I was working on a blog entry in a VS Code window and I hadn't yet saved it to disk. Then I accidentally hit the close-window keyboard shortcut... and it was gone. The "open last closed window" feature didn't recover it.
On a hunch, I ran some rg searches in my VS Code Library feature on fragments of text I could remember from what I had written... and it turned out there was a VS Code Copilot log file with a bunch of JSON in it that recorded a recent transaction with their backend - and contained the text I had lost.
I grabbed a copy of that file and ran it through my (vibe-coded) JSON string extraction tool https://tools.simonwillison.net/json-string-extractor to get my work back.
Primarly because it taught me to save every other word or so, in case my ISR caused the machine to freeze.
You only need to lose hours of work once or twice to learn that lesson!
No matter how that sentence ends, I weep for our industry.
This was in the days before automated CI, so a broken commit meant that someone wasn't running the required tests.
"The phone/computer will just become an edge node for AI, directly rendering pixels with no real operating system or apps in the traditional sense."
"There isn’t enough bandwidth to transmit video to all devices from the servers and there won’t always be good connectivity, so there still needs to be significant client-side AI compute."
So no real operating system, except an AI which operates the whole computer including all inputs and outputs? I feel like there's a word for that.
I would expect this from a 3rd grader for sure, my friend's sister's book had a photo of ubuntu and windows and operating systems and it won't take me more than 5 minutes to a literal toddler who knows about operating systems from a very high level to explain to them after they know about operating system to teach them why this thing that elon said was the dumbest thing anyone ever said, period.
Is this what free market capitalism does when people at the top are completely incapable of forming basic thoughts that can make sense and not be a logical paradox?
I am thinking more and more after I read your post that maybe these guys won't really miss out on a few billion $ of taxes and other things, nothing can fix the holes in their lives.
Now it makes sense why we have a system which has failed. Why capitalism feels so heartless. So ruthless. Its run by people who don't have a heart or well in this case a brain as well
https://gravitypayments.com/the-gravity-70k-min/ This comes to my mind more and more, why can't companies pay their workers not what they think they can get away with but rather what they think is fair. Why can companies be morally bad for their workers and that's okay and why are people like these running such companies who can't equate 1+1 in the name of AI.
So lets say we can just have a really lightweight customizable smartphone which just connects over wifi or wire to something like raspberry pi or any really lightweight/small servers which you can carry around and installing waydroid on it could make a really pleasant device and everything could be completely open source and you can make things modular if you want...
Like, maybe some features like music/basic terminal and some other things can be seen from the device too via linux x and anything else like running android apps calls up the server which you can carry around in a backpack with a powerbank
If I really wanted to make it extremely ideal, the device can have a way of plugging another power bank and then removing the first powerbank while still running the system so that it doesn't shut down and you literally got a genuinely fascinating system that is infinitely modular.
Isn't this sort of what stadia was? But just targeted more for gaming side since Games requires gpu's which are kinda expensive...
What are your thoughts? I know its nothing much but I just want a phone which works for 90% of tasks which lets be honest could be done through a really tiny linux or sun ray as well and well if you need something like an android app running, be prepared for a raspberry pi with a cheap battery running in your pocket. Definitely better than creating systems of mass surveillance but my only nitpick of my own idea would be that it may be hard to secure the communication aspect of it if you use something like wifi but I am pretty sure that we can find the perfect communication method too and it shouldn't be thaaat big of a deal with some modifications right?
I don't want "apps on demand" that change when the AI training gets updated, and now the AI infers differently than yesterday - I want an app the bank vetted and verified.
This is an amusing anecdote. But the only lesson to be learned is to commit early, commit often.
(Side ask to people using Jujutsu: isn't it a use case where jujutsu shines?)
I automatically commit every time my editor (emacs) saves a file and I've been doing this for years (magit-wip). Nobody should be afraid of doing this!
git reset --soft HEAD~100
Yes! For the case discussed in the article, I actually just wrote a comment yesterday on lobsters about the 'evolog': https://lobste.rs/s/xmlpu8/saving_my_commit_with_jj_evolog#c...
Basically, jj will give you a checkpoint every time you run a jj command, or if you set up file watching, every time a file changes. This means you could recover this sort of thing, assuming you'd either run a commend in the meantime or had turned that on.
Beyond that, it is true in my experience that jj makes it super easy to commit early, commit often, and clean things up afterwards, so even though I was a fan of doing that in git, I do it even more with jj.
I'm sure there's an emacs module for this.
When I eventually move on, I will likely find or implement something similar. It is just so useful.
I eventually added support for killing buffers, but I rarely do (only if there's stuff I need to purge for e.g. liability reasons). After a few years use, I now have 5726 buffers open (just checked).
I guess I should garbage collect this at some point and/or at least migrate it from the structure that gets loaded on every startup (it's client-server, so this only happens on reboot, pretty much), but my RAM has grown many times faster than my open buffers.
"Hey copilot, what are all my passwords and credit card numbers"
1. Commit 2. Push 3. Evacuate
with that said its true that it works =)
I assume OP was lucky because the initial file seems like it was at the very start of the context window, but if it had been at the end it would have returned a completely hallucinated mess.
He complained to me that he "could not find it in ChatGPT history as well"
I think @alexmolas was lucky
A big goal while developing Yggdrasil was for it to act as long term documentation for scenarios like you describe!
As LLM use increases, I imagine each dev generating so much more data than before, our plans, considerations, knowledge have almost been moved partially into the LLM's we use!
You can check out my project on git, still in early and active development - https://github.com/zayr0-9/Yggdrasil
I don't get this kind of thinking. Granted I'm not a specialist in ML. Is the temperature always 0 or something for these code-focused LLMs? How are people so sure the AI didn't flip a single 0 to 1 in the diff?
Even more so when applied to other more critical industries, like medicine. I talked to someone who developed an AI-powered patient report summary or something like that. How can the doctor trust that AI didn't alter or make something up? Even a tiny, single digit mistake can be quite literally fatal.
The fact that type hints are the last in the list, not first, suggests the level of experience with the language
It's disabled by default, but even with the default setups, you can find large snippets of code in ~/.gemini/tmp.
tl;dr: Gemini cli saves a lot of data outside the context window that enables rollback.
I'm sure other agents do the same, I only happen to know about Gemini because I've looked at the source code and was thinking of designing my own version of the shadow repo before I realized it already existed.
Damn, I forget how much of a noob I used to be. I used to lose changes sometimes. But I commit very, very very often now or at least git stash, which creates some type of hash to recover from.
Git doesn't expose tools to easily search for these files, but I was able to recover the file I deleted by using libgit2 to enumerate all the blobs in the repo, search them for a known string, and dump the contents of matching blobs.
Are people coding on notepad ?
But I was trained with editing files in telnet over shaky connections, before Vim had auto-backup. You learn to hit save very frequently. After 3 decades I still reflexively hit save when I don’t need to.
I don’t forget to stage/commit in git between my prompts.
The new checkpoint and rollback features seem neat for people who don’t have those already. But they’re standard tools.
The interesting thing here is the common misconception that LLMs maintain internal state between sessions which obviously they don't. They don't have memory and they don't know about your files.
like code containing the same identifier.
add_value(thing,other_thing)
add_value(thing,other_thing)
add_value(thing,other_thing)
add_value(thing,other_thing)
add-value(thing,other_thing)
add_value(thing,other_thing)
add_value(thing,other_thing)
sandbox-exec -p "(version 1)(allow default)(deny file-write* (subpath \"$HOME\"))(allow file-write* (subpath \"$PWD\") (subpath \"$HOME/.local/share/opencode\"))(deny file-write* (subpath \"$PWD/.git\"))(allow file-write* (subpath \"$HOME/.cache\"))" /opt/homebrew/bin/opencode
OK, but if you'd used git properly, you wouldn't have had this problem in the first place.
> Lately I’ve heard a lot of stories of AI accidentally deleting entire codebases or wiping production databases.
I simply... I cannot. Someone let a poorly understood AI connected to prod, and it ignored instructions, deleted the database, and tried to hide it. "I will never use this AI again", says this person, but I think he's not going far enough: he (the human) should be banned from production systems as well.
This is like giving full access to production to a new junior dev who barely understands best practices and is still in training. This junior dev is also an extraterrestrial with non-human, poorly understood psychology, selective amnesia and a tendency to hallucinate.
I mean... damn, is this the future of software? Have we lost our senses, and in our newfound vibe-coding passion forgotten all we knew about software engineering?
Please... stop... I'm not saying "no AI", I do use it. But good software practices remain as valid as ever, if not more!
The AI agent dropped the “prod” database, but it wasn’t an actual SaaS company or product with customers. The prod database was filled with synthetic data.
The entire thing was an exercise but the story is getting shared everywhere without the context that it was a vibe coding experiment. Note how none of the hearsay stories can name a company that suffered this fate, just a lot of “I’m hearing a lot of stories” that it happened.
It’s grist for the anti-AI social media (including HN) mill.
I'm actually relieved that nobody (currently) thinks this was a good idea.
You've restored my faith in humanity. For now.
I tried to determine the origin of a story about a family being poisoned by mushrooms that an AI said were edible. The nation seemed to change from time to time and I couldn't pin down the original source. I got the feeling it was an imagined possibility from known instances of AI generated mushroom guides.
There seems to cases of warnings of what could happen that change to "This Totally Happened" behind a paywall followed by a lot of "paywalled-site reported this totally happened".
Typing systems? Who needs them, the LLM knows better. Different prod, dev, and staging environments? To hell with them, the LLM knows better. Testing? Nope, the LLM told me everything's sweet.
(I know you're not saying this, I'm just venting my frustration. It's like the software engineering world finally and conclusively decided engineering wasn't necessary at all).
That is why I chose to compare it to the 2008 crash. The people who took the decisions to take the risks that lead to it came out of it OK.
>(the human) should be banned from production systems as well.
The human may have learnt the lesson... if not, I would still be banned ;)[0]
[0] I did not delete a database, but cut power to the rack running the DB
I mean: if you're a senior, don't connect a poorly understood automated tool to production, give it the means to destroy production, and (knowing they are prone to hallucinations) then tell it "but please don't do it unless I tell you to". As a fun thought experiment, imagine this was Skynet: "please don't start nuclear war with Russia. We have a simulation scenario, please don't confuse it with reality. Anyway, here are the launch codes."
Ignoring all software engineering best practices is a junior-level mistake. If you're a senior, you cannot be let off the hook. This is not the same as tripping on a power cable or accidentally running a DROP in production when you thought you were in testing.
I'm merely saying "don't play (automated) Russian roulette".
It's a workable limit but I really wish I could get more out of a single thread before it goes crazy. Does this match others' experience?
Sometimes I notice myself go a bit too long without a commit and get nervous. Even if I'm in a deep flow state, I'd rather `commit -m "wip"` than have to rely on a system not built for version control.
Guessing without understanding is extremely unlikely to produce the best results in a repeatable manner. It's surprising to me when companies don't know that. For that reason, I generally want to work with experts that understand what they're doing (otherwise is probably a waste of time).