@davidgerard I have multiple examples of Copilot failing to provide accurate information about MS products, which, apparently, Copilot can configure FOR you!

How's that possible?

@davidgerard I don’t know what you base this on. It most definitely work for some things, at least some of the time.

For example, someone I know needed to do some stuff with an Arduino to make it show a pretty wave pattern using unevenly distributed led lights. This person was a crafter, not a coder. However, by oploading a hand drawn picture of where the leds where placed it generated a web based simulator with sliders to tweak parameters. Then, when he was happy with the result after tuning the sliders, it generated code for the arduino that compiled and ran perfectly. First try.

It might have been an incredible amount of luck, but this non-technical person got his art project to work without needing to learn anything about code.

@davidgerard "You can't set a hallucination engine to work doing tasks."

You can if your goal is to produce a lot of material that is not correct, or it doesn't matter if the material is correct.

I think that is what people tend to miss about the drive to get AI into the world. The people pushing it don't care if it's accurate, it might even be better for them if it's not, they just want a lot of material that looks passable to some people. They want filler and propaganda and misinformation.

@davidgerard that reminds me... I have to do my company's mandatory agentic AI training course this week... wish me luck 🤮

@davidgerard

Software Agents never made much sense. In order for people to trust them to act on their behalf the task they do have to be so well defined that for all practical purposes it'd better to just automate it.

"AI Agents" make even less sense. Has anyone even suggested one that's more than just an automation wrapper around a sequence of LLM calls and service APIs?

@davidgerard

The use case for 'agents' isn't that they do useful things unattended, it's that they can consume (billed for) tokens unattended.

@davidgerard Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but for what I understood, it's basically the same LLM stuff but in the background?
Basically, if you roll the dice enough times, you might get something that passes all the unit tests?
(And burn a whole bunch of tokens in the process...)

@davidgerard

People who were losing patience are like “ah, agents, now we’ll surely get what we were promised!” And then it takes a few months or a year for them to figure out, nope it still doesn’t work. By which time the AI grifters will have another silver bullet to pitch.