The irony of naming this Nietszche's Debugger when he, Nietszche, directly attacks the Socratic dialectic in the Twilight.
I was thinking Adorno's negative dialectics would be a better, if gloomy, fit; debugging is never-ending.
If you're in a positive or hopeful mood, or still a junior dev, Hegel's determinate negation offers reconciliation and an ending. This is a phase; dear junior devs you too will eventually share the Adornian resignation.
stillpointlab 12 hours ago [-]
What I find interesting is that Nietzsche's critique of Socrates dialectic has to do with the transfer of power/authority.
Nietzsche states that sovereign power/authority commands without justification. Socrates did not have sovereign power and was therefore unable to win in a traditional power struggle. Socrates therefore reframed the discussion around justification through rational discourse, thereby transferring authority from the old aristocracy to a new priesthood of truth. This relied on the moral claim made by Socrates and eventually adopted by the Greeks (and Western Europe) that virtue = reason (the search for Truth).
So if we accept this interpretation of Nietzsche, then creating AIs that demand justification from us could be seen as handing over power and authority to the AI.
gobdovan 7 hours ago [-]
Hegel might see the demand of justification from AI as a form of alienation that could make us more deliberate in our choices, particularly in a time where we give up more control away without examining it properly. Unconstrained optionality is not the same as freedom and sometimes putting up your own constrains can increase rather than diminish self-determination, especially when you're aware of the barriers.
rafaelRiv 16 hours ago [-]
Not only that. Citing "What doesn't kill you make me stronger" in this context is very ironic as Nietzsche was talking for himself. He took that from Ralph Waldo Emerson while stripping the moral aspect of it
IncreasePosts 13 hours ago [-]
As another more poignant philosopher said, "what doesn't kill you makes you very, very weak"
SAI_Peregrinus 6 hours ago [-]
What doesn't kill you postpones the inevitable.
pwdisswordfishq 14 hours ago [-]
Indeed, my first thought upon seeing the premise explained was "I would have chosen a different philosopher".
12 hours ago [-]
dilawargopang 16 hours ago [-]
I hope to get laid off soon, so I will improve on it :-)
wolvesechoes 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it reads like a person who knows Nietzsche from Reddit comments.
Der_Einzige 7 hours ago [-]
Adorno, and especially Hegel began the process of philosophy turning into fashionable nonsense. The young Hegelian’s were united by their hatred of Hegel classes and his philosophy.
Max stirner, who wrote very well and easy to understand, remains obscure compared to these charlatans because philosophers don’t like it when they can understand what someone wrote.
ignoramous 15 hours ago [-]
> Nietszche, directly attacks the Socratic dialectic
Probably why Michael Sugrue opined that Friedrich Nietzsche was a Philologist and not a Philosopher.
Step one to setup: "Set your Anthropic API key"...
yaemiko 10 hours ago [-]
real ones find out with "a user you’ve blocked has previously contributed..." banner at the top
sick_of_slop 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
gnulinux 16 hours ago [-]
README.md says:
> The anti-AI.
but then it's an AI-generated picture of Nietzsche [1] and AI-generated README with AI-generated code (Claude being the co-author), and when I read sample transcript e.g. in (nietzschian-debugger/tests/fixtures/sample-sessions/sample-v1.json) it's clear the app also uses LLMs to generate output...
So what do they mean by "anti-AI"?
[1]: All issues with AI-generated images aside, AI-generating a person's likeness seems like the rudest way to do this... At least use an actual photo/drawing of his...
dkenyser 15 hours ago [-]
> So what do they mean by "anti-AI"
Keep reading.
"Guides you to the "aha!" moment — YOUR moment, not the AI's"
This seems like yet another attempt at encouraging people to continue to utilize AI without relying on it.
sureMan6 13 hours ago [-]
I don't think Nietzsche would complain, although doing it for a living person would be very funny (for example when designing a promotional poster)
CamperBob2 9 hours ago [-]
"Man is a thing that will be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him? Wait, no, not like that"
rafaelRiv 16 hours ago [-]
It is super laughable when you read his github bio. I had a good laugh not ngl
dilawargopang 15 hours ago [-]
Glad it gave you a good laugh!
frangonf 15 hours ago [-]
A markovian prussian rubber duck?
This is pure dev astrology, but in the subsidized Sonnet 3.5 times in copilot I'm guilty of prompting 'You're Uncle Bob make this legacy java services read like a book top down with the cleanest code' just for fun and I might have learnt something and had some fun so I'm not judging.
AyanamiKaine 15 hours ago [-]
This makes me wonder. What would Nietzsche think of AI and LLM in general? Would he see it as an idol or a monument of human accomplishment?
paimapi 15 hours ago [-]
I would imagine that using an LLM model for secondhand thinking would be seen as a bit decadent and reflects a weak will, easily influenced by the illusion of authority.
The Will to Power, as far as I understand it, is about how resistance (or friction) produces the strength of will to overcome obstacles. AI does the virtual opposite of that while also commoditizing cognition.
I'd agree with the other commenter that Nietzsche would probably see this as just another reversion to Plato's Forms - LLMs, by nature, are median outputs of cognition. There is no ubermensch to be found amongst the lowest-common-denominator, only the narcotic allure of becoming increasingly, as the kids say, smooth-brained.
1 hours ago [-]
wolvesechoes 3 hours ago [-]
Read a part on the Last Man from initial pages of Zarathustra.
Der_Einzige 7 hours ago [-]
Literally the last man that he’s worried about. AI is the polar opposite of an ubermensch.
greyw 16 hours ago [-]
Even Anti-AI tech now uses AI. How far we have come!
dan_p 15 hours ago [-]
Cool idea, Nietzsche or not.
Curious if one could just boil this down into a skill or prompt for better portability though. May give it a try.
dilawargopang 15 hours ago [-]
Sure
six_seven 13 hours ago [-]
As a Senior Engineer, this sparked some joy in me for the first time in a while. Please make it a prompt/skill/more portable.
And you must have known you were going to be critiqued here on your choice of philosopher :)
If my AI tells me I must overcome myself, reconcile with myself, find truths, and laugh, and do each of these things ten times each day - and tracks it for me so I know when I can stop developing and will sleep well... then we are talking Nietzsche!
- Thus Sprach Zarathustra, The Academic Chairs of Virtue (II)
andai 10 hours ago [-]
Great idea. This can be generalized to learning in general (Feynman technique), although codebases are a particularly practical application of "help me debug my mental model."
shaaaade 9 hours ago [-]
Where is the Freudian variant that questions your childhood, sexuality, and relationship with your mother?
pcblues 8 hours ago [-]
That's called a career choice :)
samstokes 16 hours ago [-]
I love the idea of helping people learn good debugging habits and understand their code. But this seems like it is still just giving the answers, and would still create the same dependence on AI to do your thinking:
You: I'm not sure, it seems random
Nietzschian: "Random" is the word we use when we haven't looked
hard enough. What do the server logs say for the 403
responses? Go look. I'll wait.
That move from "I don't know" to "where could I look to find out" is one of the key habits that makes someone good at debugging, and here "Nietzsche" is just doing it for you.
It might seem obvious to look at the logs, but in my experience 90% of being stuck debugging something is just not yet having looked at all the available evidence.
It's true you could learn these habits by exposure to them, and this could be a neat alternative to pairing with a more senior engineer for that. But it looks like you could easily just keep saying "it's random", "I don't know", and the model would keep telling you what to do next, without you actually having to think.
I wonder if making it even more Socratic would fix this? E.g. "how do you know it's returning 403s? Oh, logs you say? Is there anything else they could tell you?"
pcblues 8 hours ago [-]
What you are saying is true to a degree and debugging was 90% of the work in my career. Finding the smoking gun IS the key as you said.
It depends on where the developer is at in their journey too.
For some, "look in the logs" is a challenge just to find out what they are and where to find them and what they are saying. A great piece of advice for a person in this position.
For others, "There are files that hide in the caves of your computer's consciousness. Find what causes the shadows on the walls." is a valid call to dig deeper :)
ethin 15 hours ago [-]
The biggest problem with having an LLM do this, from what I've observed of at least frontier models, is that the way they are trained/forced to behave makes them do one of two things, neither of which is educational or helpful:
1. They ask you a "hard question" but then immediately give you some kind of "hint" which makes it obvious what the "answer" is (or, even worse, they just tell you what it is).
2. They get pedantic (and I mean maximum emphasis on the word), to the point that they will nitpick the exact, precise wording you use, even if the context makes it blatantly obvious what you meant. GPT is currently the biggest offender in this area (it is ridiculously pedantic even though I haven't told it to be so).
And yes, in case anyone is wondering, I do actually read the output of tools like Claude and I have tried, repeatedly, to get them to do something like this, and one of the two aforementioned things always happens for some reason. I'm not sure if this is a problem with how they were trained, an issue with their system instructions, or what.
ForgotMyUUID 13 hours ago [-]
I like you idea. Since it only asks questions, such a collaborator chat could be achieved with an algorithm simillar to Phillips ELZA from 1960s. Then you would not need any AI to drive it
anthk 12 hours ago [-]
Then just run M-x doctor under Emacs.
Icarusfoundyou 16 hours ago [-]
The anti-AI debugger, built with AI.
khazhoux 14 hours ago [-]
“And what doeth the saint in the forest?” asked Zarathustra.
The saint answered: “I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise Claude.”
When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that Claude is dead!”
pcblues 8 hours ago [-]
That gave me a chuckle.
He really nailed a godless post-modernism decades before it flourished. Even mentioning the names of the modern protagonists will get me down-voted :)
benrutter 15 hours ago [-]
This is a fun idea- it's a shame it's tied to anthropic models though. From the transcripts, I think this looks like it'd work well even with quite a small (10B parameter or so) local model.
simonh 16 hours ago [-]
Home. java:2: error: <identifier» expected
Public static void main (String[] arg){
^
Recursion error: void main gazes back
nanna 16 hours ago [-]
Nietzsche had no qualms with asserting answers. If anything this should be named after Socrates. But then Socrates would have despised AI for its automation of thinking. Really this Claude project shouldn't be named after philosophers at all.
vorticalbox 16 hours ago [-]
Could this not have just been a skill?
manmal 16 hours ago [-]
I see how this could be useful, to roast agents while they are debugging or building something.
dilawargopang 16 hours ago [-]
Your comment is bliss to a half hearted junior dev and full time lazy philosopher like me. thank you
cubefox 14 hours ago [-]
Is the misspelling of Nietzschean as "Nietzschian" intentional?
vova_hn2 16 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, in <current year> "AI" seems to mean "chatbot assistant". So, by "anti-AI" the author meant "the thing that acts the opposite of how you would expect a helpful chatbot to act".
Yes, I hate this usage of the term "AI" too.
kettlez 15 hours ago [-]
So a markdown file is debugger now?
a96 3 hours ago [-]
It's a trifecta of irony. Not Nietzschean, not anti-AI, and not a debugger.
xhevahir 12 hours ago [-]
It's usually spelled "Nietzschean," I think.
sbmthakur 16 hours ago [-]
Could be just use a skill i think
12 hours ago [-]
17 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 10:29:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I was thinking Adorno's negative dialectics would be a better, if gloomy, fit; debugging is never-ending.
If you're in a positive or hopeful mood, or still a junior dev, Hegel's determinate negation offers reconciliation and an ending. This is a phase; dear junior devs you too will eventually share the Adornian resignation.
Nietzsche states that sovereign power/authority commands without justification. Socrates did not have sovereign power and was therefore unable to win in a traditional power struggle. Socrates therefore reframed the discussion around justification through rational discourse, thereby transferring authority from the old aristocracy to a new priesthood of truth. This relied on the moral claim made by Socrates and eventually adopted by the Greeks (and Western Europe) that virtue = reason (the search for Truth).
So if we accept this interpretation of Nietzsche, then creating AIs that demand justification from us could be seen as handing over power and authority to the AI.
Max stirner, who wrote very well and easy to understand, remains obscure compared to these charlatans because philosophers don’t like it when they can understand what someone wrote.
Probably why Michael Sugrue opined that Friedrich Nietzsche was a Philologist and not a Philosopher.
> https://github.com/DilawarShafiq/nietzschian-debugger#setup
Step one to setup: "Set your Anthropic API key"...
> The anti-AI.
but then it's an AI-generated picture of Nietzsche [1] and AI-generated README with AI-generated code (Claude being the co-author), and when I read sample transcript e.g. in (nietzschian-debugger/tests/fixtures/sample-sessions/sample-v1.json) it's clear the app also uses LLMs to generate output...
So what do they mean by "anti-AI"?
[1]: All issues with AI-generated images aside, AI-generating a person's likeness seems like the rudest way to do this... At least use an actual photo/drawing of his...
Keep reading.
"Guides you to the "aha!" moment — YOUR moment, not the AI's"
This seems like yet another attempt at encouraging people to continue to utilize AI without relying on it.
This is pure dev astrology, but in the subsidized Sonnet 3.5 times in copilot I'm guilty of prompting 'You're Uncle Bob make this legacy java services read like a book top down with the cleanest code' just for fun and I might have learnt something and had some fun so I'm not judging.
The Will to Power, as far as I understand it, is about how resistance (or friction) produces the strength of will to overcome obstacles. AI does the virtual opposite of that while also commoditizing cognition.
I'd agree with the other commenter that Nietzsche would probably see this as just another reversion to Plato's Forms - LLMs, by nature, are median outputs of cognition. There is no ubermensch to be found amongst the lowest-common-denominator, only the narcotic allure of becoming increasingly, as the kids say, smooth-brained.
And you must have known you were going to be critiqued here on your choice of philosopher :)
If my AI tells me I must overcome myself, reconcile with myself, find truths, and laugh, and do each of these things ten times each day - and tracks it for me so I know when I can stop developing and will sleep well... then we are talking Nietzsche! - Thus Sprach Zarathustra, The Academic Chairs of Virtue (II)
It might seem obvious to look at the logs, but in my experience 90% of being stuck debugging something is just not yet having looked at all the available evidence.
It's true you could learn these habits by exposure to them, and this could be a neat alternative to pairing with a more senior engineer for that. But it looks like you could easily just keep saying "it's random", "I don't know", and the model would keep telling you what to do next, without you actually having to think.
I wonder if making it even more Socratic would fix this? E.g. "how do you know it's returning 403s? Oh, logs you say? Is there anything else they could tell you?"
It depends on where the developer is at in their journey too.
For some, "look in the logs" is a challenge just to find out what they are and where to find them and what they are saying. A great piece of advice for a person in this position.
For others, "There are files that hide in the caves of your computer's consciousness. Find what causes the shadows on the walls." is a valid call to dig deeper :)
1. They ask you a "hard question" but then immediately give you some kind of "hint" which makes it obvious what the "answer" is (or, even worse, they just tell you what it is).
2. They get pedantic (and I mean maximum emphasis on the word), to the point that they will nitpick the exact, precise wording you use, even if the context makes it blatantly obvious what you meant. GPT is currently the biggest offender in this area (it is ridiculously pedantic even though I haven't told it to be so).
And yes, in case anyone is wondering, I do actually read the output of tools like Claude and I have tried, repeatedly, to get them to do something like this, and one of the two aforementioned things always happens for some reason. I'm not sure if this is a problem with how they were trained, an issue with their system instructions, or what.
The saint answered: “I make hymns and sing them; and in making hymns I laugh and weep and mumble: thus do I praise Claude.”
When Zarathustra was alone, however, he said to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that Claude is dead!”
He really nailed a godless post-modernism decades before it flourished. Even mentioning the names of the modern protagonists will get me down-voted :)
Yes, I hate this usage of the term "AI" too.