Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 164 posts

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#51

Post by biophysboy »

matheusd wrote: post #46
biophysboy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has the lowest quality ads of any online platform I use by several orders of magnitude. AI being used for belly fat and erectile dysfunction ads is not exactly good for its creative reputation

Local governments in BR have already made ads using generative AI that were shown during prime time TV hours[1]. You can argue that is a bad thing (local designers/content producers/actors/etc lost revenue, while the money was sent to $BigTech) or that this was a good thing (lower cost to make ad means taxpayer money saved, paying $BigTech has lower chance of corruption vs hiring local marketing firm - which is very…

I have no doubt there will be AI advertising. I bet it’s the primary untapped revenue stream. My argument is that it will be associated with cheap, untrustworthy products over time, even if it’s possible to spend more money and get better AI ads. Same thing as social/search ads.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#52

Post by lanstin »

tjr wrote: post #23
jjangkke wrote: post #15

I'm fatigued by these articles that just broadly claim AI can't code because its painting a broad stroke against a widely diverse use of AI for different stacks. It's horribly outdated way of thinking that an singular AI entity would be able to handle all stacks all problems directed at it because no developer is using it that way. AI is a great tool for both coders and artists and these outlandish titles that grab a…

A lot of comments here seem to be similar. I see people claiming that AI has all but taken over doing their work for them, and others claiming that it's almost useless. But usually, nobody even briefly mentions what the work is (other than, presumably, something related to programming). I imagine there's a big difference in using AI for building, say, an online forum vs. building a flight control system, both in term…

Yeah. I use it for analytics/dataviz stuff (which involves a lot of python to run spark jobs, glue different APis to get some extra column of data, making png or svg pictures,, making D3 based web sites in html and JavaScript). That all works pretty well.

I also write high performance Go server code, where it works a lot less well. It doesn't follow my rules for ptr APIs or using sync mutexes or atomic operations across a code base. It (probably slightly older version than SOTA) didn't read deep call chains accurately for refactoring. It's still worth trying but if that was my sole work it would probably not be worth it.

On the other hand for personal productivity, emacs functions and config, getting a good .mcp.json, it is also very good and generates code that partakes in the exponential growth of good code. (Unlike data viz where there is a tendency to build something and then the utility declines over time).

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#53

Post by bee_rider »

SKILNER wrote: post #30
ACCount37 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of all the "yet another tool" reductionism. It reeks of cope. It took under a decade to get AI to this stage - where it can build small scripts and tiny services entirely on its own. I see no fundamental limitations that would prevent further improvements. I see no reason why it would stop at human level of performance either.

>> It reeks of cope. haha, well said, I've got to remember that one. HN is a smelly place when it comes to AI coping.

I’ve seen comments here claiming that this site is either a bunch of coders coping about the limitations of AI and how it can’t take their job, or a bunch of startup dummies totally on the AI hype train.

Now, there’s a little room between the two—maybe the site is full of coders on a cope train, hoping that we’ll be empowered by nice little tools rather than totally replaced. And, ya know, multiple posters with multiple opinions, some contradictions are expected.

But I do find it pretty funny to see the multiple posters here describe the site they are using as suffering from multiple, contradictory, glaringly obvious blindspots.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#54

Post by lanstin »

9rx wrote: post #28
jjangkke wrote: post #15

I'm fatigued by these articles that just broadly claim AI can't code because its painting a broad stroke against a widely diverse use of AI for different stacks. It's horribly outdated way of thinking that an singular AI entity would be able to handle all stacks all problems directed at it because no developer is using it that way. AI is a great tool for both coders and artists and these outlandish titles that grab a…

Well, AI really can't code any more than a compiler can. They all require a human to write the original code, even the machine does translate it into other code. And until the day that humans are no longer driving the bus that will remain the case.

You can say generate a c program that uses gcc 128 bit floats and systematically generates all quadratic roots in order of the max size of their minimal polynomial coefficients, and then sort them and calculate the distribution of the intervals between adjacent numbers, and it just does it. That's qualitatively different from the compilers I have used. Now I was careful to use properly technical words to pull in the world of numeric computation and c programming. But still saved me a lot of time. It was even able to bolt on multithreaded parallelism to speed it up using c stuff I never heard of.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#55

Post by jvanderbot »

kazinator wrote: post #22
manoDev wrote: post #10

I'm tired of the anthropomorphization marketing behind AI driving this kind of discussion. In a few years, all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers". We'll reap the productivity benefits from this new tool, create more work for ourselves, output will stabilize at a new level and salaries will stagnate again, as it always happens.

Generative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop. Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid. There is no exact measure of correctness in design; one bad bit does not stop the show. The clients don't even want real art. Artists sometimes refer to commer…

Anecdata: I know writers, editors, and white collar non-tech workers of all kinds who use AI daily and like it.

When GPT3.5 first landed a lifelong writer/editor saw a steep decrease in jobs. A year later the jobs changed to "can you edit this AI generated text to sound human", and now they continue to work doing normal editing for human or human-ish writing while declining the slop-correction deluge because it is terrible work.

I can't help but see the software analogy for this.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#56

Post by csours »

My best understanding/explanation of LLM tools is "plausible extension of a context"

That is, you have some context, ie the prompt and any other text, and the LLM produces a plausible continuation or alteration of that prompt and text.

My intuition leads me to a thought like: To progress, the context must compress into a fractal representation.

I feel very confident that someone smarter and MUCH better paid than me is already working on this.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#57

Post by ACCount37 »

phailhaus wrote: post #40
ACCount37 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of all the "yet another tool" reductionism. It reeks of cope. It took under a decade to get AI to this stage - where it can build small scripts and tiny services entirely on its own. I see no fundamental limitations that would prevent further improvements. I see no reason why it would stop at human level of performance either.

> I see no fundamental limitations How about the fact that AI is only trained to complete text and literally has no "mind" within which to conceive or reason about concepts? Fundamentally, it is only trained to sound like a human.

The simplest system that acts entirely like a human is a human.

An LLM base model isn't trained for abstract thinking, but it still ends up developing abstract thinking internally - because that's the easiest way for it to mimic the breadth and depth of the training data. All LLMs operate in abstracts, using the same manner of informal reasoning as humans do. Even the mistakes they make are amusingly humanlike.

There's no part of an LLM that's called a "mind", but it has a "forward pass", which is quite similar in function. An LLM reasons in small slices - elevating its input text to a highly abstract representation, and then reducing it back down to a token prediction logit, one token at a time.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#58

Post by MintPaw »

manoDev wrote: post #10

I'm tired of the anthropomorphization marketing behind AI driving this kind of discussion. In a few years, all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers". We'll reap the productivity benefits from this new tool, create more work for ourselves, output will stabilize at a new level and salaries will stagnate again, as it always happens.

You say it as a joke, but spell check has replaced certain tiers of editors. And Photoshop has replaced certain tiers of designers.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#59

Post by anthem2025 »

kazinator wrote: post #22
manoDev wrote: post #10

I'm tired of the anthropomorphization marketing behind AI driving this kind of discussion. In a few years, all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers". We'll reap the productivity benefits from this new tool, create more work for ourselves, output will stabilize at a new level and salaries will stagnate again, as it always happens.

Generative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop. Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid. There is no exact measure of correctness in design; one bad bit does not stop the show. The clients don't even want real art. Artists sometimes refer to commer…

And as people get more used to the patterns of AI it’s getting called out more and more.

Re: AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

#60

Post by narag »

I can't help thinking that a big factor is how bad our tools were before. There are many leaking abstractions, boilerplate code and cruft. Dealing with that fills a sizeable percent of a programmer's job.

These tools seem great because they are less sensitive than humans to the mess and lift us over the tedious work. But at the same time, they're giving us an excuse to not fix what needed to be fixed and, in doing so, they're adding more crap to the heap.

Maybe what we need is forcing the tools to build on a simpler base, so we can keep an understanding of the results.

Post reply on HN