I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.
More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
> I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.
And most modern parents would swamp the child with a bunch of mind rotting auto playing TV and video games. There's an account of Terence's time at university where he nearly fails his oral qualifying exams as he spent most of his time playing Civ rather than studying anything. Imagine the travesty for the world if 5 year old Terence had been handed an Xbox.
Yeah I agree, an 8 year old isn't setting up these meetings and correspondences.
I think beyond even having supportive parents, the most important part was that he had a parent that had a degree in the field that he happened to be a genius in. His mother knew exactly how to guide her child through the material, even if it just was to let him go off to a corner and read the books she guided him towards for 3-4 hours a day for fun. So many children have advanced proclivities for certain things and parents that just can't even see what it is their child is brilliant at.
Having someone that knows the path and can point it out to them is a beautiful thing to have as a child.
I think gene and characteristics are more important than knowledge and degree. I happen to have two parents who are both in education, one teaches in university and one teaches in middle schools. Because of this I also know many friends whose parents are also teachers.
Without any statistical significance, but nonetheless the sample size is greater than 5. None of us consider their parents to be great, or even good teachers. All kids squandered sometime after they are free from the parents, usually in universities.
This experience impacts me so much, that I have a bias that teachers should not teach their own kids.
A parent of mine was also a teacher, and other than grading their student's 9th grade math exams when I was in elementary school, I was on my own for most of my learning.
So I agree that yes, just having a parent who is a teacher doesn't necessarily get you much, outside of likely being in a home environment where school is deemed important (many don't have this unfortunately). But where things become slightly magical is when you have a genetically gifted child and a parent that both knows how to guide that genius and has the resources to do so.
One needs to be a (long term present) parent to understand these subtleties.
You also hear just the success stories which are often extremely marginal, when such approach wouldn't fit development curve of some other potential genius we would not be hearing their less successful story, would we.
Not diminishing the overall message, in 80s even in western democracies deeper info was not so readily available so its not like his parents just threw him wifi-connected tablet with wikipedia opened and that was it.
But I think what should be celebrated more is some proper hard long term effort and not just usual approach with exceptional results.
Apologies I am not a native speaker so sometimes more complex thoughts take long sentences to explain.
We are discussing his parent's contribution to his growth. Some, like me, tend to agree they just gave him (good) tools and he found his interest and way through and beyond due to superior analytical skills and overall intelligence, not through some super duper tutoring by them.
I have cca such cousin. He was way ahead of his class (which was already math-focused class from secondary school), geniune interest in deeper math, physics and philosophy from early age. Even very good at software development in old Pascal or C. Nobody was tutoring him in any way, he just went to public library and borrowed what he liked.
The stuff thats not hard but still counts as discovery and learning must be self-motivating in way more average folks simply don't experience, not with same topics.
His parents, as an old saying in my country, must have done a tremendous amount of good things in their previous life to be rewarded with an easy kid :P
This all sounds like the stochastic parrot fallacy. Total determinism is not the goal, and it not a prerequisite for general intelligence. As you allude to above, humans are also not fully deterministic. I don't see what hard theoretical barriers you've presented toward AGI or future ASI.
I haven't heard the stochastic parrot fallacy (though I have heard the phrase before). I also don't believe there are hard theoretical barriers. All I believe is that what we have right now is not enough yet. (I also believe autoregressive models may not be capable of AGI.)
Did you just invent a nonsense fallacy to use as a bludgeon here? “Stochastic parrot fallacy” does not exist, and there actually quite a bit of evidence supporting the stochastic parrot hypothesis.
I imagine "stochastic parrot fallacy" could be their term for using the hypothesis to dismiss LLMs even where they can be useful; i.e., dismissing them for their weaknesses alone and ignoring their strengths. (Of course, we have no way to know for sure without their input.)
I don’t believe the article makes any claims on the infeasibility of a future ASI. It just explores likely failure modes.
It is fine to be worried about both alignment risks and economic inequality. The world is complex, there are many problems all at once, we don’t have to promote one at the cost of the other.
Totally agreed. Most the weird concepts of Gas Town are just workarounds for bad behavior in Claude or the underlying models. Anthropic is in the best position to get their own model to adhere to orchestration steps, obviating the need for these extra layers. Beyond that, there shouldn’t actually be much to orchestration beyond a solid messaging and task management implementation.
The author's high-value flowcharts vs Steve Yegge's AI art is enough of a case-in-point for how confusing his posts and repos are. However this is a pervasive problem with AI coding tools. Unsurprisingly, the creators of these tools are also the most bullish about agentic coding, so the source code shows the consequences. Even Claude Code itself seems to experience an unusually high number of regressions or undocumented changes for such a widely used product. I had the same problem when recently trying to understand the details of spec-kit or sprites from their docs. Still, I agree that Gas Town is a very instructive example of what the future of AI coding will look like. I'm confident mature orchestration workflows will arrive in 2026.
For me, the killer feature would more be _autocomplete_ for art. I love to cartoon and doodle, but don’t have the time/patience/skillset to build professional digital assets. If I could go from my pencil drawn sketch to a flashy png, that would be awesome! I think it’d be a nice use of AI, since it just allows me to do more with my own creativity.
Unfortunately whenever I’ve tried uploading a sketch to ChatGPT or Gemini, it seems to fixate on details of my sketch, and recreates my mistakes in high fidelity. It fails to take a creative leap toward a good result. I’ve heard some professionals have gotten good results building custom workflows in ComfyUI.
No, seems to be about "turns X into Y", while what parent seems to want, is something that just makes making X easier/better, instead of doing those sort of "transformations" which is usually where the human feeling gets lost.
This is a great consolidation of various techniques and patterns for agentic coding. It’s valuable just to standardize our vocabulary in this new world of AI led or assisted programming. I’ve seen a lot of developers all converging toward similar patterns. Having clear terms and definitions for various strategies can help a lot in articulating the best way to solve a given problem. Not so different from approaching a problem and saying “hey, I think we’d benefit from TDD here.”
I recognized the need for this recently and started by documenting one [1]... then I dropped the ball because I, too, spent my winter holiday engrossed in agentic development. (Instead of documenting patterns.) I'm glad somebody kept writing!
I will ruefully admit that I had also planned a similar blog post! I am hoping I can still add some value to the conversation, but it does seem like _everyone_ is writing about agentic development right now.
I believe there are valid critiques to be made of prediction markets, particularly on the morality of allowing bets on events with serious/market outcomes (the market could create an incentive for an insider to actualize that bad outcome, hence we should ban the market as it increases the odds of a bad outcome occurring) or on the negative repercussions of gambling addiction. Instead of making either of these valid arguments, the article instead decides to critique the epistemic value of prediction markets. It comes off to me as ill-informed handwringing and tribal signaling, rather than bothering to engage critically with the topic and offering a meaningful critique.
More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
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