heliumtera (u/heliumtera)

heliumtera commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

chasd00 · a day ago

> I believe what we need to wake up to or come to terms with is that our industry (everything that would go into NASDAQ) is a farce.

the thing is, with software development, it's always been this way. Developers have just had tunnel vision for decades because they stare into an editor all day long instead trying to actually sell a product. If selling wasn't the top priority then what do you think would happen to your direct deposit? Software developers, especially software developers, live in this fantasy land where the believe their paycheck just happens automatically and always will. I think it's becoming critical that new software devs entering the workforce spend a couple years at a small, eat what you kill, consultancy or small business. Somewhere where they can see the relationship between building, selling, and their paycheck first hand.

heliumtera · 18 hours ago

Technology has absolute qualities. Not a fantasy. Are you being paid to browse hacker news? Probl not, but here you are. Maybe you never considered this, but programming for other reasons other than a salary is a possibility. If those pesky programmers gave it all away, for free, what would be left for you to sell? In this case, would you leave technology? Would you go somewhere else and practice your selling there? Can't we defend building for the sake of building? Doing for the sake of having fun? Maybe you would be left with nothing to sell, I understand, but that's fine for me. Sorry.

heliumtera commented on We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic... · Posted by u/lukaspetersson

_jules · 19 hours ago

Had a very strange experience with Gemini on android auto yesterday. Gave it simple instruction 'navigate to home depot' and the reply was 'ok, navigating to the home depot in x, it the nearest location' The location was twice the distance to the nearest HD. Old assitent never made this mistake - not to mention the lie.

heliumtera · 19 hours ago

Maybe the old assistant was le classic formal system that could deterministically infer your location and search for nearby locations that matched the query, ranking by distance ? Fortunately we are waaaay past this now, we just words words words words words words words

heliumtera commented on GPT-5.2-Codex openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

garbagecoder · 21 hours ago

Agree. Codex just read my source code for a toy lisp I wrote in ARM64 assembly and learned how to code in that lisp and wrote a few demo programs for me. The was impressive enough. Then it spent some time and effort to really hunt down some problems--there was a single bit mask error in my garbage collector that wasn't showing up until then. I was blown away. It's the kind of thing I would have spent forever trying to figure out before.

heliumtera · 19 hours ago

Maybe you're a garbage programmer and that error was too obvious. Interesting observation, though.

edit: username joke, don't get me banned

heliumtera commented on GPT-5.2-Codex openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

girvo · a day ago

> I clear context for every new task and keep the local context files up to date with key info to get the LLM on target quickly

Aggressively recreating your context is still the best way to get the best results from these tools too, so it has a secondary benefit.

heliumtera · 20 hours ago

It is ironic that in the gpt-4 era, when we couldn't see much value in this tools, all we could hear was "skill issues", "prompt engineering skills". Now they are actually quite capable for SOME tasks, specially for something that we don't really care about learning, and they, to a certain extent, can generalize. They perform much better than in gpt-4 era, objectively, across all domains. They perform much better with the absolute minimum input, objectively, across all domains. If someone skipped the whole "prompt engineering" and learned nothing during that time, this person is more equiped to perform well. Now I wonder how much I am leaving behind by ignoring this whole "skills, tools, MCP this and that, yada yada".

heliumtera commented on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/De... · Posted by u/simonw

andy99 · a day ago

Only if leadership lets them. Right now (anecdotally) a lot of “leaders” don’t understand the difference between AI generated and human generated work, and just look at loc as productivity so all incentives are on AI coding, but that will change.

heliumtera · a day ago

It will never change. Managers will consider every stupid metric players push to sell their solutions. Be it code coverage, extensive CI/CD pipelines with useless steps, "productivity gains" with gen tools. The gen tools euphoria is stupid and will cease to exist, but before this was bdd,tdd,DDD, test before, test after, test your mocks, transpile to a different language and then ignore the output, code maturity, best practices, oop, pants in head oriented programming... There is always something stupid on the horizon this is certainly not the last stupid craze

heliumtera commented on AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating msanroman.io/blog/ai-cons... · Posted by u/firefoxd

embedding-shape · 2 days ago

Is this like your belief? Transformers et al were invented by researchers with the explicit goal of surveillance and mass profiling? You think maybe that could have been an unintended effect of something/someone else? Or it's all the researchers fault?

heliumtera · 2 days ago

i do not believe transformers were created by independent and autonomous researchers. will not blame individuals, no. but yeah, pretty much, I maintain the original point. if the question is what are the incentives in place and funding mechanisms to pursue such technology...surveillance and mass profiling. 'we want to serve YOU as well as we can, and we want to know what YOU stands for' kind of profiling and surveillance, not necessarily the all knowing god government kind.

heliumtera commented on The State of AI Coding Report 2025 greptile.com/state-of-ai-... · Posted by u/dakshgupta

scuff3d · 2 days ago

It shouldn't be taken with a pinch of salt, it should be disregarded entirely. It's an utterly useless metric, and given that the report leads with it makes the entire thing suspect.

heliumtera · 2 days ago

Every single metric inferred from code itself should be discarded. Opinions derived from this metrics should be entirely discounted as well,they are doomed, no point in listening.

heliumtera commented on The State of AI Coding Report 2025 greptile.com/state-of-ai-... · Posted by u/dakshgupta

heliumtera · 2 days ago

Create an automated tools that inserts comments and line breaks wherever it's possible. Productivity multiplied by 10^23. With humans being this stupid, I'm not that impressed they confused llms to human cognition. Maybe it truly is a replacement.

heliumtera commented on AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating msanroman.io/blog/ai-cons... · Posted by u/firefoxd

heliumtera · 2 days ago

Not really surprising that a tool created for surveillance and mass profiling turned out to be pretty good at surveiling and profiling

heliumtera commented on AI will make formal verification go mainstream martin.kleppmann.com/2025... · Posted by u/evankhoury

heliumtera · 3 days ago

Will formal verification be a viable and profitable avenue for the middle man to exploit and fuck everybody else? Then yes, it absolutely will become mainstream. If not, them no, thanks. Everything that becomes mainstream for SURE will empower the middleman and cuck the developer, nothing else really matters. This is literally the only important factor.