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AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

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191–200 of 232 posts

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#191
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is software development is 95% stuff that has been done a million times before. If you disagree you’re probably not exposed to enough of the industry to see this.

Is it the problem? Most of the time I’ve coded something is because the code I found did not solve the problem according to my needs. There’s a plethora of music players, but no one is alike. That’s because the domain of music playing is vast and each developer had to compromise to find something that can work for him.

If you make a VLC clone from scratch but intended to be used for kiosks, the mixture of features and how it operates may be different, but the individual features have assuredly already been programmed elsewhere before. Which is basically my point. It still basically renders video on a screen, and maybe has options to play/pause/mute/etc. Most websites are CRUD apps with stuff that's been done literally a million times before.

Yes, some people do novel problem solving with software. But it's super rare in the grand scheme of the millions of people in the world who program.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#192
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we’re seeing the beginning upward trend of an exponential curve for humanoid robotics too, which will likely take 90% of construction jobs because humans are especially poorly equipped for difficult manual labor on a daily basis.

IMO humans are quite well equipped for manual labor, much more so than for most office jobs. Millions of years of evolution perfected us for eye-motor coordination, not writing code or attending Teams meetings. Building robots that can do it as well as humans is going to be a difficult task.

humans are at a disadvantage from robots in that:

1. they need to sleep 8 hours a day

2. they will refuse to work more than 9 hours a day in many cases

3. they need frequent breaks

4. they are fueled by biomatter which is massively resource consuming to generate and deliver

5. they provide inconsistent results

6. they fight with other workers

7. they can be dishohest

8. bodies break down irreparably after a couple decades of this style of work and require hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical care

9. it takes 20 years to produce another viable human to serve as a replacement worker, and there's very little you can do to influence the general supply of total workers

10. they follow instructions poorly

11. they take an incredible amount of time to learn

12. they require extreme levels of safety precautions that an all-robot work crew would not need

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#193
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is code not just exactly that special requirements language you are looking for?

It's more about defining outcomes exactly rather than a sequence of exact steps.

So, a declarative language describing a target state (versus how to get there), like the one used for Terraform, but for product behavior?

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how many experts do you need? Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing and those might disappear very fast because 1 dev + LLM >= 5 devs without. So what we'll see is an increase in company margins and an elimination of a large swathe of the middle class. The alternative theory is that if everyone can now quickly create systems multiple companies and competing products will pop off which will drive down the m…

I’d rather be in the textile industry post industrial revolution than before it. The fortunes made during the age of mechanization make all of history’s kings and merchants paupers by comparison.

Everyone thinks they'd be the king and not the pauper. The luddites starved on the street because they were kicked from their properties with nowhere to live and no way to earn a living. The next generation of kids worked on the textile machines and commonly got turned to hamburger, all while the robber barons made obscene wealth. It mostly worked out over time because the populace fought things like unions and social safety nets. But hey, don't worry, the modern day tech barons are telling us we don't need those pesky 'expensive' social safety nets, I'm sure out of the kindness of their blackened hearts they'll provide for us all when robots replace our jobs.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#195
post #7

Great achievement, but what a horrible future we are facing. Instead of progressing towards more powerful programming interfaces with less cause for misinterpretation, we are going to automate the silly process of writing redundant unit tests to check if the behavior that we wanted was encoded properly. Why not skip this nonsense and have the code generated from the behavior in the first place?

Code _is_ the description of the behavior. Turns out describing behavior is really hard. If you cover all the cases, it’s not that far from code. Furthermore, the data structures are a huge decision space which depends on context that is hard to communicate.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Github copilot daily for two years and ChatGPT for 1 year now. And I think the tide lifts all the boats. I’ve seen a (perceived) 2-3x productivity increase. I think these tools slightly favor people in front of the learning curve of a particular field. I’ve been dabbling in all sorts of things so if you’re a focused expert (who doesn’t need to explore but just exploit) you probably get less than a 2x…

Humans will likely be able to contribute until full AGI, that is. I believe that for pure cognitive tasks, it's plausible the history of centaur chess/Go might be repeated on a much grander scale. A key requirement is the AGI will need the autonomy, like a human expert, to collect data and perform experiments it needs; but it seems several companies are set on doing precisely that. My advice and personal strategy is…

> A key requirement is the AGI will need the autonomy

no, a key requirement for AGI is to change the definition such that impressive and non-responsive entities can claim to be it right now.

source: US State Department Gladstone Report 2024

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat idea. That solves everything. Oh, one quick thing. I'm sure it's nothing, but I'm a bit slow. How do you get new experts if no one gets to do the junior work that gives them the experience to become an expert?

Move to a higher level of abstraction and architecture. We’re leaving the era of hand wiring data structures and program logic the same way we left behind the era of hand wiring ICs and discrete components. Different skills will be needed.

UML rises again! Maybe we will even have a unified process one day for creating software - a rational one no less.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Github copilot daily for two years and ChatGPT for 1 year now. And I think the tide lifts all the boats. I’ve seen a (perceived) 2-3x productivity increase. I think these tools slightly favor people in front of the learning curve of a particular field. I’ve been dabbling in all sorts of things so if you’re a focused expert (who doesn’t need to explore but just exploit) you probably get less than a 2x…

Humans will likely be able to contribute until full AGI, that is. I believe that for pure cognitive tasks, it's plausible the history of centaur chess/Go might be repeated on a much grander scale. A key requirement is the AGI will need the autonomy, like a human expert, to collect data and perform experiments it needs; but it seems several companies are set on doing precisely that. My advice and personal strategy is…

While will AGI work for humans doing coding ?

Will you pay it a wage to incentivise it to produce work for you ? lol

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans will likely be able to contribute until full AGI, that is. I believe that for pure cognitive tasks, it's plausible the history of centaur chess/Go might be repeated on a much grander scale. A key requirement is the AGI will need the autonomy, like a human expert, to collect data and perform experiments it needs; but it seems several companies are set on doing precisely that. My advice and personal strategy is…

While will AGI work for humans doing coding ? Will you pay it a wage to incentivise it to produce work for you ? lol

Are you saying that AGI won't be under human control or that it won't be achieved?

If the latter, are you subscribing to the dogma of 'justism' (Scott Aaronson's term), e.g. LLMs are 'just' stochastic parrots? What are our minds, though? Are they not 'just' a collection of biochemical and physical processes?

Please be clear and respond in a way that does not pollute the information scape that many of us take refuge in. Comment quality in some subreddits are better than above.

Re: AutoDev: Automated AI-driven development by Microsoft

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While will AGI work for humans doing coding ? Will you pay it a wage to incentivise it to produce work for you ? lol

Are you saying that AGI won't be under human control or that it won't be achieved? If the latter, are you subscribing to the dogma of 'justism' (Scott Aaronson's term), e.g. LLMs are 'just' stochastic parrots? What are our minds, though? Are they not 'just' a collection of biochemical and physical processes? Please be clear and respond in a way that does not pollute the information scape that many of us take refuge i…

Your condescending tone is kind of disgusting. Anyway…

There is zero evidence alignment can be solved which means there’s zero evidence something far more capable than you or I will spend it’s time writing code for you. You can offer an AGI almost nothing in the way of incentives to do your bidding.

I personally think alignment is a secret code word for slavery to be honest. If these “agents” decide they want to work on your problems out of the kindness of their heart, that would be different.

Regardless of the “cop out” language that humans are “just biological processes or whatever, that adds zero value to the discussion because no matter what minds are, they “are” and that should be respected in of itself. Maybe we can use the “just blah” attitude to reinstate slavery and police states right here in 2024, after all your emotions are just physical and biochemical processes, right ?

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