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Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#201
post #190

I'd like to hear from Linux kernel developers. There is no significant software that has been written (plagiarized) by "AI". Why not ask the actual experts who deliver instead of talk? This whole thing is a religion.

What counts as "significant software"? Only kernels I guess?

Office software, CAD systems, Web Browsers, the list is long.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#202
post #190

I'd like to hear from Linux kernel developers. There is no significant software that has been written (plagiarized) by "AI". Why not ask the actual experts who deliver instead of talk? This whole thing is a religion.

What counts as "significant software"? Only kernels I guess?

Can you point to any significant open source software that has any kind of significant AI contributions?

As an actual open source developer I'm not seeing anything. I am getting bogus pull requests full of AI slop that are causing problems though.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#203

I'd like to hear from Linux kernel developers. There is no significant software that has been written (plagiarized) by "AI". Why not ask the actual experts who deliver instead of talk? This whole thing is a religion.

There is no significant software that has been written (plagiarized) by "AI". How do you know? As you haven't evidenced your claim, you could start by providing explicit examples of what is significant. Even if you are correct, the amount of llm-assisted code is increasing all the time, and we are still only a couple of years in - give it time. Why not ask the actual experts Many would regard Karpathy in the expert c…

The AI people are the ones making the extraordinary claims here.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#204

Meanwhile, I asked this morning Claude 4 to write a simple EXIF normalizer. After two rounds of prompting it to double-check its code, I still had to point out that it makes no sense to load the entire image for re-orientating if the EXIF orientation is fine in the first place. Vibe vs reality, and anyone actually working in the space daily can attest how brittle these systems are. Maybe this changes in SWE with more…

The real question is how long it'll take until they're not brittle

“Treat it like a junior developer” … 5 years later … “Treat it like a junior developer”

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#205
post #54

Where do these analogies break down? 1. Similar cost structure to electricity, but non-essential utility (currently)? 2. Like an operating system, but with non-determinism? 3. Like programming, but ...? Where does the programming analogy break down?

> programming The programming analogy is convenient but off. The joke has always been “the computer only does exactly what you tell it to do!” regarding logic bugs. Prompts and LLMs most certainly do not work like that. I loved the parallels with modern LLMs and time sharing he presented though.

> Prompts and LLMs most certainly do not work like that.

It quite literally works like that. The computer is now OS + user-land + LLM runner + ML architecture + weights + system prompt + user prompt.

Taken together, and since you're adding in probabilities (by using ML/LLMs), you're quite literally getting "the computer only does exactly what you tell it to do!", it's just that we have added "but make slight variations to what tokens you select next" (temperature>0.0) sometimes, but it's still the same thing.

Just like when you tell the computer to create encrypted content by using some seed. You're getting exactly what you asked for.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#206
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the human is the problem here, but the time it takes to run the full testing suite.

It is kind of a human problem too, although that the full testing suite takes X hours to run is also not fun, but it makes the human problem larger. Say you're Human A, working on a feature. Running the full testing suite takes 2 hours from start to finish. Every change you do to existing code needs to be confirmed to not break existing stuff with the full testing suite, so some changes it takes 2 hours before you ha…

This is the workflow that ChatGPT Codex demonstrates nicely. Launch any number of «robotic» tasks in parallel, then go on your own. Come back later to review the results and pick good ones.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#207
post #54

Where do these analogies break down? 1. Similar cost structure to electricity, but non-essential utility (currently)? 2. Like an operating system, but with non-determinism? 3. Like programming, but ...? Where does the programming analogy break down?

Define non-essenti The way I see dependency in office ("knowledge") work: - pre-(computing) history. We are at the office, we work - dawn of the pc: my computer is down, work halts - dawn of the lan: the network is down, work halts - dawn of the Internet: the Internet connection is down, work halts ( - dawn of the LLM: ChatGPT is down, work halts (<- for many, we are here already)

I see your point. It's nearing essential.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#208
I was trying to do some reverse engineering with Claude using an MCP server I wrote for a game trainer program that supports Python scripts. The context window gets filled up _so_ fast. I think my server is returning too many addresses (hex) when Claude searches for values in memory, but it’s annoying. These things are so flaky.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#209

Tight feedback loops are the key in working productively with software. I see that in codebases up to 700k lines of code (legacy 30yo 4GL ERP systems). The best part is that AI-driven systems are fine with running even more tight loops than what a sane human would tolerate. Eg. running full linting, testing and E2E/simulation suite after any minor change. Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the h…

I don't think the human is the problem here, but the time it takes to run the full testing suite.

Humans tend to lack inhumane patience.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#210
post #178

It's fascinating to see his gears grinding at 22:55 when acknowledging that a human still has to review the thousand lines of LLM-generated code for bugs and security issues if they're "actually trying to get work done". Yet these are the tools that are supposed to make us hyperproductive? This is "Software 3.0"? Give me a break.

Plus coding is the fun bit, reviewing code is the hard and not fun bit, arguing with an overconfident machine sound like it'll be worse even than that. Thankfully I'm going to retire soon.
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