I read it. i agree this is out of touch. Not because the things its saying are wrong, but because the things its saying have been true for almost a year now. They are not "getting worse" they "have been bad". I am staggered to find this article qualifies as "news".

If you're going to write about something that's been true and discussed widely online for a year+, at least have the awareness/integrity to not brand it as "this new thing is happening".

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flumpcakes a day ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps the advertising money from the big AI money sinks is running out and we are finally seeing more AI scepticism articles.

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minimaxir a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They are not "getting worse" they "have been bad".

The agents available in January 2025 were much much worse than the agents available in November 2025.

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Snuggly73 a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, and for some cases no.

The models are gotten very good, but I rather have an obviously broken pile of crap that I can spot immediately, than something that is deep fried with RL to always succeed, but has subtle problems that someone will lgtm :( I guess its not much different with human written code, but the models seem to have weirdly inhuman failures - like, you would just skim some code, cause you just cant believe that anyone can do it wrong, and it turns out to be.

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minimaxir a day ago | parent [-]

That's what test cases are for, which is good for both humans and nonhumans.

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Snuggly73 a day ago | parent [-]

Test cases are great, but not a total solution. Can you write a test case for the add_numbers(a, b) function?

	▲	Snuggly73 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Well, for some reason it doesnt let me respond to the child comments :( The problem (which should be obvious) is that with a/b real you cant construct an exhaustive input/output set. The test case can just prove the presence of a bug, but not its absence. Another category of problems that you cant just test and have to prove is concurrency problems. And so forth and so on.
	▲	minimaxir a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Of course you can. You can write test cases for anything. Even an add_numbers function can have bugs, e.g. you have to ensure the inputs are numbers. Most coding agents would catch this in loosely-typed languages.

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Snuggly73 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean "have been bad" doesnt exclude "getting worse" right :)