by threethirtytwo | 2026-01-18 07:20:46+00:00
>Wait, so we can infer the future from “trendlines”, but not from past events? Either past events are part of a macro trend, and are valuable data points, or the micro data points you choose to focus on are unreliable as well. Talk about selection bias…

If past events can be dismissed as “noise,” then so can selectively chosen counterexamples. Either historical outcomes are legitimate inputs into a broader signal, or no isolated datapoint deserves special treatment. You cannot appeal to trendlines while arbitrarily discarding the very history that defines them without committing selection bias.

When large numbers of analogous past events point in contradictory directions, individual anecdotes lose predictive power. Trendlines are not an oracle, but once the noise overwhelms the signal, they are the best approximation we have.

>What is hypothetical is what will happen to all this software and the companies that produced it a few years down the line. How reliable is it? How maintainable is it? How many security issues does it have? What has the company lost because those issues were exploited? Will the same people who produced it using these new tools be able to troubleshoot and fix it? Will the tools get better to allow them to do that?

These are legitimate questions, and they are all speculative. My expectation is that code quality will decline while simultaneously becoming less relevant. As LLMs ingest and reason over ever larger bodies of software, human oriented notions of cleanliness and maintainability matter less. LLMs are far less constrained by disorder than humans are.

>Really? Everything? There is no chance that some people are simply pointing out the flaws of this technology, and that the marketing around it is making it out to be far more valuable than it actually is, so that a bunch of tech grifters can add more zeroes to their net worth?

The flaws are obvious. So obvious that repeatedly pointing them out is like warning that airplanes can crash while ignoring that aviation safety has improved to the point where you are far more likely to die in a car than in a metal tube moving at 500 mph.

Everyone knows LLMs hallucinate. That is not contested. What matters is the direction of travel. The trendline is clear. Just as early aviation was dangerous but steadily improved, this technology is getting better month by month.

That is the real disagreement. Critics focus on present day limitations. Proponents focus on the trajectory. One side freezes the system in time; the other extrapolates forward.

>I don’t get how anyone can speak about trends and what’s currently happening with any degree of confidence. Let alone dismiss the skeptics by making wild claims about their character. Do better.

Because many skeptics are ignoring what is directly observable. You can watch AI generate ultra complex, domain specific systems that have never existed before, in real time, and still hear someone dismiss it entirely because it failed a prompt last Tuesday.

Repeating the limitations is not analysis. Everyone who is not a skeptic already understands them and has factored them in. What skeptics keep doing is reciting known flaws while refusing to reason about what is no longer a limitation.

At that point, the disagreement stops being about evidence and starts looking like bias.