Punch yourself in the face with reality

https://adi.bio/reality

by AdityaAnand1 • 9 days ago

246 126 9 days ago

adi.bio

sorokod2• 8 days ago

This quote from Philip K Dick seems relevant:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

AdityaAnand13• 8 days ago

Love it.

And something I wish the current crop of AI startups learn as well, just making XYZ agentic maybe isn't the answer to everything.

Same folks that said crypto will destroy traditional finance are now saying stuff like, AI will "destroy" all jobs and create a permanent underclass. Almost feels like every few years a new cult gets created with messaging perfectly designed to trigger the Gen-Z(/current college generation) into a frenzy and drinking the kool-aid.

Can't wait for it to be over (and then to do it all over again with something else). Being in my 30s helps. I care less :)

fragmede• 8 days ago

Yeah. In the 90's it was outsourcing is going to move all software jobs to India. Turns out that did happen, but also not. Still, manufacturing jobs have actually left the USA.

wolvesechoes• 6 days ago

"AI will "destroy" all jobs and create a permanent underclass"

Of course, this is silly!

The rich people will do this, using AI at least as an excuse.

totetsu3• 8 days ago

It’s a nice quote. But what about the notion that we’re always believing in something, and sometimes those beliefs tune closer to something objective but if we keep tuning past that into something else, then that reality becomes hard to conceive of and really does seem like it’s gone away.

ozim• 8 days ago

When you break a leg you can’t start believing it is all good. It doesn’t go away.

As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough.

Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.

lstodd• 8 days ago

There isn't an exact quote from Douglas Adams, you have to read it all, but he put the point marvelously: reality is scary, unlimited and lovecraftesque, and we have filters to avoid that. Only when you master those filters you can consider yourself conscious.

throwawayffffas2• 8 days ago

No matter how much you don't believe there is a tiger behind the bush. The tiger really believes you are going to be tasty.

lesostep• 8 days ago

Common philosophical answer is that people only can know the approximation of reality, never the reality itself.

Better approximations usually score you more points, which is why our perception usually evolves closer to reality.

Bad scoring systems exist.

For example, let's say if an extremely privileged person – a favorite son|daughter of a billionaire – takes random chances and people around him|her always agree and accommodate for them to win (because they want a favor from a parent), than this person will most likely have a very warped sense of reality through no fault of their own. Basically their only approximation could only be "Do whatever, just don't touch fire with bare hands and don't make daddy angry"

On the other hand, the suffering child from "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" would also have warped sense of reality, because they lose no matter what action they take. The only reality approximation they can know is "everything feels bad"

Sidenote: in my philosophy, the continuous warping of reality happens mostly to people in overprivileged and underprivileged positions. Which is why I believe that a good equality index makes for a healthier society. But thats my pov, I'm not trying to sell it or anything :)

Note that I wrote "continuous warping". While sometimes bad approximations got rewarded more than good ones, reality is probabilistic. Since it can't be comprehended by people, we basically define reality as "something that is more likely".

And that's the answer to your question. If you tune past the reality, you start scoring worse again, and turn back. It's a distance thing, and the goal is to get as close to zero as you can, doesn't matter from which direction.

card_zero• 8 days ago

"Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are opposites.

Schiendelman2• 8 days ago

There's a difference.

The first is getting market feedback.

The second is just getting opinions.

pixl978• 8 days ago

If I listened to market feedback I would have delivered a faster horse.

pjc50• 8 days ago

Not quite. Optimism about where you are going doesn't conflict with being able to accurately assess where you currently are.

It does require you to think carefully about what constitutes validation or invalidation of your ideas, though.

saghm• 8 days ago

Not if you're perfectly able to differentiate which things will eventually succeed rather than will always fail! The best strategy for "winning in the age of AI" is "be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy", which at least anecdotally quite a lot of people lately seem to think they are able to do lately.

Probably not so different from past hype cycles, except maybe this time it will be different!

jamesrcole• 8 days ago

"Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you"

If you're doing something that isn't like how people are used to things being done, is novel, or is contra to common beliefs, there's a good chance that nobody will believe in you. And in such situations, their lack of belief is not a reliable indicator of whether what you're doing is valid or correct. Most people's negative responses in such cases are emotional responses, not rational ones.

In such situations, "Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are not opposites.

lo_zamoyski• 8 days ago

Not really. You can be honest about something working and others can disagree with your assessment.

vanviegen• 8 days ago

In this context "working" means selling. If you're selling the product that means that others are on board.

_moof• 8 days ago

No, they're actually the same thing: making an honest assessment of reality. In the first case you're doing so to prevent self-delusion. In the second you're doing so to prevent others from clouding your judgment.

andai2• 8 days ago

Figure out why you were put on this earth.

Who is responsible for this mess? ;)

inigyou7• 8 days ago

Nobody. We're just here. Mentally healthy human adults have ways to avoid thinking about the terrifying reality of infinite potential being restricted by a finite lifespan of decay, but not everyone is mentally healthy all the time.

alansaber2• 8 days ago

Ah, so this is why oldschool runescape is still popular

andai2• 8 days ago

Thanks. I was making simultaneous reference to Half-Life 1 (where the scientists keep asking "who is responsible for this mess?" and the humorous implication is that the player himself is the one responsible — having inserted the crystal into the laser or whatever), and the recordings of Alan Watts, in one of which he mentions the parents love to project lots of guilt onto their child but... Of course the one responsible for the child's existence are the parents. "They know what they did!" Hahaha

quirkot• 8 days ago

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

AdityaAnand13• 8 days ago

My previous business failed. Everything we built was useless. 2.5 yrs.

My current business is profitable. Almost everything we built was still useless. Since 4 yrs ago.

The amount of effort that went into that "almost" Is something that I don't think AI moved any needle for even though half of our journey was after AI coding took off.

Speed of coding was never the problem, still isn't even if AI allegedly 10x-ed it.

inigyou7• 8 days ago

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

pizzafeelsright4• 8 days ago

The goal isn't solving a problem (for founders) but to get investor money. The VC system is designed to 100x investments.

People who solve problems while being profitable do not take investment money unless they want to expand or sell.

"What is the exit?" that is the question for every startup.

ryandrake2• 8 days ago

Many startups simply solve the following problem: Rich person has a massive amount of money, and wants to use some of that to chase risky returns. They don't really know what to do with it, so they become an LP and act as part of a risk sink for crazy ideas. In that way, the pitch decks, logos, landing pages, and breathless hype is, itself, the "problem" in the process of being solved.

ChrisMarshallNY4• 8 days ago

I have found that it gets some of the "cruft" out of the work, freeing me to do more work.

Since starting to use LLMs, I have actually been spending more time, at the console, than before.

One reason is that I like to ship (as opposed to "code"). That means a lot of tedious, boring stuff. The kind of thing that I want to "take a break before tackling," so I may take 30 minutes, and watch something on TV for a while, before rolling up my sleeves.

Now, the LLM can take care of a lot of this stuff, so I am not motivated to "take a break," so much, anymore.

It doesn't actually feel bad, but I now have to schedule "downtime." I never used to have to do that, before. My work always involved a lot of "context switch" points; naturally set up for taking breaks.

throwawayffffas2• 8 days ago

Yeah I have found that AI in general has a procrastination nullifying effect.

Before dealing with anything that might put me off. I can just ask the agent to do it for me. And then, do something else, take that break, but regardless in a few minutes I will have something to jump on instead of the same blank terminal with the same blinking cursor judging me. It really makes taking the first step, much easier and then the ball just gets rolling.

I see what his point is to be honest though, it's easy to say just one more week of polish, just 5 more features, etc.

theshrike793• 8 days ago

It's the empty page problem.

For some people (most?) it's really hardhard, almost impossible, to fill the page with text, but when you have a page of text - even if it's shit - suddenly it's easy to critique it and interate to make it better.

AI lets me poop out an MVP out of any idea or spec with very little effort on my part, then I can go in and start improving it.

randusername• 8 days ago

And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.

Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.

On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.

Grombobulous2• 8 days ago

I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity.

It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.

But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.

This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.

For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.

When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.

It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

NopIdoN3• 8 days ago

It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

smcg• 8 days ago

I feel bruised

vertias3u• 8 days ago

Same

a_c4• 8 days ago

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real progress was made when I actually dig into the documentation of colmap/OpenMVS (essential tools, which I had never used before, in my workflow).

The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.

inigyou7• 8 days ago

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

a_c4• 8 days ago

Indeed it is. I’m very grateful to what LLM enables me.

The revelation to me was that I used to code what I know, now I could code what I don’t know. The common path is that when I face something I don’t know, which is quite often, to move forward I have to level up my understanding.

pizzafeelsright4• 8 days ago

This was true a while ago. Today we are replacing decades old sloppy production code with 100% verified better code through tests written by AI, code written by AI. This is not looking functional but drop in functional replacement with measurable improvements.

ryandrake2• 8 days ago

It seems like an absolute dream for corporate execs who don't know anything about development, see a taped-together prototype built in a day, and think to themselves "Wow, we're 90% done... we could almost ship that!!"

SoftTalker3• 8 days ago

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

a_c4• 8 days ago

I find it highly similar between running agents and running human teams.

Clear goal, share context, delegate but verify. Running a team of engineers also inevitably generates pages and pages of material, design spec, code, test, review. Just that we now do that with agents and agents are way less trust worthy

bigmattystyles• 8 days ago

3 pages of reply or overly verbose code, often without abstractions - I read all the posters here and in other forums say that programming has shifted towards reviewing AI output rather than coding said output manually; I agree, however, I just don't buy that everyone is actually reviewing the code as intensely as one would expect - there is a tendency that arrived rather quickly to assume that the AI is correct and efficient. I guess the ultimate reviewer is another AI agent I guess.

bryanrasmussen• 8 days ago

It's sort of its nature for some reason

I've known some people who can never stop talking. Maybe they are overly represented in the training set.

overgard4• 8 days ago

The verbosity in code is also a huge problem. I asked it to introduce 4 functions in my project (like, literally, just functions) and I'm looking at 32 files changed and two spec files that are total 200 lines long. It's functional, but jesus, this is going to need a refactor.

recursive• 8 days ago

for some reason

Usage is metered/billed by the token. This suggests a few possible hypotheses for why they might tend to be verbose.

sbloz• 8 days ago

I think the mistake there was the 5 hour session specing the app. It's so hard to know what you want before you see it, so optimize towards seeing it as soon as possible. That's what I thought the article was going to be about based off the title.

Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if the code for the prototype is a mess the "idea" of it should be cleaner. I like to have an LLM make a new spec at that point, and start fresh with it. You can clean up the abstractions and the UX there.

When writing code is cheap figuring out what you want to write is the hard part. It always was, but the barrier of getting the code written and working made that less obvious.

grebc• 8 days ago

One of the most foundational insights I’ve ever had in IT is clients don’t know what they want until you shove it in their face. And only then do they say no, no, no, change this, this and that.

Same story as building a house. There’s so many unknowns.

brightball• 8 days ago

I find the more structure that the AI can be given to follow the better. I recently tried building a side project with Elixir, Phoenix & LiveView but on the recommendation of somebody I decided to have it use the Ash framework within it.

I've been very pleasantly surprised. The combination of the compiler improvements in Elixir 1.20 and the structural guardrails from Ash seems to have led to very consistent, organized and readable code.

cadamsdotcom• 8 days ago

A climbing app..

Does anyone want one?

The article says to stop building and go outside!

And actually, talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.

a_c4• 8 days ago

I climb and I want one :)

talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.

Indeed. The climbers I met are very supportive. They helped me scan the gym, shared their own climbing footage, which is what I'm trying to do, visualize climbing in a 3D scene.

rukuu001• 8 days ago

As apps get larger and more complex, I get the LLM to produce 'developer documentation'. I find it helps them stay on the rails, and it helps ME stay on top of everything.

The 'spec' frameworks are documentation as well, but can become contradictory as decisions about the app change over time.

scotty79• 7 days ago

The only two instances where I didn't manage to achieve satisfactory outcome with AI were when I overspecced ahead of time. The things I left out of the spec were implemented in the most undesired manner possible.

The best mode of work for me was gradually sculpting the prototype into a product by providing feedback and moving to version 2 (from scratch but often with v1 accessible as inspiration) if I felt like it's becoming overbloated.

bana-io• 8 days ago

Click biat. Sorry.

threethirtytwo4• 8 days ago

No this isn't punching yourself in the face. Not for swes.

What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question.

Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stomach. That you don't matter, that all your years of coding and your identity is about to be consumed by a machine that is superior. The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow. We don't code by hand anymore and this came about in less than 5 years since the popular rise of LLMs. Think about what the next 5 years will bring.

That is punching yourself in the face with reality^^

zahlman• 8 days ago

We don't code by hand anymore

/usr/bin/vim on my machine begs to differ.

threethirtytwo4• 7 days ago

I mean some people on this earth refuse to use electricity and they still live away from civilization. When I say people use electricity I obviously don't refer to those people.

So when I say we don't code by hand anymore. I'm obviously not referring to you.

overgard4• 8 days ago

What even motivates you to write something like this? In what universe is a software engineer a "rank"? You sound absurdly bitter that people want to keep their livelihood?

This doesn't even match with reality. I got laid off in January because of "ai" (scare quotes because it was really about the salaries of the US based teams being more expensive than the overseas teams, I think). I got hired at a new job with better pay within two months, and my team is still hiring software engineers, and we work on cutting edge stuff. And yes we use AI (tastefully), but nobody here expects it to replace them. Hacker News and twitter are a fricking echo chamber of the most obnoxious people trying to be "thought leaders", but it doesn't match my reality at all.

threethirtytwo4• 7 days ago

"The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow"

^ read what I wrote. I'm telling you the future, but you're talking about your current job. So there's no contradiction here. Your current situation FITS what I said. And my prediction of the future is the most likely out come.

What even motivates you to write something like this

Because it's the most likely truth? It's the most probably reality. The god awful truth is like the sun. It permeates everything, it's rays touch everything and it's a very obvious flaming fireball in the sky, yet nobody can stare directly at it. No one can fully face the sun.

I ask you, What motivates you to lie to yourself? To deny the obvious trajectory of AI? Does preserving your livelihood involve denying reality?

holtkam2• 8 days ago

This guy's head will explode when he realizes that AI has been better at coding than humans for years and yet software engineering employment % has barely twitched...

layla5alive• 8 days ago

? Claude code didn't get very useable until about 4.5 - and its still not better than the best humans - only faster to first implementation.

You must have a different definition of most of the words you used than I do.

OlavKoefoed• 8 days ago

Reminds me of the part in "Silicon Valley" where they launched and couldn't figure out why no-one (except engineers) became real users.

SoftTalker3• 8 days ago

I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user

This has been a problem since the beginning of tech startups. I worked in a dot-com in the late 1990s. Lots of investor money. New offices. Hundreds of employees. The product was well thought out, fairly well built, and it worked. But they had no customers. It's even in the same market niche as products that today have millions of users, but those folks weren't ready for it in 1999, at least not enough of them and quickly enough to matter.

Building something quickly is only a small part of what it takes to have a successful startup. You must solve a problem for people who are ready for your solution and willing to pay for it.

pixl978• 8 days ago

Hence marketing in making people want it.

So you have two options, be good at making people want to spend money on something. This is pretty hard and a rare capability.

The other is to watch trends and catch what people want now, and be ready to deliver a product that does that....

SoftTalker3• 8 days ago

Really at that time the internet was still a novelty and too hard to use for many people. Remember this was before smartphones, a lot of people were still on dial-up, which added tremendous friction to using online services. Many households didn't even have a PC that could get online. Facebook didn't exist. Amazon had just started to expand beyond being an online bookstore. The investment bubble and hype were too far ahead of the reality and patience ran out.

ReactiveJelly2• 8 days ago

"Nature cannot be fooled"

zkmon• 8 days ago

Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.

Reminds me of a politician in India who would ask elders in his family to slap him hard before he starts out on the election campaigns. He says that the slaps are meant to keep him alert and honest.

all2• 8 days ago

Pain is a powerful teacher. I have grown the most when I hurt.

jimbokun• 8 days ago

If all you know is how to build, and you just use AI as an excuse to keep building more and more and more, you are just procrastinating and avoiding reality.

I’ve had this sense about AI for a while now and this articulates that feeling far better than I’ve been able to.

01284a7e• 8 days ago

If 90% of tech startups failed in the past, AI pushes that that rate to over 99%.

Cloud was like this too. You spent all this money as a startup with AWS regardless of whether you made a dollar or not.

k__• 8 days ago

While it's true that unsupervised AIs build a heap of trash, I have to admit, it doesn't look much worse than some of the code I saw powering products that sold for millions.

The only thing that changed is the scale.

neongreen• 8 days ago

As someone who used to have an incredibly hard time putting my app in front of users, or asking for feedback, or getting rejected, etc:

Posts like this one always made me feel like I was a coward. Like there was.. unvirtuousness.. in not killing one’s darlings, not validating ideas, not quitting things in time, not looking for product-market fit.

I can report that looking for product-market fit, and everything else from the list above, became easier once I started taking antidepressants and adhd meds.

For example, it turns out deciding to punch yourself in the face with reality is much easier when you don’t feel, for example, like abandoning a project would be a giant betrayal and a thing one might in theory do but you must never do ever under any circumstances.

- - -

There are likely many people who have more capacity for self control, and who are genuinely helped by hearing moderately harsh truths because they can (1) take a look at their behavior, (2) realize it hurts them and their chances of success, (3) realize where they’ve been blind to reality, and (4) change.

I suspect that such people assume — maybe correctly in most cases — that if someone hasn’t done (4), it’s because they haven’t done enough (1-3), and this is the appropriate lever to push.

I don’t know how to finish this comment.

overgard4• 8 days ago

I wouldn't phrase it as cowardice or virtue.. it's just a skill you have to learn. I'm struggling with getting my project in front of users for a bit of a different reason, which is just that it's a bit of a specialty writing tool, and asking people to test it would also be asking them to do work with it (it's really the only way to know if it works for them or not), which is kind of a lift. My hope here is just that because I myself am a consumer of this and have worked in this space, my judgement will be similar to other's judgement. I hope!

mips_avatar• 8 days ago

I'm a creative person so my brain requires that I make something every day. Sometimes I make stuff that isn't very good. I've been told a lot by former bosses and random people that my desire to build stuff is frivolous. I could punch myself in the face with this reality, but then I would stop building.

jamie_royce• 8 days ago

AI has made it easier than ever to avoid customers while feeling incredibly productive.

pinklimetea• 7 days ago

You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

I mean, this is true of literally every thought I have.

How many pointless imaginary arguments have you won? Maybe it had some benefit, but it was probably mostly unproductive thought. Time spent, calories burned, that would have been better spent elsewhere.

How many random side experiments or "Guess I'll just try" moments ended up defining your career, or life? People meet their spouses this way, and land their first real job.

It's all just flowing out of darkness... Nobody knows where it comes from. Nobody knows where it goes. Nobody knows what works. Nobody knows what fails.

But I'm not so naive to brush off tangibilities that unfold before my very eyes.

That's where some of us draw the line. You have to know the difference between reality and "unreality", or myth. That goes both ways

Punch yourself in the face with reality

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