Alexander Bruce

I released Antichamber a long time ago. I'm currently deep down a rabbit hole exploring something else.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

Hi Twitter... have a video update for once, after all my talk about tech, optimisations, bugs, etc.

Perfectly seamless portals with accurate physics, rendering and collision.

Long objects half sticking through double sided multi-entry portals... who needs that? Me, apparently!

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

I did this detour mainly to test whether I was actually getting left behind, on parts that mattered to me, and generally the answer is no. The main upside is that I have a way more powerful search engine than what Google has degenerated into. But it's also a distraction engine.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

After taking a week break to detour into some research about AI, I really just solidified my reasonings for it not touching my main project at all.

Maybe I'll let it read the code at some stage if I wanted to try asking questions about it, but I don't want it editing it at all.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

I also have a very deep, persistent context of my work. I don't rapidly forget details, my reasoning doesn't get lossy as the hours progress. I know exactly what I did and why. So working with something chasing its tail when I held the clear picture was the most frustrating part.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

While this was playing out, Claude is running around changing who knows what, which is also muddying up some tests, prompting several "close everything and restart fresh" attempts from me.

So, yeah, good luck surviving without an understanding of what you're doing / is expected.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

Using AI absolutely doesn't stop you from getting sent down debug traps, as it confidently throws incorrect hypotheses at you, suggesting that actually, the facts you're telling it are wrong and can have never been possible, so I must have remembered / told it the wrong thing.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

2 hours spent trying to debug an issue, sending screenshots, giving exact verification steps, and still several times being told I'm wrong, only for me to tell to another window which was accurate the entire time to pass verification messages to the sessions telling me I'm lying

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

@Patrickode13 Yeah, so, this one has actual use cases I can see applying to things I do / need, as opposed to... "put all your money in Crypto!" "Everything should be on Blockchain!" "NFT's give you hard ownership of anything!!!"

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

This regularly comes up, so I want to cover the "You're just going to ask AI to do everything now" point from my perspective, having dealt with this in other contexts "e.g. just pay someone else to do everything for you" "Just use an app to get someone else to run an errand" etc.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

For me, "Just ask someone to do it" has an enormous cost that I will almost never follow through on. This is not a trivial "make it go away" like everyone loves to assert. I'm almost 40. This is a personality quirk. AI is a genuinely useful way to remove some of these roadblocks.

[Alexander Bruce @Demruth]

In that instance, there are absolutely times where I'd previously write a tool / script to take maintenance away from myself, and other times where I didn't know how to do that either, so I just didn't do it.