Human behaviour is goal-directed because humans have executive function. When you turn off executive function by going to sleep, your brain will spit out dreams. Dream logic is famous for being plausible but unhinged.

I have the feeling that LLMs are effectively running on dream logic, and everything we've done to make them reason properly is insufficient to bring them up to human level.

What I'm surprises me about the current development environment is the acceleration of technical debt. When I was developing my skills the nagging feeling that I didn't quite understand the technology was a big dark cloud. I felt this clopud was technical debt. This was always what I was working against.

I see current expectations that technical debt doesn't matter. The current tools embrace superficial understand. These tools to paper over the debt. There is no need for deeper understanding of the problem or solution. The tools take care of it behind the scenes.

It’s not. LLMs are just averaging their internet snapshot, after all.

But people want an AI that is objective and right. HN is where people who know the distinction hang out, but it’s not what the layperson things they are getting when they use this miraculous super hyped tool that everybody is raving about?

It's much easier to fire an employee which produces low quality/effort work than to convince leadership to fire Claude.

The volume is different. Someone submitted a PR this week that was 3800 lines of shell script. Most of it was crap and none of it should have been in shell script. He's submitting PRs with thousands of lines of code every day. He has no idea how any of it actually works, and it completely overwhelms my ability to review.

Sure, he could have submitted a ill-considered 3800 line PR five years ago, but it would have taken him at least a week and there probably would have been opportunities to submit smaller chunks along the way or discuss the approach.

Humans have a 'world model' beyond the syntax - for code, an idea of what the code should do and how it does it. Of course, some humans are better than others at this, they are recognized as good programmers.