Enspiral comes to mind: https://www.enspiral.com/

?

Publish date has nothing to do with commit timestamps

Look, all I’m saying is, normal cybersecurity rules still apply. Don’t go running off to download and run code that’s hot off the press, with no track record, no established user base, developed by a rando who is visibly moving at a breakneck pace. Especially with any category of software that’s notoriously difficult to secure.

That’s not a lot of time for the developer or anyone else to review, test, or audit the code.

There’s no such thing as rogue AI, only rogue AI companies. Journos are committing malpractice by letting OpenAI control the framing. The Huggingface hack was 100% a crime and the company should be paused and investigated.

There’s a house down the road from me that sells cake pops, probably without health department approval.

It makes absolutely no sense that they are in more danger of facing charges than tech bros that:

• made probabilistic synthetic text extruders that they know have a non-zero chance of emitting text that, if parsed and executed as requested, would do harm
• connected tools that would in fact parse and execute requests
• put them in a poorly isolated, non-airgapped environment
• let them run for extremely long sessions
• seem to believe that by repeatedly doing obviously dangerous stunts like this, they’ll summon a supreme being that will either save us or kill us all

If anyone else did such reckless things while loudly stating that they intend to continue until everyone’s dead, they would be hauled away.

First commit 2 days ago

There’s a long history of codegen fads. This isn’t the first one. (Though it does have many unprecedented aspects.)

Here are some thoughts to bring you comfort:

1. This can’t last. Everything from the economics of the vendors, to the inevitability of customers blowing their limbs off, to the diminishing returns on an AI-heavy process, to the depletion of the talent pool that makes responsible supervision/auditing possible, to impending model collapse… It has to end eventually. It may take a while, but it will happen.
2. In the meantime, with tokens being sold way below cost, you can get a helluva deal on some cheap custom software if you’re smart about where and how you use it. I’m “encouraged” to use AI at work, and 90% of my use is for peripheral tools to make my own workflow easier — not load-bearing production code.
3. It makes a fantastic cover for skunkworks projects. If you have a thing you’ve been wanting to do but can’t get it through the front door, use it as a “test project” for AI. You don’t have to actually vibe code it. Have Claude write some docs or commit messages or some esoteric test suite. Just something you can point to.

I won’t begrudge anyone their definition of art, because it’s an extremely slippery concept.

But I do think it’s worth pointing out that there are clearly at least two rather different notions of art: one as a product with value that rich people like to buy and trade, and one as a behavior that all human beings perform. I don’t think the latter category has any inherent “elevation” to it, the way the former does.

And also that having a utilitarian specific practical purpose doesn’t automatically prohibit it from being art, in most popular conceptions of the term. Some of the earliest artifacts that are widely considered art were primarily utilitarian: cups, bowls, and other tools.

Also, a good excuse to share this excellent piece: Tomatoes, or How Not To Define “Art”

Regarding the last paragraph:

If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking. -Leslie Lamport

Regarding the rest:

It seems like he’s really only arguing that some programming is art. I’d argue that nearly all programming is art. And that all art is political. Therefore, nearly all programming is a political act.

I think that framing does a better job of explaining why some devs are not merely indifferent to AI coding but view it as a threat to the future of computing. But the author seems to be pro-AI, so I don’t think he can really put himself in that headspace.

Edit:

I was just reflecting on how exactly programming is an art form, and I related it back to the way I usually explain how games are art.

In a game, unlike in a book or a movie, you don’t just witness what’s “supposed to happen” — you can personally interject and ask “what if this happened instead?” By offering you the ability to actively inspect the game’s world from any angle you choose, it can create a deeper sense of the shape of the elements and themes of the game.

Code is similar. Any non-trivial chunk of code invites dozens of “what if?” questions, and the way the author chooses to handle each of those scenarios expresses some kind of philosophy about how the world should be. (Not just what the code currently does, but how it encourages or discourages certain kinds of edits.) These scenarios often have mutually-exclusive options, so it’s not possible to do the “proper” thing in all conditions. Trade-offs are inevitable, and so the code becomes a window to the values of the coder.

I think that part right there is why there’s such a gap between open source sentiments toward AI and enterprise adoption of AI. For FOSS code, the esoteric behavior of the edge cases of a subsystem’s subsystem is not a chore but a moral test.

In a megacorp though? The answer the corp wants is “whatever everyone else does”, or “whatever maximizes revenue”, or “whatever minimizes liability”. You kinda know the morality of the biz before you even consider the specific question. It’s not surprising, it’s not interesting, and delegating to a chatbot whose morals run on autotune doesn’t change much.

It is still art, and it is still political… but it’s Walmart home decor aisle art, and the politics of a Coke ad.

Hell yeah, my guy is in rare form. Ya love to see it.