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Comment by conductr

12 hours ago

It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow his medical advice.

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conductr

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tstrimple  6 hours ago

> Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this.

A confident statement that's trivial to disprove. I use claude code to build and deploy services on my NAS. I can ask it to spin up a new container on my subdomain and make it available internal only or also available externally. It knows it has access to my Cloudflare API key. It knows I am running rootless podman and my file storage convention. It will create the DNS records for a cloudflared tunnel or just setup DNS on my pihole for internal only resolution. It will check to make sure podman launched the container and it will then try to make an HTTP request to the site to verify that it is up. It will reach for network tools to test both the public and private interfaces. It will check the podman logs for any errors or warnings. If it detects errors, it will attempt to resolve them and is typically successful for the types of services I'm hosting.

Instructions like: "Setup Jellyfin in a container on the NAS and integrate it with the rest of the *arr stack. I'd like it to be available internally and externally on watch.<domain>.com" have worked extremely well for me. It delivers working and integrated services reliably and does check to see that what it deployed is working all without my explicit prompting.

dionian  11 hours ago

Brenda + AI > Brenda

  • conductr  11 hours ago

    That’s definitely the hype. But I don’t know if I agree. I’m essentially a Brenda in my corporate finance job and so far have struggled to find any useful scenarios to use AI for.

    I thought once this can build me a Gantt chart because that’s an annoying task in excel. I had the data. When I asked it to help me, “I can’t do that but I can summarize your data”. Not helpful.

    Any type of analysis is exactly what I don’t want to trust it with. But I could use help actually building things, which it wouldn’t do.

    Also, Brenda’s are usually fast. Having them use a tool like AI that can’t be fully trusted just slows them down. So IMO, we haven’t proven the AI variable in your equation is actually a positive value.

    • wat10000  10 hours ago

      I can't speak to finance. In programming, it can be useful but it takes some time and effort to find where it works well.

      I have had no success in using it to create production code. It's just not good enough. It tends to pattern-match the problem in somewhat broad strokes and produce something that looks good but collapses if you dig into it. It might work great for CRUD apps but my work is a lot more fiddly than that.

      I've had good success in using it to create one-off helper scripts to analyze data or test things. For code that doesn't have to be good and doesn't have to stand the test of time, it can do alright.

      I've had great success in having it do relatively simple analysis on large amounts of code. I see a bug that involves X, and I know that it's happening in Y. There's no immediately obvious connection between X and Y. I can dig into the codebase and trace the connection. Or I can ask the machine to do it. The latter is a hundred times faster.

      The key is finding things where it can produce useful results and you can verify them quickly. If it says X and Y are connected by such-and-such path and here's how that triggers the bug, I can go look at the stuff and see if that's actually true. If it is, I've saved a lot of time. If it isn't, no big loss. If I ask it to make some one-off data analysis script, I can evaluate the script and spot-check the results and have some confidence. If I ask it to modify some complicated multithreaded code, it's not likely to get it right, and the effort it takes to evaluate its output is way too much for it to be worthwhile.

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  • mrgoldenbrown  8 hours ago

    But execs aren't talking about that, they are talking about firing Brenda, or replacing her with a junior version.