Everyone assumes that carefully crafting a specific AI architecture with bits and pieces bolted together based on their human intuition is necessarily superior to simply using a bigger monolithic AI model. It turns out that the opposite is true, and has been demonstrated over and over again.

The bitter lesson is this: You can simply ask a frontier model to do the things you suggested, in a few terse lines of English. Dump a few lines in AGENTS.md and you are good to go.

Your approach is to "fiddle with inadequate tools" for weeks or months until you can finally attain a pale imitation of what the frontier models can do effortlessly.

It's the classic "But I can customise EMACS endlessly, why would I use an actual IDE?" argument all over.

I get it. You don't feel ownership over someone else's AI. You don't feel involved, you don't feel like you have agency.

It's like LEGO or IKEA furniture: study after study has shown that people enjoy things more if they "put it together themselves", even if fundamentally the thing is worse and/or still essentially nothing more than plastic made in a factory.

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8bitbeep 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It's the classic "But I can customise EMACS endlessly, why would I use an actual IDE?" argument all over.

That paragraph sets me off. I’ll take Vim and Emacs over VSCode and Eclipse any day.

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SCHiM 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I get it. You don't feel ownership over someone else's AI. You don't feel involved, you don't feel like you have agency.

You don't _have_ ownership of someone else's ai, and that comes with real risks.

Security risks, privacy risks, business risk.

They might rug pull you, they might charge you more, or like atrophic, silently corrupt the answers, or code...

The labs are happy to jump on any emergent capability the scaling and training impart: generate prose, teach you things, cyber security, design, code, etc.

Do you really think that the frontier labs won't turn a popular capability, or trend they notice, into a first party tool if the ROI seems there? If it's your own private ai in your datacenter, you can keep it all secret, and not lose your business.

On the bitter lesson you're right of course:), wish I had a super computer to just scale that instead.

	▲	jiggawatts an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't have to be "externally hosted, proprietary AI model"! The argument is against "self-assembled small AI pieces" versus frontier monolithic models. A) You can always self-host something like Kimi, DeepSeek, or GLM. B) Just because you use a specific proprietary AI for programming doesn't actually bind you to that provider in any meaningful way. The authored code remains even if you stop paying them! Of course, if you use AI as an active component in some sort of service, then the EULA, rug-pulls, etc... suddenly start to matter. That's a different story.

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pianopatrick 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wouldn't this imply that in terms of AI usage you should take a "Wait and see" approach? I.e. just wait until the models can easily do whatever it is you want?