alt Hacker NewsPointless anecdote: I asked it to make some slides and it decided to write its own slide rendering engine:
> On the format — I dropped reveal.js and wrote a small engine inline instead. Reveal would have meant a CDN load, and a deck that half-renders because the lecture theatre wifi is flaky
It one-shotted a perfect functional mini version of powerpoint (or Reveal) for a simple presentation I asked it to make.
Replies
That's embarrassing and would have you grilled in any code review, to not even consider to just vendor reveal.js. We have been vendoring dependencies before machine learning was a thing.
It's awesome that it had the capability to do that, but it worries me a bit that it chose to do that.
How many tokens did it burn doing that instead of just vendoring?
Like I said in a separate comment, these tools are written and trained by corporations first and foremost, they'll always have conflicting interests.
That's hilarious. You can totally vendor reveal.js and it works perfectly fine offline. I've done this countless times. Sometimes intelligence means knowing there must be a better way.
What better way to spend token. I’m amazed that people talk about this as it’s a good thing!
"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
You know PowerPoint is just a zip archive of xml files right?
Opus 4.8 decided to code up its own version of the SwiftUI rendering engine for iOS when I asked it to change a swipe gesture. I left the computer for several hours, came back, noticed it still wasn't done, noticed it had alarmingly burned through my weekly tokens, and had to stop it from continuing.
"You're right. What I did was overkill and I should have just used iOS's built-in rendering engine. Noted for next time."