That's the nature of abstraction. Everything you create on a computer is built on a towering stack of black boxes.
replyIt’s a really cool shade of black though.
replyIt’s not so much the black box that’s the issue here, but the fact you can’t even make sure doesn’t change. I’d be fine with downloading the black box and running it on my servers until I decide to update it.
replyIt could actually be a health problem. Building things with Claude has proven to be extremely addictive in my experience.
replyYou will literally build nothing but the most primitive of devices unless you accept black boxes. In fact I'd argue its one of humanities great strengths that we can build on top of the tools others have built, without having to understand them at the same level it took to develop them.
replyI have been able to build plenty of stuff with a pretty plain emacs + ghci for years...neither are black boxes. Except maybe my brain driving them.
replyThey run on an operating system you probably don't know all the inner workings of.
replyAnd that runs on a chip with trillions of transistors.
Yeah so? Claude isn't an OS. It's the thing making my code. I don't want my codebase to be some bytecode adjacent thing that LLMs operate on.
replySo you stand upon a big pile of black boxes.
replyBlack boxes aren't inherently bad. But if they don't have well defined mappings of inputs to outputs, they aren't good black boxes. That's the problem with Claude Code imo.
replyI'm not just talking about the user
replyIts not like anthropic can just set a breakpoint in the model and debug
not really. Most of the technology is not black box but something of a grey box. You usually choose to treat it as a black box because you want to focus on your problems/your customers but you can always focus on underlying technologies and improve them. Eg postgresql for me is a black box but if I really wanted or had need I could investigate how it works.
replyTrue, you can understand an ICE engine all the way down to the chemistry if you so chose. An LLM isn't even understood by its inventors so users have no chance to understand it even if they wanted to.
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replyThose black boxes are usually deterministic.
replyWe are surrounded by black boxes we depend on - have been for at least a century.
replyArguably political systems have generated similar convolution and lack of complete insight or oversight for much longer, and sometimes I wonder if markets are composed of complex, emergent components which no one truly understands as well.
reply> Its so silly everyone being dependent on a black box like this
replyIt's the logical result of "You will own nothing and you will be happy"... You are getting to the point where you won't even own thoughts (because they'll come from the LLM), but you'll be happy that you only have to wait 5 hours to have thoughts gain.
Everything in our life is a black box, but I agree that depending on non-deterministic and sporadic quality black boxes is a huge red flag.
replyNo, most systems in daily life can be understood if you are willing to take the time.
replyThat doesn’t mean you personally are required to, but some people do and your interaction with the system of social trust determines how much of that remains opaque to you.