1. Did you have MCP tooling setup so it can get lsp feedback? This helps a lot with code quality as it’ll see warnings/hints/suggestions from the lsp

2. Unit tests. Unit tests. Unit tests. Unit tests.

I cannot stress enough how much less stupid LLMs get when they jave proper solid Unit tests to run themselves and compare expected vs actual outcomes.

Instead of reasoning out “it should do this” they can just run the damn test and find out.

They’ll iterate on it til it actually works and then you can look at it and confirm if its good or not.

Theres also a massive distinction between consuming something necessary/important, vs consuming something 100% optional.

Harry Potter isnt food, shelter, or any other kind of critical necessity.

Theres literally countless better alternatives to Harry Potter media you can choose to consume from that doesnt directly put money straight into the pocket of someone actively funding direct harm

This isn’t multiple layers of washing here, that money basically goes straight towards actively harming minority groups.

Its not even a good fucking book, and I used to be a fan of it as a kid, but I went back and read my old books and… it just fuckin sucks dawg, its not good lol.

Go pick like, any other fandom at least.

The difference, when the tool is used correctly, is so massive that only someone deeply uninformed or naive would contend it.

I got about 4 entire days worth of work completed in about 5 hours yesterday at my job, thats just objective fact.

Tasks that used to take weeks now take days, and tasks that used to take days now take hours. Theres no “feeling” about this, Ive been a software developer for approaching 17 years now professionally. I know how long it takes to produce an entire gambit of integration tests for a given feature. I spend almost all of my time now reviewing mountains of code (which is fairly good quality, the machines produce fairly accurate results), and then a small amount of time refining it.

People deeply do not at all understand how dramatically the results have changed over the past 2 years, and their biases are based on how things were 2 years ago.

Sure, 2 years ago the quality was way worse, the security was bad, the enforcement almost non existent, and peoples overall skill with how to use the tools was just beginning to grow. You cant exactly be good at using a tool that only just came out.

But its been two years of very rapid improvement. Its good now. Anyone who has been using these tools and actually monitoring progression can speak to this.

Things heavily shifted about 5 months ago when competition started to really fire up between different providers, and I wont say its even close to great yet, but its definitely good, it works, its fast, and it’s pretty damn good at what I need it to do.

Go find the richest person in your local city.

You have one, they exist. Probably several in the same area.

Make it their problem.

We arnt in active physical danger.

You arent in percieved active physical danger.

If trump launches a nuke boy that sure will change lickity split tho

You know programmers who use llms believe they’re much more productive because they keep getting that dopamine hit, but when you actually measure it, they’re slower by about 20%.

Everyone keeps citing this preliminary study and ignores:

1. Its old now
2. Its sample size was incredibly tiny
3. Its sample group were developers not using proper tooling or trained on how to use the tools

Its the equivalent of taking 12 seasoned carpenters with very little experience on industrial painting, handing them industrial grade paint guns that are misconfigured and uncalibrated, and then asking them to paint some of their work and watching them struggle… and then going “wow look at that industrial grade paint guns are so bad”

Anyone with any sense should look at that and go “thats a bogus study”

But people with intense anti-ai bias cling to that shoddy ass study with such religious fervor. Its cringe.

Every professional developer with actual training and actual proper tooling can confirm that they are indeed tremendously more productive.

Lovely anthropic mcp. Make sure you give anthropic lots of money and use their tools

Its becoming clear you have no clue wtf you are talking about.

Model Context Protocol is a protocol, like http or json or etc.

Its just a format for data, that is open sourced and anyone can use. Models are trained to be able to invoke MCP tools to perform actions, and anyone can just make their own MCP tools, its incredibly simple and easy. I have a pretty powerful one I personally maintain myself.

Anthropic doesnt make any money off me, in fact, I dont use any of their shit, except maybe whatever licensing fees microsoft pays to them to use Claude Sonnet, but microsoft copilot is my preferred service I use overall.

I bet you your contract with them says they’re not liable for shit their llm does to your files

Setting aside the fact that I dont even use anthropic’s tools, my copilot LLMs dont have access to my files either. Full stop.

The only context in which they do have access to files is inside of the aforementioned docker based sandbox I run them inside of, which is an ephemeral immutable system that they can do whatever the fuck they want inside of because even if they manage to delete /var/lib or whatever, I click 1 button to reboot and reset it back to working state.

The working workspace directory they have access to has readonly git access, so they can pull and do work, but they literally dont even have the ability to push. All they can do is pull in the stuff to work on and work on it

After they finish, I review what changes they made and only I, the human, have the ability to accept what they have done, or deny it, and then actually push it myself.

This is all basic shit using tools that have existed for a long time, some of which are core principles of linux and have existed for decades

Doing this isnt that hard, its just that a lot of people are:

1. Stupid
2. Lazy
3. Scared of linux

The concept of “make a docker image that runs an “agent” user in a very low privilege env with write access only to its home directory” isnt even that hard.

It took me all of 2 days to get it setup personally, from scratch.

But now my sandbox literally doesnt even expose the ability to do damage to the llm, it doesnt even have access to those commands

Let me make this abundantly clear if you cant wrap your head around it:

LLM Agents, that I run, dont even have the executable commands exposed to them to invoke that can cause any damage, they literally dont even have the ability to do it, full stop

And it wasnt even that hard to do

You’ll be the 4753rd guy with the oops my llm trashed my setup and disobeyed my explicit rules for keeping it in check

Read what I wrote.

Its not a matter of “rules” it “obeys”

Its a matter of literally not it even having access to do such things.

This is what Im talking about. People are complaining about issues that were solved a long time ago.

People are running into issues that were solved long ago because they are too lazy to use the solutions to those issues.

We now live in a world with plenty of PPE in construction and people are out here raw dogging tools without any modern protection and being ShockedPikachuFace when it fails.

The approach of “Im gonna tell the LLM not to do stuff in a markdown file” is tech from like 2 years ago.

People still do that. Stupid people who deserve to have it blow up in their face.

Use proper tools. Use MCP. Use a sandbox environment. Use whitelist opt in tooling.

Agents shouldn’t even have the ability to do damaging actions in the first place.

The only people who have these issues, are people who are using the tools wrong or poorly.

Using these models in a modern tooling context is perfectly reasonable, going beyond just guard rails and instead outright only giving them explicit access to approved operations in a proper sandbox.

Unfortunately that takes effort and know-how, skill, and understanding how these tools work.

And unfortunately a lot of people are lazy and stupid, and take the “easy” way out and then (deservedly) get burned for it.

But I would say, yes, there are safe ways yo grant an llm “access” to data in a way where it does not even have the ability to muck it up.

My typical approach is keeping it sandbox’d inside a docker environment, where even if it goes off the rails and deletes something important, the worst it can do is cause its docker instance to crash.

And then setting up via MCP tooling that commands and actions it can prefer are explicit opt in whitelist. It can only run commands I give it access to.

Example: I grant my LLMs access to git commit and status, but not rebase or checkout.

Thus it can only commit stuff forward, but it cant even change branches, rebase, nor push either.

This isnt hard imo, but too many people just yolo it and raw dawg an LLM on their machine like a fuckin idiot.

These people are playing with fire imo.

OH!

I honestly did not understand that link there with how they wrote it initially, but that makes sense now, thank you lol.

That makes zero sense to me, the sentence seems to be a total non-sequiter with respect to the text before and after it.

The White House app was created by 45Press, a company based in Canfield, Ohio, a town of fewer than 8,000 people located roughly halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. (Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States.) The company’s website describes it as a “design, development, and DevOps agency” and a WordPress VIP Agency Partner; it lists Amazon, NBC, and Sony as past clients.

Wat?

Anti-AI measure?

AI generated noise?

Why is that random sentence in there…?

Edit: I see now, thanks to dhork for pointing out to me the aside line is pointing out the link to the name, 45Press and Trump being the 45th president. It still is weirdly written imo but at least it makes sense.

You: just the cheap ones

I never said that. I just said that the cheap ones are especially shitty.

People on this site really lack reading comprehension it seems.

What are you talking about.

No? I never said that.

I just explained /why/ it happened, I literally nowhere in my post said, or implied, someone should pay for more expensive models. What are you smoking?

You just have to be aware they have very short memory when using a cheap model and assume anything you wrote 1 minute ago has already left its memory, which is why they produce pretty dumb output if you try and depend on that… so… dont depend on that.

Uh… no its just the free models being free, theyre lower cost intentionally to provide free options for people who dont wanna pay subscription fees.

(context is (V)RAM)

Eh sort of, its more operating costs, the larger the context size the more expensive the model is to run, literally in terms of power consumption.

Keep in mind we are on the scale of fractions of cents here, but multiply that by millions of users and it adds up fast.

But the end result is that the agent will fuck stuff up, and will even quickly /forget/ it fucked that up if you dont catch it asap

A lot of them have a context window that can be wiped out within like, 2 minutes of steady busywork…

They dont lol

Pretty much always this is just the fact cheaper, especially free, chatbots, have very limited context windows.

Which means the initial restrictions you set like “dont do this, dont touch that” etc get dropped, the LLM no longer has them loaded. But it does have in the past history the very clear and urgent directives of it trying to do this task, its important, so it’ll do whatever it autocompletes its gotta do to accomplish the task. And then… fucks something up.

When you react to their fuck up, it *reloads the context back in

So now the LLM has in its history just this:

1. It doing a thing against the rules
2. The user yelling at it
3. The users now getting loaded after that on top

So now the LLM is going to autocomplete its generated text on top being very apologetic and going on about how it’ll never happen again.

Thats all there is to it.

No they mean routers.

And running your own router with its own OS is allowed.

Buying a prefab router from Shenzhen chock full of foreign malware is not.

Only locally produced malware is now allowed in prefab routers!

Folks definitely should be picking up learning how to setup their own router and wifi hubs, but they wont do it.

I just fucking install my games like normal with wine if needed.

What is wrong with people that you can’t install something and add a .desktop entry on your system?

Yes. Theyre being reactionary.

Are these people even paying a single penny to the developer or are they just acting entitled?

Have they contributed at all to the project? Its foss, maybe they dhould open up their own PRs and fix it if they care so much.

Theyre welcome to fork it anytime they want and just not merge in any AI commits, if they can spot them, right?

But I bet you no one will actually do this, people will mald and act entitled and stamp their feet… and then keep using it anyways and never pay a cent to the dev.

Fuck em. The dev doesnt owe them shit.

Building and running my own server for self hosting multiple tools for my home.

• Bitwarden Password manager, now sharing logins/passwords for stuff my fiance and I both use is easy, and every single website we use has its own unique randomly generated password so when one site gets breached, our logins aren’t compromised anywhere else

• Plex, it’s like your own self hosted Netflix. My file copies of any movies/TV shows go on here and it parses em all, keeps it all grouped together, streams in 4k.

• Shinobi, for my security cameras. Self hosted free CRTV application, works with any open spec cameras. Has movement detection and tonnes of other open source options for plug-ins.

• Deluge, handy UI for downloading torrents onto my server. Conviently added presets to it that let me download to the very folders Plex scans… cough cough.

• Kavita, self hosted server for books/pdfs. Some e-readers can even connect to it. A couple popular manga reading apps also work with it. Can also just use its own browser web interface as an e-reader, it has multiple options for styles (infinite scroll, page swiping, left/right click, and even supports right to left mode for manga!)

• Nextcloud, pictures/document storage. Sort of like a selfhosted filesshare/file backup. Has a mobile app that can automatically backup every picture/video you take on your phone!

• Gogs, open source super lightweight git repo. Has only the bare minimum of features, basic web hook, authorization, permissions, simple web ui to edit. It does the job I need it to and that’s good enough.

• OpenVPN, self hosted VPN so I can securely access all the above stuff without exposing it to the internet.

• Also I host my own websites on it, publicly exposed. Blog, a writing project, nothing terribly fancy.

Eventually I plan to add some more stuff to it. Migrate my smart home dependencies over to Z wave and install Home Assistant, so I don’t have to rely on sending my info to google/amazon/etc to do basic smart home stuff.