I hate to say it because it sounds ridiculous, but that is the path we are going to arrive at just give it 50 years.

We are the proof: what do we do to animals that are less intelligent than ourselves? Now take away the moral compass and there you go. QED.

Brakes slow down a vehicle to zero. Apply brake -> Slow down. The engineering is not important. The intent and result are absolutely of most importance.

ABS breaking for example makes some assumptions along with the additional engineering allows for safer braking.

Now we are entering the realm of software engineering where I say "take a timestamp" I am going to make a list of assumptions of how the model would do this. One possible option is to generate an abacus, then make an API call to an outside NTP server, using the abacus UI, generate the mouse movements to do the math, record the number, convert it to epoch.

Watching these models work the results get better but sometimes the result is far simpler than fifteen agents doing the strange work of writing long python wrappers around APIs to process logs when 'last 30 seconds' and grep will work.

I fall between your human-in-the-loop and hobbyist tinkering limits, where I want to force Claude to atop and talk to me at only a few specific points. I'm still not sure if my 600-word prompt templates are overbearing or not.