Maybe not autonomously (that would be very close to economic AGI).
But I don't think the big companies are lying about how much of their code is being written by AI. I think back of the napkin math will show the economic value of the output is already some definition of massive. And those companies are 100% taking the credit (and the money).
Also, almost by definition, every incentive is aligned for people in charge to deny this.
I hate to make this analogy but I think it's absurd to think "successful" slaveowners would defer the credit to their slaves. You can see where this would fall apart.
Not grandparent, but I'm in the same boat. I've been dreaming for almost 10 years of building a sort of digital bullet journal. I had some feeble attempts to start, but never got to the point where I could actually use it. Last year I started again, heavily LLM assisted. After 1-2 weeks (this was before agents), I had something usable, from which I could benefit, which wanted to make me improve it more, which made me want to use it more.
By now it's grown to 100k lines of code. I've not read all of them, but I do have a high level overview of the app, I've done several refactorings to keep it maintainable.
This would not have happened without AI agents. I don't have the time, period. With AI agents, I can kickoff a task while I'm going to the park with my kids. Instead of scrolling HN, I look every now and then to what the agent is doing.
So, it's a personal pet project, I've thrown in everything and the kitchen sink. There's a telegram integration so I can submit entries via telegram, there's a chatbot integration so that I can "talk to my entries" and ask questions about what I did when). It imports weather data, Garmin data, and so on.
So yes, it's around 100k lines of code (Python, HTML, JS and CSS).
> With AI agents, I can kickoff a task while I'm going to the park with my kids. Instead of scrolling HN, I look every now and then to what the agent is doing.
How does that work? Are you running the agents on a server? Are you using gnu screen and termux? Can you respond to prompts asking for permission to e.g. run ls or grep?
I have at least two projects that I estimated to take a week or two but aren't finished after years. There might be others that just got abandoned that should be included in the count.
Then there are things that work but aren't polished enough or should really have documentation.
I can’t (due to other priorities) give consistent time to a project unless it is very important. That lack of consistency means I have to spend time re-learning what I was thinking and doing which is both inefficient and not fun. Since the projects are either experimental or not that important, I’m generally more motivated to do something else.
Over time I’ve learned to not even start such projects, but LLMs have made it easier to complete such projects by making the work faster reducing the time variable in time over importance and easing the refamiliarization problem, adding to the set of such projects I’m willing to tackle.
lack of character, distracted by other things for to long, drowning in unforeseen complexity, much slower progression than expected, bored with it, force majeure, etc
Tons of people totally speak English there. But it's not an official language. And government totally forces kids to speak French/Dutch/whatever in schools. if England invades Netherland will you say they also have a point?;)
The point is that Ukraine used to be a part of Soviet Union, and this is why "obviously" Ukranians speak Russian, and we are drawing a parallel to how former British colonies also speak English. France et al are not former British colonies, and I assume they prefer to speak their native language at home, and not English. Not because they are forced to, but because English is not their native language.
Oh, it's a transliteration of Russian "офтоп", which itself started as a borrowing of "off-topic" from English (but as a noun instead of an adjective/stative) and then went some natural linguistic developments, namely loss of a hyphen and degemination, surface analysis of the trailing "-ic" as Russian suffix "-ик" [0], and its subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form.
>subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form
Also called a "back-formation". FWIF I don't think the existence of corrupted words automatically justifies more corruptions nor does the fact that it is a corruption automatically invalidate it. When language among a group evolves, everyone speaking that language is affected, which is why written language reads pretty differently looking back every 50 years or so, in both formal and informal writing. Therefore language changes should have buy-in from all users.
Everything is inevitable. If it happened, then it couldn't have happened otherwise. "Your computer sending screenshots to microsoft so they can train AIs on it" was inevitable, because that's what incentives pushed them to do. Vocal opposition and boycotting might become a different kind of incentive, but in most cases it doesn't work. The fact of the matter is that corporations are powerful, shareholders are powerful, the collective mass of indifferent consumers are powerful, while you are powerless.
> The fact of the matter is that... you are powerless.
Trivialities don't add anything to the discussion. The question is "Why?" and then "How do we change that?". Even incomplete or inaccurate attempts at answering would be far more valuable than a demonstration of hand-wringing powerlessness.
The core difference is in the amount of intentional decisions being made by the artist. A prompt, no matter how specific, still delegates a lot of work to what is essentially chance. Something like Blender does make it easier to do certain things, but you still have to actively choose to do them. This is why AI-slop, no matter how detailed, will always feel off. It lacks the deliberateness of a human artist who knows exactly what they're doing and why at every level.
I think it's debatable whether the principle that "any press is good press" is actually true. Especially for a brand that is already a household name. People will talk about you, yes. But is it a good thing that they're gonna be talking, and reinforcing the association in the minds of your customers, that you're putting out lazy, soulless slop? Of course, that's de facto what McDonald's is, but it's not like they don't benefit from at the very least an illusion that this isn't the case.
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