CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@pmonks @not2b @mhoye

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No matter how many prompt contexts you stack up and fire off in parallel, the machine cannot find truth, cannot do math, cannot know things, or reason.

It's Massively Multiplayer Online Autocomplete.

The fact that the capital and executive class thinks this is sufficient to replace most of the world's knowledge workers tells you all you need to know about how we should be dealing with them, and all of this.

Look, if you tell an LLM it needs 95% confidence, it doesn't know what either "95%" nor "confidence" means. It knows people tend to respond to this kind of direction either by saying "I'm not sure enough because..." or "I'm super confident for these reasons." It has no ability to correctly choose which of those templates it will follow.

Flip a coin. You'll get a reasonable looking sentence back in one of those styles, with a random assortment of reasons that may or may not be rooted in fact.

Reading a claude.md and seeing written there many directives like this: "Don't make changes until you have 95% confidence in what you need to build."

This reveals such a profound misunderstanding of how this technology works that I'm speechless. And this is literally what people are trying to build fully-automated "software factories" from.

This is not to say that it's impossible for this to work. But it is fighting human nature every step of the way. Refusing to define organizational structure, leadership, accountability, and governance only ensures that either there will be infighting, or invisible shadow versions of these structures will evolve. And shadow structures can't be effectively managed for purposes of alignment and efficiency. They are ripe for subversion by private interests.

I state this because in my experience not only is it common to see a coincidental lack of ownership, but also *intentional* lack of ownership.

There are people who don't like the idea of a software system having a "boss" or someone "in charge," and they think they can avoid this through collective ownership.

There are also companies that think they can avoid "silos" through shared ownership.

Both of these are misguided, and willfully ignorant of the nature of humans working in groups.

@DoodleDonut Absolutely. It's why the analogy to addictive drugs is so apt. The more you use it, the more you need to use it.

Possibly controversial take....

Software systems need clear, cohesive, continuous ownership/accountability. This applies to:
* running applications that require operational support
* software libraries and frameworks that are "merely" used by other applications
* company internal apps, OSS libraries, and everything in between

If there isn't a specific team, led by a specific person, owning the system, then there is an accountability problem. Things will go wrong. Fingers will point.