Did the security researcher point the LLM at the blob of information and say "Find vulnerabilities" or was the LLM told to "determine if vulnerability X is present in this blob"? Confirmation of suspected vulnerabilities is a different problem from finding vulnerabilities.

Same. I've used it for debugging failed canary tests which required scripts and very specific knowledge on the canary platform that I wouldnt of ever spent time on.

I also have scripts to fetch specific database assets and forward them to slack channels so I can easily share them with a group rather than manually running a query and generating them.

I had a theory about improving a product. I asked it to build an offline simulation setup to try various implementations. The results were a bit fishy but i decided to give it a try and A/B testing is showing similar results.

And now im vibecoding a locally hosted dashboard. This one is less useful for anything specific, and more of a minor quality of life improvement, but its fun to just vibe code and see changes happen occasionally. Its not a critical thing.

I find it very useful for debugging tasks like that but it always ends up costing me like $3 despite doing incredible work. And then one of the other engineers at my company will rack up like $200 in tokens in one day producing tens of thousands of SLOC and we end up actually shipping about the same stuff. Sometimes I wonder if it's bad agent use discipline (just pointing it at massive codebases and having it read it all from scratch each time) and sometimes I wonder if they're just using it for personal projects. Because none of that code seems to land in prod, and I've found that cranking out 10s of thousands of SLOCs at a time is a recipe for a mess.

But depending on how much you get paid hourly, $3 would be very little comparatively, no?

Yeah that's my point. You can get a ton of value for a few bucks so I'm not sure what these people are doing to torch hundreds of dollars. It's possible they haven't figured out patterns to make AI work on large codebases, and it's also possible they're just churning endless on massively bloated AI written codebases.

I work at a company that mainly makes money off ads. Theres no doubt in my mind that the end goal is to make their ads blend into organic content and make them indistinguishable. Typically that results in positive A/B metrics. Its also a reason why influencer driven ads perform well, they seem more organic.

I have recently began driving projects with multiple contributors that are following a plan I laid out and got buy-in on.

I attempted to run the project entirely asynchronous, where we had a slack channel, ICs had their section of goals and milestones, and I was there for them to consult with, provide feedback, unblock obstacles, and proactively come up with interfaces across the objectives. I thought this would be a nice high trust method of doing things that gave people ownership over their respective parts.

What happened was one person made an AI copy of the doc I had and began vending that out to everyone else, progress was quite slow and really complex in original proposed PRs (unsure if thats AI or author doing that), people did not really follow through with their implementations and it all ended up taking longer than I expected for no good reason. In the end, I lost trust in these ICs as I now feel the need to chase them and have low desire to work with them.

For the next XFN project, I will be driving a brief weekly meeting. Unfortunately the pressure seems to be important. I think there are things I could've done better communication wise at the beginning and throughout as well, but overall I felt disappointed that I had to check in to see progress.

Meta had grown headcount by 50% in the last 7 years. In the same time frame, they tripled their revenue up to mid $200B range.

Even if every employee fired saved $500k a year, that'd be roughly $4B in a year. Not a small amount but relative to their income, not huge either

Im at a public, well known tech company.

We got broad and wide access to AI tools maybe a month ago now. AI tools meaning claude code, codex, cursor and a set of other random AI tools.

I use them very often. They've taken a lot of the fun and relaxing parts of my job away and have overall increased my stress. I am on the product side of the business and it feels necessary for me to have 10 new ideas and now the ones with the most ideas will be rewarded, which I am not as good at. Ive tried having the agents identify opportunities for infra improvements and had no good luck there. I haven't tried it for product suggestions but I think it would be poor at that too.

I get sent huge PRs and huge docs now that I wasnt sent before with pressure to accept them as is.

I write code much faster but commit it at the same pace due to reviews taking so long. I still generate single task PRs to keep them reviewable and do my own thorough review before hand. I always have an idea in ny head about how it should work before getting started, and I push the agent to use my approach. The AI tools are good at catching small bugs, like mutating things across threads. I like to use it to generate plans for implementation (that only I and the bots read, I still handwrite docs that are broadly shared and referenced).

Overall, AI has me nervous. Primarily because it does the parts that I like very well and has me spending a higher portion of my job on the things I dont like or find more tiresome.

As someone who has worked in an ad domain, 100% agree. Ads are like a dangling carrot. There's always a way to get ad gains by blending them with organic content. What starts off as cleanly separated incrementally evolves into being indistinguishable from the original product offering.

It also skews towards power users, as it allows for more ad inventory. If they're going to do an ad auction marketplace with bidding snd such then they're likely to rollout slowly to keep auction pressure and bids high enough. Expand to too much inventory and CPMs will drop like crazy.

I work on ads as a SWE at a company youve heard of. Albeit, its been less than a few years for me.

Maybe OpenAI does things different, but as soon as an OKR around ad performance gets committed to, the experience will degrade. Sure they're not selling data, however they'll almost certainly have a direct response communication where advertisers tell Open AI what and when youve interacted with their products. Ads will be placed and displayed in increasingly more aggressive positions, although it'll start out non intrusive.

Im curious how their targeting will work and how much control they'll give advertisers to start. Will they allow businesses of all sizes? Will they allow advertisers to control how their ads work? I bet Amazon is foaming at the mouth to get their products fed into chat gpt results.

And no change in exercise or other levels of physical activity, home life, work life, or other diets attempted, right?

Its awesome that youre feeling better. Its possible, but hard to believe, that its due to nothing but diet changes and if it is, then its hard to imagine that such an extremely specific diet is needed to get the same results.

Yes, sure, I also took up a physical job and started taking cold showers. Have quit the physical job a year ago, still occasionally cold shower.

Feel free to judge for yourself: cysts, acne, eczema, Raynaud's syndrome, dizziness, poor wound healing, easy bruising, tinnitus, eyesight problems, restless arms and legs (damn now that I list this I'm so fucking lucky, waking up with restless arms and legs fucking sucks), twisting my ankle whenever the pavement isn't perfectly flat, hand eye coordination problems and more subjective things like less tension and better sleep