FearfulSalad

joined 2 years ago
[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 24 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Preface: I have a lot of AI skepticism.

My company is using Cursor and Windsurf, focusing on agent mode (and whatever Windsurf's equivalent is). It hallucinates real hard with any open ended task, but when you have ALL of:

  • an app with good preexisting test coverage
  • the ability to run relevant tests quickly (who has time to run an 18 hour CI suite locally for a 1 line change?)
  • a well thought out product use case with edge cases

Then you can tell the agent to write test cases before writing code, and run all relevant tests when making any code changes. What it produces is often fine, but rarely great. If you get clever with setting up rules (that tell it to do all of the above), you can sometimes just drop in a product requirement and have it implement, making only minor recommendations. It's as if you are pair programming with an idiot savant, emphasis on idiot.

But whose app is well covered with tests? (Admittedly, AI can help speed up the boilerplating necessary to backfill test cases, so long as someone knows how the app is supposed to work). Whose app is well-modularized such that it's easy to select only downstream affected tests for any given code change? (If you know what the modules should be, AI can help... But it's pretty bad at figuring that out itself). And who writes well thought out product use cases nowadays?

If we were still in the olde waterfall era, with requirements written by business analysts, then maybe this could unlock the fabled 100x gains per developer. Or 10x gains. Or 1.1x gains, most likely.

But nowadays it's more common for AI to write the use cases, hallucinate edge cases that aren't real, and when coupled with the above, patchwork together an app that no one fully understands, and that only sometimes works.

Edit: if all of that sounds like TDD, which on its own gives devs a speed boost when they actually use it consistently, and you wonder if CEOs will claim that the boosts are attributable to AI when their devs finally start to TDD like they have been told to for decades now, well, I wonder the same thing.

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 63 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Can we stop posting this headline? Again and again and again?

It's not news.

If a sizable portion of the population did want to do something stupid, that'd be news.

This is... It's not even propaganda. It's just a waste of our limited time and emotional capacity for idiocy.

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 month ago

Spelljammer campaign at level 11. We were hired to get a MacGuffin necklace off of a pirate, by his rival. We waltz into his stronghold, get an audience, and then Nat 20 a Persuasion check to convince him for a 1on1 with my bard, b/c for a pirate so tough, what threat could my bard pose? His guards and my party members leave the room.

Land a Suggestion to have him hand me the necklace, and then land a Modify Memory to have him think it was his idea: we would claim he was dead, use the necklace to get an audience with his rival to show her "proof," and then double cross her and kill her. Then he'd swoop in, reclaim the necklace, and pay us handsomely.

Poor dummy. Hoodwinked!

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 9 points 2 months ago

Maybe. There are many ways to move files and directories around without using Finder, at which point all indexed data about those files and directories will be stale. Forcing something as core as mv to update Spotlight would be significantly worse, I think. By keeping the .DS_Store files co-located with the directory they index, moving a directory does not invalidate the index data (though moving a file without using Finder still does). Whether retaining indexing on directory moves is a compelling enough reason to force the files everywhere is probably dependent on whether that's a common enough pattern among workflows of users, and whether spotlight performance would suffer drastically if it were reliant on a central store not resilient against such moves.

So, it's probably a shaky reason at best.

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 3 points 2 months ago

That reads like the sort of thing Wolfram Alpha was designed to absolutely obliterate, if only the raw data representing each of those keywords had been loaded in.

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 24 points 2 months ago

I introduced a "small one story structure, its walls no wider than the span of a single door" next to the farmhouse my players were investigating. They didn't believe the owners who told them what it was for, and went to check it out for themselves, hackles up and weapons drawn.

It's an outhouse.

Just an outhouse.

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 22 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I think it turned into some amount of shit slinging that stopped being relevant to the shit at hand. I'm guessing mods decided to close that sphincter before the verbal diarrhea overflowed the rim of the post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] FearfulSalad@ttrpg.network 72 points 5 months ago (40 children)

The poop knife is irrelevant until and unless one plans to flush, which this question did not ask.

Also, why do you assume the nurse is a lady?

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