"In my experience, AI still drifts from what I meant it to do on anything bigger than building a widget."

I've had code bases with tens of thousands of lines of code built from scratch that I hand-reviewed every line of and worked with the AI to improve, and haven't had this issue. I feel like a significant part of this is due to an involved /plan stage -- going back and forth on building out a plan for what you want the AI to do involves surfacing the assumptions that you would have called drift if you asked them to implement it directly from your prompt.

Once the plan has been refined and is what I want it to be, getting it to implement everything in TDD style has for the most part given me 100% working code, as I wanted it to be, without issues. It definitely helps that I'm a principal-level engineer with extensive architectural experience -- but if you're able to tell the AI in detail what you want, have it ask questions for clarifications, and read through a plan before getting it implemented, and have a solid testing plus manual qa process (automated by chrome devtools mcp) in place, I've find that you can one-shot complex features, rewrites, and even not-insignificant applications that would have taken days to write by hand in a few hours.

Depends - using Sonnet here and generally it should be as you say: plan would produce the result.

Still Claude will sneak things in - in my recent plan, for example I had defined, per acceptance criteria what colours the statuses should be: green for live, blue for sold, grey for anything else; it changed this to: green for live, orange for in progress, blue for sold, red in demolition, etc. When pressed why did it to this, it was unable to explain why. This is with a plan where AC were explicitly provided from the task in Given/When/Then format and were to be adhered to strictly. I've caught this within planning, but I shouldn't need to be doing this.

Even in standard prompts where I tell it "Change this label from X to Y", it ended reordering the tabs unrelated to ask. Again I was not able for it to explain why - it was so abrupt. And it was in fresh context, without any pollution on what I expect it to do.

I also noticed a different behaviour regarding skill; today and yesterday it would not be following skill guidance at all ie: skill writing skill - I'd have to explicitly tell it to test skills after writing them, when this is a behaviour expected by default. Similarly with other skills - knowing that it should have done something per skill guidelines and it not doing it at all. This is new behaviour that I've not seen a week ago.

There are certainly domains where AI is not so effective, but at this point I would agree that at least in terms of web development if you can't get effective results from agents at this point it is a skill issue. That skill can be learned, if you recognize that learning is part of the solution. I do think prior experience in product design, specifications & business analysis as well as engineering leadership are all extremely helpful. Its about putting the agent in a box so small that it really can't screw up; but its also about being able to review design and code rigorously - to see around corners and anticipate possible weaknesses etc. There is really nothing I have to do when working with an agent that I haven't already been doing for decades but it seems to me that a lot of developers have never found a single bug while reviewing someone else's code.

But what was the overlap?

If you take the chromatic scale and then swap every other pair of notes on opposite sides of the circle, it yields the circle of fifths. You'll notice that on the circle of fifths notes that skip a step are a whole tone apart in the chromatic scale.

Although there have been some claims in these comments to the contrary, harmony is particularly mathematical. Symmetry and the breaking of within the integers mod 12 form the foundational principles of harmony.

Abstract Algebra, Combinatorics, and Discrete Mathematics are all definitely worth the squeeze; and incidentally something that could easily be taught to middle- and high-schoolers with the right examples.

and now we program the fabric of society ;)

This is why I exclusively use the API to 'chat' with GPT -- complete control over the context presented.

Many artists in fact do exactly this -- they do not make the art themselves, but instead imagine and manage the 'art project' and delegate tasks to other artists that work for them. Leonardo (Da Vinci) in fact himself did this with much of the work required for his paintings, although the most crucial parts he left for himself.

Yes, that is why I chose Leonardo as an example.

In that case, I think the answer to your hypothetical is "If you can convince people to call you that then yes."

Didn't Warhol explore this conceptual space during his career?

They are slant rhymes of one another. B and M are phonetically nearby, as are ia and ih and ao and ou. In no way like hacker news and cake her knees -- but more like hacker news and hagger moos ;)

I stand by 'ish' - B is plosive & M is not; that difference is if anything more apparent in Mandarin than English.

Then 'im' is read flat and not like 'ià'.

Of course 'bo' is quite like 'bāo', but that's your 'ish'.

Are you a native Chinese speaker?

I've noticed Chinese are very loose with their puns, and it helps that there is a lot of regional dialect variation in pronunciation.

For example a common one is 520 (wu er ling) being used for "wo ai ni" (I love you)

So I wouldn't put it past them to consider the two words as "similar"

No, very far from it! That's interesting, thanks.

I have also found that programming is the gateway drug to Math B. Thanks to Functional Programming and Type Theory I eventually found may way into Abstract Algebra, Topology, and Category Theory... Wish I had time to go back and study these with a mentor, though!

>>> The Pythagorean theorem becomes intuitively true not when you have some deep insight about Euclidean space, but when, on seeing a right triangle, three proofs of it spring instantly to mind.

To be honest, this sounds like orienting one's self in the 'space of mathematics'. Is it not possible that, just like one can navigate by landmarks (proofs) or by the space itself (deep understanding), that there are in fact two roads to intuition in mathematics, of which ones is practice and fluency, and the other is deep insight and understanding?