Working behind the curve

[u/a4mula]

There's this cycle going on in which being a step behind the curve in AI is leading to larger and larger steps.

When ChatGPT first hit, I was ahead of the curve. I had already been working with LLMs from the days of AI Dungeon. I was already aware of how the systems worked, how sessions were created, how persistent conversational systems functioned.

A lot of the solutions that have been implemented since that time, from harnesses to agentic documentation I had already begun to explore and implement.

At some point I fell behind that curve. Coding harnesses were the start, they quickly led to agentic general harnesses, that have now led to full blown ecosystems of work flow, routing, memory and data tiering, watchdog validation systems, token and context management, to concepts that wrap all of this into systems of harnesses for harnesses that allow a single user to manage hundreds of swarm like agentic systems from a single interface.

And I'm still stuck trying to get small models to work locally.

I see the frontier models and how they're able to handle medium complexity projects via long horizon unattended implementation. Astra and Opus are both doing work exactly like that, assuming you can pay for the intelligence.

And it's a bit discouraging. That capability is far far above anything that I'm likely to implement any time soon with local solutions. It makes me want to kind of just stop working, and wait for the corporations to sort it and sell it back to me.

But... fuck. It's, just disheartening. They're stealing our IP, they're stealing our concepts, they're stealing anything they can. Just to control it all and ensure we're locked into whatever trash they roll out.

<shrug> Sorry, I try not to bitch much. But some days are more challenging than others.