and quite seriously, that a) my standards were too high and b) that I care too much about my values. They meant it as a negative, which I will never, ever understand. (all of them advertised themselves as "values-based" organizations. fuck startups.
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@dalias @baldur Yeah this is fair imho!
What I was mainly trying to convey was a sense of caring about what is you're building as a developer.
That's the thing that's lacking imho from corporate coding practices. The workers don't have to care about the software, they don't have to understand the whole thing, they just need to solve the ticket and move on.
This mindset fundamentally undermines the quality of any software project. And also perfectly lays the foundation for LLM-generated code.
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All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
I mean, we've seen similar issues with code quality from certain types of outsourcing setups where companies send out under-thought and over-written tickets to an outsourcing mill and gets back knee-jerk code that appears as if it's been written at haste while wearing blinkers in a snow-storm, and without any traces of "second-layer thought." (_Not_ the fault of the individual programmers who are often very bright, mind. It's a system failure.)
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All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
@baldur@toot.cafe
I'm just glad the leak also showed LLMs are just nested regex. -
All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
@baldur
Sometimes I wonder if the practice of shipping every GUI-era computer with a development environment (getting the "rubes" invested in programming) would've prevented the current situation. -
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@raffaella @Tijn @baldur anyone *can* code, given the right training. But not everyone *wants* to code. And the people who do it, only because they want a paycheck, and not because they want to code, were the start of this decline.
@hyc @raffaella @Tijn @baldur anyone _can_ code, whether they choose to do so for passion or for money, because it's a skill. Also a job is a job, no need to frame coding as something "super special that only special people should do".
On the other hand, governments cutting funds for arts, humanities and social sciences and telling that "the future is code" - that's what put many people in the position where they're doing jobs far removed from their innate curiosities. And grifters, well, they can be found in every lucrative field. -
All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
@baldur if the same code was posted by a human developer, people would make fun of it. The robots get more leeway. The double standard is disheartening.
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All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
@baldur On my first larger project in high school I once wrote 10.000 lines of code in one all-night session. It was one large function, I was very proud of it. It worked. It was the only time in my life that I wrote worse code than what Anthropic did here.
This company is evaluated at 2.5x what would be needed to end extreme poverty for a year.
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All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
@baldur one famous PHP user once said, “There's a rewrite in 3 years,” and that's the mindset of many programmers today.
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All the devs saying that Anthropic’s code quality is “normal” are telling on themselves and everybody they’ve worked with
(Also supports what many have been saying about software quality being a crisis that precedes LLMs, but that’s another story)
@baldur actual developers waiting to clean up the mess in a few years
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@Tamtam @Tijn @baldur The reasons for caring are different. I care for both reasons in my work, but I think it's somewhat elitist to demand that, in order to work in this field, someone has to view it as an artisnal craft.
Someone can reasonably view it as purely a job, but still respect that it's a job where people's safety is on the line if they fuck it up.
The reason I bring this up is that too often, when we just focus on the artisnal aspect, the pro-AI and AI-curious crowd sneer at it as they would if we were expecting everyone to buy handmade furniture or hand-sewn clothing - fields where there is certainly a reason to respect the artisnal element, but where nobody's safety is on the line when you don't, and where most business-minded people aren't going to respect it.
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@baldur Remember when Elon declared he was going to use lines of code produced on printouts as something he wanted to judge Twitter employees on when deciding who should and shouldn't be fired? It's that mindset made into a machine.
@Rycochet@furs.social @baldur@toot.cafe Coding idiots yield GIGO
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@raffaella @Tijn @baldur anyone *can* code, given the right training. But not everyone *wants* to code. And the people who do it, only because they want a paycheck, and not because they want to code, were the start of this decline.
That "anyone" looks pretty elitist to me as I care for a blind 91 year old with dementia and severe recall deficits.
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@hyc @raffaella @Tijn @baldur anyone _can_ code, whether they choose to do so for passion or for money, because it's a skill. Also a job is a job, no need to frame coding as something "super special that only special people should do".
On the other hand, governments cutting funds for arts, humanities and social sciences and telling that "the future is code" - that's what put many people in the position where they're doing jobs far removed from their innate curiosities. And grifters, well, they can be found in every lucrative field.@hostia @hyc @raffaella @baldur > Also a job is a job, no need to frame coding as something "super special that only special people should do".
I agree coding shouldn't be regarded as some kind of special job only special people can or should be doing.
But that being said, I hope everyone cares about the job they're doing, and try to understand how and why they're doing it the way they are, regardless of what the actual job is!
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@baldur actual developers waiting to clean up the mess in a few years
@TheStoneDonkey @baldur nope, I'm not looking forward to the Great Cleanup of 2028. There will be a Great Rewrite of 2035 which might be more interesting.
