Claude can easily do the merges I need (or myself manually for that matter). I guess all codebases and usecases are very different here and hard to give general advice.
But I do have many years of experience working in a larger team and it's the same problem there (just that people want to merge after some days of working). I'm not sure if AI changes the picture much vs working in a team.
Either way one has to plan ahead a bit and select tasks that are not going to trample on each other. I can typically imagine roughly what the code generated is going to be (at least what files will likely be involved in what way) and when selecting tasks to work on I take into account if it's going to likely cause conflicts.
In my experience if different branches work on different things, Claude have no issue doing "trivial" merges where you just ended up changing different aspects of the same lines. Of course, if two branches rewrite the same pieces of code there's a problem -- so don't do that..
With the long waits for agents to do stuff I really don't see how one can get anything done without multitasking with multiple worktrees in parallel. So I'd want support for listing the worktrees and then have a list of agents within each worktree.
Emdash and Nimbalyst have this kind of UI. Unfortunately both of them want to manage the state of each worktree group themselves; I'm looking for something that just would just call git worktree directly so that I can switch more seamlessly between CLI and IDE/TUI..
So, I have a PhD in Astrophysics so I am not a total stranger to doing some thinking. And I would say "create (...) answers by relying on the abstract concepts of the objects they are using" is a lofty goal for humans, something to aspire to more than something that typically goes on. We go by habits and intuition and allegories and quite muddy concepts most of the time. Concepts are malleable and evolve in clarity. And in creating new mathematics etc., intuition, inspiration, "flashes of insights" etc after absorbing oneself in the problem has an important role.
Are these things we have in our minds, whether concepts or habits or intuitions or flashes of insights, better or worse than whatever patterns could potentially be found in the LLM weights?
I struggle to label one of them "understanding" and the other not, at least without involving consciousness somehow.
Obviously you can define "understand" as "understand as a human would" but that is circular and uninteresting.
We just have to agree to find each others position incredible I am afraid :)
I didn't really try to argue that LLMs "have understanding".
I am more, in a sense, arguing that "understanding" isn't clearly defined and sceptical about your confidence that this is an obvious quality of humans.
I'm not getting what this "understanding" thing is in humans that you are talking about. But I feel if anyone you are the one making the unfalsifiable statements here. You are the one talking about an inner quality within the reasoning that only humans possess and not LLMs.
If I re-read your post and replace the word "understanding" with "consciousness" then it makes a lot more sense to me. Yes, humans can be conscious that they understand something, while LLMs are very very probably not conscious of anything at all. If that is what you mean, I can easily agree with that. I would never argue LLMs are conscious.
But at least my original post had nothing to do with consciousness.
If I'm coding, I'd definitely pick the "understanding" of Fable over a junior engineer's "understanding" any day, for purely pragmatic reasons. When I say that, I simply mean that the rate of mistakes in junior humans is way higher than in best trained LLMs for most coding tasks.
I'm guessing this is not using the word "understanding" in a way you are happy with, and probably because you define the word "understanding" as being related to consciousness?
Humans don't make the exact same errors of LLMs of course. Humans are very different beings.
So you recognize that Claude is not a human.
Humans make mistakes as well "inconsistent with the understanding mechanism", but they have a very different form, and you are so used to the particular failure mode of humans, that you don't think about it.
But aliens visiting earth likely would find some aspects of human mind very peculiar!
Examples:
Humans learning algebra (or really anything like playing music, paddling a canoe, etc.) have to go through lots and lots of trivial basic mistakes, and only learn to avoid them through repetition and pattern matching on earlier experience, rather than relying on "reasoning".
A "pure reasonable being" would simply be learned the rules for algebra then go ahead and make perfect deductions applying the rules -- but humans are very clearly not such beings. Humans can know the rules for algebra perfectly well, then still go ahead and make mistakes until enough training has been done until we say you have "learned" it (be able to pattern match on previous experience).
Imagine humans being employed by aliens to do algebra, then aliens seeing humans basically do "2 + 2 = 5" (just on a higher complexity level). Like very human in first year in university WILL do with their formulas. What would you conclude about humans and their relation to "real understanding"?
Or another example: Humans engage a lot in post-rationalization, having first made up ones mind, then finding the reasons for the choice afterwards. (Most striking example of post-rationalization is the experiments on patients with severed brain half connections where one brain half invents a reason it can believe in for a choice made by the other brain half; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain -- but if you look at pretty much any political issue for instance it is clear that people are driven at least as much by being herd animals as by doing any reasoning -- the majority of humans decide what people they belong with first, then figure out why afterwards).
It's the same with human intelligence though. A human can be brilliant on some things and then we're puzzled why they are so idiotic in other areas.
Every time this comes up, people pick on any kind of flaws or inconsistencies of AI models, while at the same time giving a huge pass to the extreme variation in intelligence and stupidness displayed in human behaviour.
Creativity is the same. Human artists are "inspired" by earlier arts, perhaps following and slightly changing "trends" they participate in -- which is somehow seen as totally different from what AIs are doing.
The article seems to define "smart" as being good at spatial awareness and navigating a body through 3D space and such. Thus, a mice is smarter than an LLM.
That's the first time in my life I hear this definition. Until now, the word "smart" has meant doing exactly the things LLMs do, and mice don't.
I guess it is a sign we are re-evaluating what makes humans special.
Do you have to? Is it common to treat ?a=1&b=2 the same as ?b=2&a=1 in browser/CDNs/etc?
Seems the spec puts this as a MAY. I think I doubt it will be implemented in generic ways, except perhaps for urlencoded payloads. After all you cannot normalize in general without knowing the query language. At the backend it does not matter, may as well cache one level deeper based on the parsed input irrespective of QUERY or not.
As a Norwegian teen parent: Seeing all the issues cropping up which is /enabled/ (not saying caused) by social media, you don't need to look for ulterior motives. I believe these bans are honest attempts to fix real problems.
Examples I know about include 12-year-olds selling nudes, teen experimentation with alcohol being replaced with cocaine because cocaine is so easily available (the issue is the scale and how widespread cocaine is getting; not that it never happened before), several cases in Norway of 13-year-olds being recruited by the mafia to throw bombs at houses through the internet, violence etc. is up the roof, kids have 4 hours of sleep since they doomscroll all through the night, results in school are trending downwards, university reports that students are increasingly unable to concentrate...
Are there other solutions than bans to social media? Sure. Could this in theory have been fixed by better parenting? Sure.
But parents don't live in a vacuum. Parents and children alike rely on the culture around them.
Social media is a HUGE shift to society, and neither culture nor parenting practices has sufficiently adopted to handle it yet. Slowing the shift down a bit until norms and culture catches up doesn't seem like a bad idea.
As I use claude more and more I've started using git worktrees, one branch per worktree per PR, with possibly multiple agents working in each worktree at the same time on different aspects. And I manually instruct those agents. Like Emdash/Cursor/Zed. Sometimes I review code locally, sometimes agents push and I review in GitHub, no clear system yet. (jj seems promising, but Zed doesn't seem to support jj as well as git, so have delayed looking at it.)
But Paca is hinting in another direction where the agents are more in control of the branches/worktrees to use and are created by the agent? What tooling is used to support such flows? Would people use GitHub with Paca or is GitHub redundant as well.
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
https://syncmap.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dag-sverre-seljebotn-84535a86