More generally, I think it’s more specialized knowledge.

If you have particularly specific knowledge in pretty much any domain, combining that with AI can lead to huge gains.

> Sounds terrible, but is it?

Yes

> It incentivises high-impact research

It incentivizes work that sounds impressive to laymen. Actual work tends to be technical and might not sound super exciting.

If 20 years ago, a politician had to get up and explain that we were spending millions of dollars training computers to recognize a strawberry, likely the entire field of machine learning would not exist today.

Lots of bad smells in this repo.

Do you have some examples to look at? I am curious.

Well the √t stuff looks like nonsense or way overblown, existing tools already do similar things, there’s pretty much a single commit with no follow up commits etc etc.

O(√t) looks weird but it's real. the "naive trial division" primality test for example.

It doesn’t apply to what this repo is doing. Also the 70 odd single author preprints seems to suggest the author is in some deep AI psychosis: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Logan-Nye-2

Oh wow you weren't joking.

Tech “decision makers” are feckless lemmings. If the trends tomorrow change, then their decisions will change.

At least where I am we can’t and shouldn’t know all the requirements of a project beforehand^. Every project is an iterative learning process between the users, product and engineers. The problem is if everyone uses AI to replace their thinking it breaks that process and no one learns anything.

^ I say shouldn’t because I work in research engineering. Most of the needs of our users are pretty unique. We’ve had people come in and try and specify every piece of work, -and ended up building a crud app no one wanted or used.

At least for some people I know it’s not necessarily because there’s pressure from leadership, but because it’s funny that the org spends like $15,000/mo writing HP fanfic or whatever

> Claude is a phd level mathematician , I am not

I’m going to guess that this is Gell-Mann amnesia more than anything, and it’s going to get a lot of organizations into a lot of weird places.

This isn’t foolproof either and plenty of people can talk convincingly about running projects that they had little to nothing to do with.

Totally agreed, I've been 'got' in interviews before. Now I ask follow-ups with specifics. If you were an IC, you should know libraries/architectures that were used. If you were in leadership, you should be able to tell me the story leading up to a project, about the parties involved, and the outcomes.

It takes time to do properly, though. And most of the time I just don't care about evaluating someone's capabilities like that.

This is a good way of putting it. I ship individual features faster, but the end to end process of shipping software has remained the roughly same because the vast majority of my time is building the “theory”.

Conversely, the value of software has dropped to 1/10 of what it was before Claude code existed.

I’m being glib, but there’s a whole class of software (eg simple crud apps) that just don’t have any marginal value anymore. So it doesn’t matter if it’s 10X faster or 100X faster. 100 x $0 is still 0.

You mean the price of software, as well as the cost. The value (to the user) is the same if not more.

Unless the user just vibe-codes their own version.

Which is what I’m seeing at my job. All of these “afternoon vibe code” projects never actually get users because everyone just vibe-codes their own.

But GP statement is still true. You just cut out a middleman.

But “your software” isn’t bringing value anymore if people don’t use it.

The things that the software does might have value, but the marginal utility of your software is effectively 0.