Tom Conneely

I came across this article by Matthew Hansen. Worth reading.

Developers used to google things. You’d read a StackOverflow answer, or an article, or a GitHub issue. You did some research, verified it against your own context, and came to your own conclusion. Nobody said “Google did it for me” or “it was the top result so it must be true.”

Now I’m starting to hear “AI did it for me."

That’s either overhyping what happened, or it means the developer didn’t come to their own conclusion. Both are bad. If someone on my team ever did say Google wrote their code because they copied a StackOverflow answer, I’d be worried about the same things I’m worried about now with AI: did you actually understand what you pasted?

I came across this article on Medium by Marina Wyss, a data scientist at Twitch.

I still find it hard to determine what's real when it comes to programming using AI tools. Social media is full of people declaring that they don't write code anymore, that they trust whichever agent they're using to do the job. It could be I'm just using it wrong.

It's critical to remember that someone is responsible for the output. This part gets left out a lot in social media posts venerating the abilities of gen AI tools. Marina writes:

Because here’s what doesn’t change regardless of how good AI gets: when something breaks in production — when there’s a security breach, a compliance violation, or an outage that costs the company boatloads of money — someone is accountable.

AI doesn’t get paged at 3am. You do.

AI doesn’t get called into the incident review. You do.

AI doesn’t explain to leadership why customer data was exposed. You do.

Don't forget it.

I’ve heard a lot about OpenClaw over the past few weeks. I’ve been surprised at the amount of access some people are willing to give it. There are a number of security flaws that I would not be comfortable having on my machine.

This story about Summer Yue, the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, shows how unreliable OpenClaw can be even for people who know what they’re doing.