A conversation with google gemini

[Edward K. Ream]

Here is my first real conversation with an AI. I am astounded by its capabilities.

Note how gemini gently corrects some poorly-worded questions.  It also ignores without comment my saying "information" instead of the intended "misinformation". I doubt any human could answer my questions as cogently and completely.

An important trick

I used a hidden technique in this conversation: asking "What would it take to accomplish an objective?" This technique comes from the Hugo-Award-Winning SciFi novel Stand on Zanzibar. 

I read this novel decades ago. For me, the pivotal moment comes when the protagonist "unfreezes" Shalmanizar, an almost all-powerful supercomputer. As I vaguely remember, the computer starts rejecting inputs about Beninia, a (fictional?) region in Africa. The solution is starts with this dialog:

QQQ

Evaluate this, then: Postulate that the data given you about Beninia are true.
Cue: what would be necessary to reconcile them with everything else you know?

QQQ

After lengthy computation, Shalmanizar replies that it needs to accept the possibility of an unknown factor influencing the Beninians' actions.

The protagonist then instructs the computer to accept this unknown factor as fact.  "I tell you three times" :-)

Summary

You will see this (tactical? strategic?) trick in various places in my dialog. The most important use of this trick is this question:

What would it take to convince Pushmeet Kohli to use Gemini to improve public policy?

I then followed up the answer with additional questions, the first being:

"So, would combating misinformation have (in your words), "Clear and Measurable Impact on Complex Societal Challenges"?

I like this approach. It lets the AI do the arguing for me. What do you think?

Edward

P.S. I asked gemini to "polish" this letter. I despise the results. What you are hearing in this email is my voice, not some way-too-suave imitation.

EKR

[Thomas Passin]

Loading that link, Gemini says " This conversation was created with a Gem that has been deleted. Create a new Gem or start a new chat to continue. "

I'd like to see the transcript, it sounds interesting.  Getting a good prompt is a major factor in getting good results.  I had a conversation with ChatGPT about how to get effective results while minimizing hallucinations and not keep giving me positive feedback for every response of mine.  During it, I asked the chatbot to recommend a prompt for that purpose.  Here's what it suggested.  It seems to be effective although it produces lengthy results:

"Answer this as a skeptical expert would,
    minimizing speculation and avoiding any
    attempt to affirm or reassure me. If the
    answer requires assumptions, state them
    explicitly. If you don’t know or can’t verify
    something, say so clearly. I want a strictly
    factual and critical analysis, not an
    optimistic or polished summary.”

I used to ask it to be concise, but then there were reports that this increases the hallucination rate so I don't any more.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2025 at 10:56 AM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

Loading that link, Gemini says " This conversation was created with a Gem that has been deleted. Create a new Gem or start a new chat to continue. "

I still see the link on my end, but several people have seen what you have seen.

I'll see what I can do.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 10:56:35 AM UTC-5 tbp1...@gmail.com wrote:

Loading that link, Gemini says " This conversation was created with a Gem that has been deleted.

Does this link work?

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 10:56:35 AM UTC-5 tbp1...@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to see the transcript, it sounds interesting.  Getting a good prompt is a major factor in getting good results. 

I was (and am) confused about what a "gem" is. There were no initial custom instructions for this gem/chat. Later on I did add an instruction, but that as minor: " In future, please don't remind me that everything about politics is debatable." 

Edward

[jkn]

A bit OT, but I met John Brunner once, years ago (I used to hang out with some of the SF crowd...)

    J^n

[Viktor Ransmayr]

Hello Edward,

Am Di., 10. Juni 2025 um 18:48 Uhr schrieb Edward K. Ream <edre...@gmail.com>:

...

On Tuesday, June 10, 2025 at 10:56:35 AM UTC-5 tbp1...@gmail.com wrote:

Loading that link, Gemini says " This conversation was created with a Gem that has been deleted.

Does this link work?

Yes, it does. - Thanks for sharing !

With kind regards,

Viktor 

[Edward K. Ream]

Does this link work?

Yes, it does. - Thanks for sharing !

Glad to hear it!

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Tue, Jun 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM jkn <jkn...@nicorp.f9.co.uk> wrote:

A bit OT, but I met John Brunner once, years ago (I used to hang out with some of the SF crowd...)

Heh. Everything is a bit OT now.  What were your impressions?

Edward

[Thomas Passin]

Yes, this other link worked for me.

[HaveF HaveF]

I am usually cautious when it comes to political issues. I am not sure if his answers make sense or if I fully agree with him.

REF:

- [Google restricts AI chatbot Gemini from answering questions on 2024 elections | Technology | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/12/google-ai-gemini-2024-election)

- [Why won't Gemini chat about Trump : r/Bard](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1j3ywtf/why_wont_gemini_chat_about_trump/)

[Thomas Passin]

It takes a great deal of skilled, critical thinking to have a hope of getting reliable results from these chatbots. Ironically, when students use them to get through school, they will for the most part have no way to develop their facility for such thinking.

[Thomas Passin]

I just asked ChatGPT an involved question about its capabilties for developing large and complex software. I picked AWIPS, the (US) National Weather Service's Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System,  because I had some professional involvement with it in the early 2000's.  I have to say, the chatbot's discussion of important aspects of system engineering that it is unable to do tracks very well with what I know from experience.

Here is my prompt.  Then I will give the transcript.  I'm afraid it's pretty long but I don't know if I can get a working link to it so I've pasted it here verbatim.

tl;dr: " I cannot independently develop, verify, or maintain a software system at the scale or complexity of AWIPS or any comparable mission-critical platform. Any claim to the contrary is speculative or based on trivial examples, not grounded in the realities of enterprise-scale software engineering."

So DOGE is going to re-engineer the Social Security System software in months with the help of AI?  Hahaha!

"Answer this as a skeptical expert would, minimizing speculation and avoiding any attempt to affirm or reassure me. If the answer requires assumptions, state them explicitly. If you don’t know or can’t verify something, say so clearly. I want a strictly factual and critical analysis, not an optimistic or polished summary.

I want to explore your potential for developing very complex software. When the US National Weather Service was trying to develop AWIPS, the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, it had around 11,000 requirements, and that had been greatly reduced from the original set. Are you capable of developing, and providing tests for, a software system that has a GUI and must meet a set of requirements that large?"

ChatGPT

========

"The short answer is: no, not independently, and not reliably—at least not in the way such a system would be developed by a professional engineering team operating under disciplined systems and software engineering protocols.

Let’s break that down critically.

---

1. Requirements Scale and Structure

The AWIPS example you cited—originally tens of thousands of requirements—is a realistic portrayal of large-scale, mission-critical systems. These requirements are typically hierarchical, with high-level system requirements broken down into functional, performance, and interface specifications. Many are ambiguous or interdependent without domain-specific clarification.

I can help:

• Parse and categorize requirements if they are well-documented and structured.

• Generate initial designs or pseudocode for subsets.

• Provide unit tests or basic system-level tests for components once they are decomposed into manageable pieces.

I cannot:

• Manage or trace 11,000 requirements reliably.

• Validate their completeness or consistency.

• Resolve contradictions or vague specifications without clarification.

• Simulate the iterative and cross-disciplinary review processes used in real systems engineering.

In practice, such a requirement set demands rigorous version control, stakeholder validation, domain-specific modeling, and continuous integration testing—none of which I can autonomously carry out.

---

2. GUI Development

I can generate GUI code for frameworks like Qt, Tkinter, JavaFX, or web stacks like React. I can also suggest UI layouts, interaction flows, and state machines. However:

• I do not maintain state across sessions unless you re-provide the design context.

• I lack real-time testing feedback, so UI behavior is hypothetical unless you test and report back.

• Accessibility, internationalization, responsiveness, and platform-specific edge cases are typically overlooked unless explicitly specified.

Designing GUIs for critical systems like AWIPS, which must handle high data throughput, human factors under stress, and concurrent multi-modal input, would exceed my current architectural reasoning abilities without continuous expert guidance and iterative feedback.

---

3. Testing and Validation

I can:

• Write unit and integration tests based on clear interface definitions.

• Generate tests from requirement statements if they're phrased unambiguously and scoped tightly.

• Suggest test plans for UI or backend components in isolation.

I cannot:

• Produce a traceability matrix automatically across thousands of requirements.

• Validate statistical models or performance under load.

• Certify correctness under adversarial conditions or edge cases unless specifically directed.

Any real test suite for such a system would require hardware simulations, environmental test data, fault injection, performance benchmarks, regression testing—all managed continuously. I cannot autonomously orchestrate that.

---

4. Project Management and Tooling

I do not:

• Maintain a persistent project state across sessions (unless scaffolded manually by the user).

• Interface with full DevOps pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Kubernetes) without explicit command-by-command instruction.

• Manage documentation, issue tracking, code reviews, or code ownership structures.

I can assist in scripting or describing tools to manage these tasks, but I do not act as a team or development environment. You would need human oversight to manage everything from software configuration management to risk assessment.

---

5. Historical Comparison: AWIPS

AWIPS was developed with:

• A budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

• Multiple years of development.

• Input from meteorologists, UI/UX experts, systems engineers, software developers, testers, and program managers.

• A legacy of failure and redesign (AWIPS I to AWIPS II) due in part to requirement complexity and contractor issues.

Even now, systems like AWIPS are maintained by specialized contractors (e.g., Raytheon, General Dynamics), not generated or maintained by any single tool or language model.

---

Conclusion

I am a useful component in the development pipeline for a large-scale system, especially for:

• Boilerplate code generation.

• Requirement interpretation (in chunks).

• Test scaffolding.

• Code review.

• UI prototyping.

But I cannot independently develop, verify, or maintain a software system at the scale or complexity of AWIPS or any comparable mission-critical platform. Any claim to the contrary is speculative or based on trivial examples, not grounded in the realities of enterprise-scale software engineering."

[HaveF HaveF]

AWIPS, Surprising experience. 

Let me digress for a moment.

There are indeed many reasons for failure for large and complex software such as weather. I remember an article I read last year, which said that for certain problems, such as numerical weather forecasts, the United States also declined, which was really surprising. This may be due to structural reasons, I guess.

Of course, Google has some means of predicting weather in artificial intelligence, but in general, Europe is still very strong in this area.

Let's see if the United States can continue to lead in AI area.

[Edward K. Ream]

"We'll See" is my motto these days. I live in Madison, Wisconsin, the home of one of the world's great universities. I have many friends who are scientists. None are optimistic.

The United States will suffer in all areas of leadership under this administration.  Tragically and needlessly. The costs of the squandered leadership will be incalculable. Judging by comments in Nature and Science magazines, many irreplaceable scientific leaders are about to depart, or have already done so. The animus towards Chinese scientists is mind-boggling self-defeating.

The costs extend way beyond scientific leadership. This administration seems to have no conception of the benefits of existing economic order. Conceding this leadership will make us all measurably poorer, with no compensation whatsoever. This administration's economic stupidity is beyond belief.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 7:29 AM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I just asked ChatGPT an involved question about its capabilties for developing large and complex software. I picked AWIPS, the (US) National Weather Service's Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System,  because I had some professional involvement with it in the early 2000's.  I have to say, the chatbot's discussion of important aspects of system engineering that it is unable to do tracks very well with what I know from experience.

Many thanks, Thomas, for sharing this discussion with us. 

My own take on DOGE: no competent engineer would destroy a working system and its attendant procedures and experts in order to make that system better. Why the Republican Congress goes along with the unlawful actions of this administration is beyond me. Those actions directly diminish the powers of the Congress.

Edward

[Thomas Passin]

On Wednesday, June 11, 2025 at 10:59:39 AM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote:

> My own take on DOGE: no competent engineer would destroy a working system and its attendant procedures and experts in order to make that system better. 

No competent engineer, sure.  If you read The Daily WTF frequently, as I do, over time a pattern will emerge in which upper management does this kind of idiocy amazingly often. Who thinks Musk is upper management, and who thinks he is a competent engineer?  Go ahead, raise your hands.

[Edward K. Ream]

Hehe. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Edward

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

I have seen this from other country, but still amazed by how the self made billionaire mythos have co-opted USA* and been extended to the "once in a generation" world genius and all that companion crap. I remember saying, long before his fall from grace, that Musk was not a real man Ironman, but a real man Luthor, except for the genius part, just a rich megalomaniac super villain.

Going back to the IA topic, recently I started to listen a podcast episode that makes a hard critique to one of the unfortunately foundational papers of the field, "The imitation game" and all the presumptions tone and lack of understanding behind it. It is refreshing to listen it, amidst all that hype that confuses thinking with the magic trick that Apparent Intelligence (my coined expansion for AI) is doing:

https://omny.fm/shows/future-of-coding/computing-machinery

Cheers,

Offray

* For me America is still a continent and not a single country, and such a naming sounds pretty imperialistic, as people who grew up in other places of America (the continent) could notice intermediately. 

Edward

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/CAMF8tS07n88%2BM-0KfvzG%3D1dyF2HVpkUzWs_P_u9KCQYANRo%2BUw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 4:50 PM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <off...@riseup.net> wrote:

> I started to listen to a podcast episode that makes a hard critique to one of the unfortunately foundational papers of the field, "The imitation game" and all the [presumptous] tone and lack of understanding behind it. 

From first principles I am unimpressed with any critique of Alan Turing. He was one of the giants on whose back we all stand. Let's move on.

Edward

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

That's precisely the point they made and that I find related with this thread: a billionaire is not a granted genius and a genius in computer science is not a genius on everything else and, in fact, can device pretty bad test regarding intelligence, justified in a pretty poorly written paper, as showcased in the podcast. Like Turing's affirmation of the overwhelming statistical evidence for telepathy and his considerations of paranormal phenomena while advocating for the Imitation game and "considering" and deviating possible criticisms.

First principles should be properly located, for example in places like geometric axioms and not in Joe/Jane Doe is un-criticable, as (s)he is who (s)he is. That is the path to fall in argumentative fallacies, like the principle of authority. An argument should stand on its own merits and not on the ones of who made it. But yes, let's move on.

Offray

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 9:07 AM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <off...@riseup.net> wrote:

> First principles should be properly located, for example in places like geometric axioms and not in Joe/Jane Doe is un-criticable, as (s)he is who (s)he is. 

Turing proposed his test 75 years ago. The blog is crap.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 9:56:39 AM UTC-5 Edward K. Ream wrote:

 

Turing proposed his test 75 years ago. The blog is crap.

Let me be a bit more positive :-) I assert:

- Criticisms of Turing will teach us nothing about AI as it exists today.

- Criticizing historical figures using modern values is a dubious enterprise.

- The Turing test in no way hindered the development of AI.

Most blogs have almost no information content. The only blogs I watch regularly are the following:

- Two minute papers by Prof. Karoly Zsonlynai-Feher.

- Anastasi in tech by Anastasiia Nosova.

- Lines on maps by Prof. William Spaniel.

- Michael Redmond's Go TV, by Michael Redmond, professional 9-dan.

Edward

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

That doesn't make it automatically valid nor invalid. Newton proposed his Principia Mathematica several centuries ago. It was the quality of the proposal, not its author or newness/oldness, what make it stand the test of time.

The blog is crap.

Do you mean the podcast episode? If yes, could you point to particular places that make it so? The podcast did a pretty good work to pointing to particular places where Turing's paper is "crap".

Offray

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 11:06:20 AM UTC-5 Edward K. Ream wrote:

> The only blogs I watch regularly are the following:

> - Two minute papers by Prof. Karoly Zsonlynai-Feher.

Oops. The proper spelling is Károly Zsonlynai-Fehér.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 11:07:22 AM UTC-5 off...@riseup.net wrote:

Do you mean the podcast episode?

Yes. 

If yes, could you point to particular places that make it so? The podcast did a pretty good work to pointing to particular places where Turing's paper is "crap".

I am uninterested in this topic, for reasons I have explained previously. You may have the last word, if you like.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 11:16:26 AM UTC-5 Edward K. Ream wrote:

> I am uninterested in this topic, for reasons I have explained previously.

Imo, Wikipedia article on the Turing Test refutes the notion that Turing's 1950 paper was anything but first rate.

>     You may have the last word, if you like.

Still true :-)

Edward

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

On 12/06/25 11:44, Edward K. Ream wrote:

On Thursday, June 12, 2025 at 11:16:26 AM UTC-5 Edward K. Ream wrote:

> I am uninterested in this topic, for reasons I have explained previously.

And I have explained why such reasons seem uncompelling. A first principle (an axiomatic rule) can not be: someone argument's are, by principle un-criticable.

Imo, Wikipedia article on the Turing Test refutes the notion that Turing's 1950 paper was anything but first rate.

In fact it doesn't. None of the 24 references to the paper across the article says anything about the paper quality itself, and are more related with interpretations. Given than Wikipedia, as any encyclopedia is a secondary source that appeals to primary sources, and we have access to the primary source[1], we can judge by ourselves about the papers quality and see if we agree or not with the podcast criticism about Turing's tendencies to displacing both the question from "can machines think?" to "can machines pass the imitation game?" and also displacing the objections (from machines can not create anything original to machines can not surprise us), his lack of citations, his disengagement with contemporary thinkers/academicians working on similar topics, his poor referencing to external sources and so on.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/mind/article-abstract/LIX/236/433/986238?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

>     You may have the last word, if you like.

Still true :-)

I'm not interested in having the last word, nor in forcing someone into a conversation. In my two decades as member of the Leo community, I have found here a place of intelligent, inspiring and well argumented conversations, that I have praised several times. That was also what I was looking for here regarding IA. I think that such conversations are important in this times of rage and noise, particularly when we disagree.

Cheers,

Offray

Ps: In another moment I'll share my links collecting criticisms of AI, that seem also necessary, now that most of places seem preaching to the (AI) chorus.

[Thomas Passin]

I have read Turing's paper and I think it's something of a masterpiece.  He finds a way to avoid figuring out what "thinking" is and still make progress.  We have now had 75 more years of experience than Turing had in 1950, and it's no wonder if there were things he hadn't figured out. And we still don't have a good handle on what "thinking" is.  His original proposed game is more sophisticated than what is usually meant nowadays when people talk about "the Turing test", and we have have had more chances to see where these tests have turned out not to be perfect.  And after all, his ideas seem to have been evolving in the several years after the paper was published. Were he still alive we can be sure they would have evolved further.

There's no point is arguing whether Turing got everything right.  His ideas and presentation opened up people's minds in the area of thinking machines, and even now he doesn't seem to have been far from the mark.

[Edward K. Ream]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 4:12 PM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <off...@riseup.net> wrote:

On 12/06/25 11:44, Edward K. Ream wrote:

And I have explained why such reasons seem uncompelling. A first principle (an axiomatic rule) can not be: someone argument's are, by principle un-criticable.

Fair enough. But I didn't use that principle to reject the podcast!

Let me repeat my assertions:

- Criticisms of Turing will teach us nothing about AI as it exists today.

- Criticizing historical figures using modern values is a dubious enterprise.

- The Turing test in no way hindered the development of AI.

So yes, I didn't state my first principles explicitly. And yes, my first post could be construed as if I was saying "someone's arguments are, by principle un-criticable". I apologize for my provocative language and lack of clarity.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, June 13, 2025 at 4:12:24 PM UTC-5 off...@riseup.net wrote:

Imo, Wikipedia article on the Turing Test refutes the notion that Turing's 1950 paper was anything but first rate.

In fact it doesn't. None of the 24 references to the paper across the article says anything about the paper quality itself, and are more related with interpretations. Given than Wikipedia, as any encyclopedia is a secondary source that appeals to primary sources, and we have access to the primary source[1], we can judge by ourselves about the papers quality

Sure. But the commentary from many other thinkers can not be ignored.

and see if we agree or not with the podcast criticism about Turing's tendencies to displacing both the question from "can machines think?" to "can machines pass the imitation game?"

This "displacement" clarifies the original question. Imo, changing the question this way was a stroke of genius. It seems so obvious in retrospect.

and also displacing the objections (from machines can not create anything original to machines can not surprise us), his lack of citations, his disengagement with contemporary thinkers/academicians working on similar topics, his poor referencing to external sources and so on.

I'm not interested in nit-picking a paper written 75 years ago from today's perspective. 

In my two decades as member of the Leo community, I have found here a place of intelligent, inspiring and well argumented conversations, that I have praised several times. That was also what I was looking for here regarding IA. I think that such conversations are important in this times of rage and noise, particularly when we disagree.

I could not agree more. Thanks for these kind words.

Edward

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, June 13, 2025 at 9:44:41 PM UTC-5 tbp1...@gmail.com wrote:

I have read Turing's paper and I think it's something of a masterpiece.  He finds a way to avoid figuring out what "thinking" is and still make progress.  We have now had 75 more years of experience than Turing had in 1950, and it's no wonder if there were things he hadn't figured out. And we still don't have a good handle on what "thinking" is.  His original proposed game is more sophisticated than what is usually meant nowadays when people talk about "the Turing test", and we have have had more chances to see where these tests have turned out not to be perfect.  And after all, his ideas seem to have been evolving in the several years after the paper was published. Were he still alive we can be sure they would have evolved further.

There's no point is arguing whether Turing got everything right.  His ideas and presentation opened up people's minds in the area of thinking machines, and even now he doesn't seem to have been far from the mark.

Thanks, Thomas. Your views are my own.

Let's recall how stunning the recent progress in AI is. Ten years ago, nobody, not Turing, not Geoffrey Hinton, not Demis Hassabis, not anyone else, could have predicted the effectiveness of LLM's using attention-based architectures. This progress has changed all of our questions. Alan Turing surely would have something profound to say if he were alive today.

Specifically, in 2016 (almost ten years ago!!) AlphaGo defeated Leo Sedol, who was one of the world's top Go players at the time. I clearly recall thinking this was the most shocking scientific result in my entire life. It still is.

But earlier results had already showed that neural nets have incredible power. In 2015 (only one year earlier!!!) Deepmind had mastered Atari video games. This two-minute papers video gives the details. I remember seeing a video something like this one. It's incredible. But I though Go was still out of reach. How wrong I was.

And then came AlphaZero, AlphaFold, and AlphaEvolve. The last two projects solve problems that are vastly more complex than Go.

Summary

It's easy to forget just how shocking the last 10 year's progress has been. Scientific life before 2015 is fundamentally different from today's.

Edward

[Mike Hodson]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 6:29 AM Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I just asked ChatGPT an involved question about its capabilties for developing large and complex software.

...

ChatGPT>>

========

"The short answer is: no, not independently, and not reliably—at least not in the way such a system would be developed by a professional engineering team operating under disciplined systems and software engineering protocols.

• I lack real-time testing feedback, so UI behavior is hypothetical unless you test and report back.

• Accessibility, internationalization, responsiveness, and platform-specific edge cases are typically overlooked unless explicitly specified.

I can assist in scripting or describing tools to manage these tasks, but I do not act as a team or development environment. You would need human oversight to manage everything from software configuration management to risk assessment.

---

I am a useful component in the development pipeline for a large-scale system, especially for:

• Boilerplate code generation.

• Requirement interpretation (in chunks).

• Test scaffolding.

• Code review.

• UI prototyping.

But I cannot independently develop, verify, or maintain a software system at the scale or complexity of AWIPS or any comparable mission-critical platform. Any claim to the contrary is speculative or based on trivial examples, not grounded in the realities of enterprise-scale software engineering."

End ChatGPT>

So far in my tests, Gemini 2.5 Pro seems to be giving me interestingly useful BASH results.  Here's a deep dive into the coding of a moderately useful cpu p-state control script.

https//github.com/mystica555/cccpu

Is the communist theme a bit too much? would you suggest something else? I'm open to suggestions, and have a lot (a _LOT_) of images that came out of 2.5 pro chat mode. So much I had to slow down and can't use 2.5 pro again until tomorrow. 

I could link a gallery,  if anyone is interested.

I think i figured out a decent way of importing the files into git the first time as well, only about 4 iterations w/gemini on a quick script for that and then fixing it to copy ccccp.x.y.sh to ccccp.sh so the version reflects the same file.. before this it naively imported the files with the versions still as part of their filenames.   

For now, I figure if I can be a design director and critiquer, fixing randomness that pops up but mostly just kindly asking tasks of it, gemini does a good job. Trying to find the right balance between prompt length and desired outcome has been an interesting learning curve, that I still think I am gong up. 

Mike

[Thomas Passin]

I've been finding it helpful to prompt not to emit any code except for snippets to illustrate a point.  Then I hold a discussion of a proposed approach.  Only then do I ask for some code. I think using the chatbots can provide some of the benefits of pair programming.  But you need to be involved closely for the best results.

Remember the old saying, that you need to be twice as smart to debug code as to write it.  So if your code is as clever as you can make it, then you are not smart enough to debug it.

[HaveF HaveF]

Remember the old saying, that you need to be twice as smart to debug code as to write it. 

Oh, it is my first time to hear it. 

Btw, I've seen a post for a few days and I think you might be interested in it.

- A meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity: https://typesanitizer.com/blog/complexity-definitions.html

[Thomas Passin]

The saying comes from Brian  Kernighan and more exactly quoted is

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

— Brian W. Kernighan, Programming Style and Debugging, 1997

Note the part **by definition**.

[Thomas Passin]

None of those views really express things that can be measured in a given piece of software.   McCabe's "Cyclomatic complexity" was an attempt but it's widely thought to be not very good as a measure. I used to know a better one but even its name has faded away over the years. Views of complexity can even differ depending on whether one is viewing, e.g., the difficulty of maintenance vs the difficulty of testing.

Because of my background I am biased towards requirements and models of the software. In terms of requirements (and specifications), I find that when developing bug fixes or reviewing PRs, so often the requirements or specifications for the behavior in question aren't known and have to be reverse engineered.  That can be hard, and can be done incorrectly.

In terms of modeling, there is (or should be) a model that reflects the users' requirements, and another reflecting the actual software.  The trick for design is how to go from the one to the other. Of course for software that is written largely by or for one person, no requirements or models may get written down.  But never fear, they exist - at the least, they are in the mind of the person creating the system. That person may forget them or their definition may drift over time, and that can be a problem.  We've seen it in the Leo codebase, for example.

On Saturday, June 28, 2025 at 10:17:37 PM UTC-4 iamap...@gmail.com wrote:

[Mike Hodson]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2025, 06:49 Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been finding it helpful to prompt not to emit any code except for snippets to illustrate a point.  Then I hold a discussion of a proposed approach.  Only then do I ask for some code. I think using the chatbots can provide some of the benefits of pair programming.  But you need to be involved closely for the best results.

Remember the old saying, that you need to be twice as smart to debug code as to write it.  So if your code is as clever as you can make it, then you are not smart enough to debug it.

So far I have yet to see any code come out of a chatbot written in ostensibly BASH that I cannot understand. Some try to use in some circumstances different code structures than I would have used, and chatGPT a year ago decided instead of a case/esac list, let's go and instead parse an array 10 times over for a value every single value being checked every single time.

But what they do is save me a massive amount of time just to get what I think is a simple concept in my mind converted into the actual code that will completely effectively do what I needed to do.

Even though cccpu was something like 50+ revisions of code that I think I ended up with, I don't think I would have been able to come up with a specification for the end product quite that easily at the beginning. I am very much an iterative developer in that sense.

Mike

[Mike Hodson]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 03:05 Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

But what they do is save me a massive amount of time just to get what I think is a simple concept in my mind converted into the actual code that will completely effectively do what I needed to do.

Even though cccpu was something like 50+ revisions of code that I think I ended up with

...

Another thing that it has helped me do versus my entire life of not being able to finish a single thing reasonably, is get a project to a point where I feel reasonably happy with the results and am not just plagued by wanting to add something more but not wanting to take the hours or perhaps even days at the amount of time I end up putting into the effort. 

I would have to say that with exception of about two other scripts I have written in my entire lifetime, this is the third most useful, and absolutely the quickest developed script I have ever done.

The other two are: 

1: a virtual machine provisioning script for Linux that reads a Windows style sysprep-style unattend.xml and is able to set the virtual machine IP addresses and expand the disc to the proper size. It is essentially a really crappy version of cloudinit to be used with a hyperv control panel that really was only made for Windows automation, and had the support of other operating systems at a bare minimum give the iso and install it yourself sort of fashion. 

2: a script which is able to initialize and bring up or down a connection on a qmi Qualcomm modem under linux. This script does about 80% of what something like modem manager would do, but in a very specific way for a specific IoT deployment. 

And other than that every other script I have done has been extremely short and lacking functionality because I just can't force myself to continue sitting for hours on end figuring out the exact way I want to come up with the code for an idea. 

So far I would say 99.8% of the code of cccpu was written by Gemini pro, with my direction and coaching, with the exception of it being unable to figure out the proper way to center the headings and columns without either too many or too few spaces to keep the right hand vertical ASCII-art column in line. 

Less than one calendar day to come up with something I consider useful is an amazing improvement in my productivity. 

Mike

[Thomas Passin]

It's that direction and coaching part that's so important. I'm fairly sure that soon there will be a glut of code that didn't get much direction and coaching. And since good design and architecture don't seem to come easily to many people, much chatbot software is likely not to have good design and architecture. In an ideal world, working with a chatbot should improve requirements, specifications, architecture, design, and implementation. We'll see how that all plays out.

[Mike Hodson]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 06:30 Thomas Passin <tbp1...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's that direction and coaching part that's so important. I'm fairly sure that soon there will be a glut of code that didn't get much direction and coaching. And since good design and architecture don't seem to come easily to many people, much chatbot software is likely not to have good design and architecture. In an ideal world, working with a chatbot should improve requirements, specifications, architecture, design, and implementation. We'll see how that all plays out.

I'm not certain if you were YouTube videos overlap with mine in the coder sphere, but a very funny and quite down-to-earth YouTuber / other short form video content site creator named Alberta Tech @alberta.nyc does some hilarious and yet still realistic videos pertaining to this concept of ”vibe coding”.

While going down that rabbit hole I found a different video from some talk somewhere that I cannot seem to find a YouTube form of so I will link the TikTok here that literally goes into this specific aspect of directing a program. 

https://www.tiktok.com/@baxate_carter/video/7489869135795539242

[Yes I looked at his YouTube I could not find a corresponding video] 

Mike

[Mike Hodson]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2025, 06:56 Mike Hodson <mys...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not certain if you were YouTube 

...your...

I tend to rely on voice typing [far too much in fact] because I cannot fat finger fast enough lol. 

Mike

[Edward K. Ream]

On Friday, June 27, 2025 at 10:11:19 PM UTC-5 mys... wrote:

For now, I figure if I can be a design director and critiquer, fixing randomness that pops up but mostly just kindly asking tasks of it, gemini does a good job. Trying to find the right balance between prompt length and desired outcome has been an interesting learning curve, that I still think I am gong up. 

Thanks, Mike. This approach seems reasonable.

Edward