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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]

#261

Post by geraneum »

fergie wrote: post #133

There were some cool ideas- I particularly liked "psychology of AI" Overall though I really feel like he is selling the idea that we are going to have to pay large corporations to be able to write code. Which is... terrifying. Also, as a lazy developer who is always trying to make AI do my job for me, it still kind of sucks, and its not clear that it will make my life easier any time soon.

On a tangent, I find the analogies interesting as well. However, while Karpathy is an expert in Computer Science, NLP and machine vision, his understanding of how human psychology and brain work is as good as you an I (non-experts). So I take some of those comparisons as a lay person’s feelings about the subject. Still, they are fun to listen to.

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

#263

Post by diggan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #250
diggan wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to make a point regarding "reliability", not a point about how to prompt or how to use them for work.

This is relevant. Your example may be simple enough, but for anything more complex, letting the model have its space to think/compute is critical to reliability - if you starve it for compute, you'll get more errors/hallucinations.

Yeah I mean I agree with you, but I'm still not sure how it's relevant. I'd also urge people to have unit tests they treat as production code, and proper system prompts, and X and Y, but it's really beyond the original point of "LLMs aren't reliable" which is the context in this sub-tree.

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

#264

Post by guappa »

dist-epoch wrote: post #240
darqis wrote: post #193

when I started coding at the age of 11 in machine code and assembly on the C64, the dream was to create software that creates software. Nowadays it's almost reality, almost because the devil is always in the details. When you're used to write code, writing code is relatively fast. You need this knowledge to debug issues with generated code. However you're now telling AI to fix the bugs in the generated code. I see it…

> This is a toy for rich people GitHub copilot has a free tier. Google gives you thousands of free LLM API calls per day. There are other free providers too.

1st dose is free

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

#265

Post by bonoboTP »

latexr wrote: post #254
abdullin wrote: post #102

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…

> Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one. That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality. Why are we doing this to ourselves and embracing it? A few years ago, it would have been seen as a joke to say “the future of software development will be to have a million monkey interns banging on one million keyboar…

If it's monkeylike quality and you need a million tries, it's shit. It you need four tries and one of those is top-tier professional programmer quality, then it's good.

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

#266

Post by diggan »

latexr wrote: post #254
abdullin wrote: post #102

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…

> Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one. That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality. Why are we doing this to ourselves and embracing it? A few years ago, it would have been seen as a joke to say “the future of software development will be to have a million monkey interns banging on one million keyboar…

> A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality

You clearly have strong feelings about it, which is fine, but it would be much more interesting to know exactly why it would terrible and demotivating, and why it cannot produce anything of quality? And what is "real quality" and does that mean "fake quality" exists?

> million monkey interns banging on one million keyboards and submit a million PRs

I'm not sure if you misunderstand LLMs, or the famous "monkeys writing Shakespeare" part, but that example is more about randomness and infinity than about probabilistic machines somewhat working towards a goal with some non-determinism.

> We’re beyond doomed

The good news is that we've been doomed for a long time, yet we persist. If you take a look at how the internet is basically held up by duct-tape at this point, I think you'd feel slightly more comfortable with how crap absolutely everything is. Like 1% of software is actually Good Software while the rest barely works on a good day.

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

#267

Post by diggan »

bsenftner wrote: post #260
diggan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the first, nor the last person, to have a seemingly vastly different experience than me and others. So I'm curious, what am I doing differently from what you did/do when you try them out? This is maybe a bit out there, but would you be up for sending me like a screen recording of exactly what you're doing? Or maybe even a video call sharing your screen? I'm not working in the space, have no products or ser…

I'm a greybeard, 45+ years coding, including active in AI during the mid 80's and used it when it applied throughout my entire career. That career being media and animation production backends, where the work is both at the technical and creative edge. I currently have an AI integrated office suite, which has attorneys, professional writers, and political activists using the system. It is office software, word proces…

But parent explicitly mentioned:

> - yes I've tried giving it prompts so detailed a literal infant could follow along and accomplish the task

Which you are saying that might have missed in the end regardless?

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

#268

Post by TeMPOraL »

diggan wrote: post #171
OvbiousError wrote: post #160

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…

Worked in such a codebase for about 5 years.

No one really cares about improving test times. Everyone either suffers in private or gets convinced it's all normal and look at you weird when you suggest something needs to be done.

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

#269

Post by diggan »

crmi wrote: post #245
sensanaty wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also those instances where Microsoft unleashed Copilot on the .NET repo, and it resulted in the most hilariously terrible PRs that required the maintainers to basically tell Copilot every single step it should take to fix the issue. They were basically writing the PRs themselves at that point, except doing it through an intermediary that was much dumber, slower and less practical than them. And don't get me s…

I've got a working theory that models perform differently when used in different timezones... As in during US working hours they dont work as well due to high load. When used at 'offpeak' hours not only are they (obviously) snappier but the outputs appear to be a higher standard. Thought this for a while but now noticing with Claude4 [thinking] recently. Textbook case of anecdata of course though.

Interesting thought, if nothing less. Unless I misunderstand, it would be easy to run a study to see if this is true; use the API to send the same but slightly different prompt (as to avoid the caches) which has a definite answer, then run that once per hour for a week and see if the accuracy oscillates or not.

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

#270

Post by diggan »

kypro wrote: post #229
sensanaty wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also those instances where Microsoft unleashed Copilot on the .NET repo, and it resulted in the most hilariously terrible PRs that required the maintainers to basically tell Copilot every single step it should take to fix the issue. They were basically writing the PRs themselves at that point, except doing it through an intermediary that was much dumber, slower and less practical than them. And don't get me s…

I think part of the problem is that code quality is somewhat subjective and developers are of different skill levels. If you're fine with things that kinda working okay and you're not the best developer yourself then you probably think coding agents work really really well because the slop they produce isn't that much worse than yourself. In fact I know a mid-level dev who believes agent AIs write better code than hi…

> If you're very critical of code quality then it's much tougher

I'm not sure, I'm hearing developers I know are sloppy and produce shit code both having no luck with LLMs, and some of them having lots of luck with them.

On the other side, those who really think about the design/architecture and are very strict (which is the group I'd probably put myself into, but who wouldn't?) are split in a similar way.

I don't have any concrete proof, but I'm guessing "expectations + workflow" differences would explain the vast difference in perception of usefulness.

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