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.

"anti-ai"

> https://github.com/DilawarShafiq/nietzschian-debugger#setup

Step one to setup: "Set your Anthropic API key"...

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...

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.

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?

Even Anti-AI tech now uses AI. How far we have come!

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.

There are a few Facebook pages I actually like, and using this debugger will remind me of one of them: https://www.facebook.com/GrumpyNietzscheanCat/

This is a fun idea with a good premise.

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)

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."

Where is the Freudian variant that questions your childhood, sexuality, and relationship with your mother?

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?"

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.

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

The anti-AI debugger, built with AI.

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.

“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!”

Home. java:2: error: <identifier» expected Public static void main (String[] arg){ ^ Recursion error: void main gazes back

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.

Could this not have just been a skill?

I see how this could be useful, to roast agents while they are debugging or building something.

Is the misspelling of Nietzschean as "Nietzschian" intentional?

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.

So a markdown file is debugger now?

Could be just use a skill i think

It's usually spelled "Nietzschean," I think.