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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]

#271
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Agreed. It is worth noting how search has evolved over the years.

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

#272
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

if the thing producing the four PRs can't distinguish the top tier one, I have strong doubts that it can even produce it

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

#273
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd like to see the prompt. I suspect that "literal infant" is expected to be a software developer without preamble. The initial sentence to an LLM carries far more relevance, it sets the context stage to understand what follows. If there is no introduction to the subject at hand, the response will be just like anyone fed a wall of words: confusion as to what all this is about.

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

#274
post #181

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.

Yes, and (some near-future) AI is also more patient and better at multitasking than a reasonable human. It can make a change, submit for full fuzzing, and if there's a problem it can continue with the saved context it had when making the change. It can work on 100s of such changes in parallel, while a human trying to do this would mix up the reasons for the change with all the other changes they'd done by the time th…

You can't run N bots in parallel with testing between each attempt unless you're also running N tests in parallel.

If you could run N tests in parallel, then you could probably also run the components of one test in parallel and keep it from taking 2 hours in the first place.

To me this all sounds like snake oil to convince people to do something they were already doing, but by also spinning up N times as many compute instances and run a burn endless tokens along the way. And by the time it's demonstrated that it doesn't really offer anything more than doing it yourself, well you've already given them all of your money so their job is done.

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

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we can collect all of this salt and operate a Thorium reactor with it, this in turn can then power AI.

We'll need to boil a few more lakes before we get to that stage I'm afraid, who needs water when you can have your AI hallucinate some for you after all?

Who needs water when all these hot takes come from sources so dense, they're about to collapse into black holes.

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

#276
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#277
post #266
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 submi…

> And what is "real quality" and does that mean "fake quality" exists?

I think there is no real quality or fake quality, just quality. I am referencing the quality that Persig and C. Alexander have written about.

It’s… qualitative, so it’s hard to measure but easy to feel. Humans are really good at perceiving it then making objective decisions. LLMs don’t know what it is (they’ve heard about it and think they know).

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

#278
post #254

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…

> That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality

This is the right way to work with generative AI, and it already is an extremely common and established practice when working with image generation.

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

#279
post #266
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 submi…

If "AI" worked (which fortunately isn't the case), humans would be degraded to passive consumers in the last domain in which they were active creators: thinking.

Moreover, you would have to pay centralized corporations that stole all of humanity's intellectual output for engaging in your profession. That is terrifying.

The current reality is also terrifying: Mediocre developers are enabled to have a 10x volume (not quality). Mediocre execs like that and force everyone to use the "AI" snakeoil. The profession becomes even more bureaucratic, tool oriented and soulless.

People without a soul may not mind.

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

#280
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality This is the right way to work with generative AI, and it already is an extremely common and established practice when working with image generation.

I can recognize images in one look.

How about that 400 Line change that touches 7 files?

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