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AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

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

#61

Post by 9rx »

lanstin wrote: post #54
9rx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That's qualitatively different from the compilers I have used.

Is it? I can, in most traditional programming languages commonly used to today, using decades old compiler technology, say something like "x = [1,2,3]" and it will, for example, systematically generate all the code necessary to allocate memory without any need for me to be any more explicit about it. It would be fair to say AI offers an even higher level abstraction, like how most programming languages used today are a higher level abstraction over assembly, but fundamentally different it is not.

"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" is just code. You still have to write the code get AI to translate it into a lower-level abstraction. It doesn't magically go off and do its own autonomous thing.

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

#62

Post by DrewADesign »

mjr00 wrote: post #50
kazinator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Were AI-generated actors chosen over real actors, or was the alternative using some other low-cost method for an advertisement like just colorful words moving around on a screen? Or the ad not being made at all? The existence of ads using generative AI "actors" doesn't…

A) J. Crew and others are using AI models instead of real models. Retail modeling was steady pay-the-bills work for models and actors and is actively being replaced by AI image generators— sometimes trained on images of a particular model they’re no longer paying. Writers and stock photographers are in much worse shape.

B) Even in cases where AI actors are used where there wouldn’t have been actors before, the skillset is still devalued, and even that modest insulation for higher-end work is almost certainly temporary. Someone doing a worse version of what you do for 1% of your pay affects the market, and saving 99% is great incentive for companies to change their strategy until the worse version is good enough.

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

#63

Post by jbstack »

But what is meant by "real coder"? Does it mean an experienced senior coder? In that case, no, AI isn't ready to replace one. How about a junior coder who is fresh out of university and starting his first job? Surely that counts as a "real coder"? I'd argue that AI can and does already replace such coders, depending on the type of work they have been assigned.

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

#64

Post by boesboes »

frank_nitti wrote: post #44
kazinator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with your sentiment. But where I struggle is: to what degree do each of those ads “represent one less person who would have been paid” versus those that represent one additional person who would not be able to afford to advertise in that medium. Of course that line of reasoning reduces similar to other automation / minimum wage / etc discussions

It reminds me of the piracy lawsuits that claimed damages as if every download would have been a sale

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

#65

Post by anthem2025 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #27
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.

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.

We see massive initial growth followed by a slowdown constantly.

There is zero reason to think AI is some exception that will continue to exponentially improve without limit. We already seem to be at the point of diminishing returns. Sinking absurd amounts of money and resources to train models that show incremental improvements.

To get this far they have had to spend hundreds of billions and have used up the majority of the data they have access to. We are at the point of trying to train AI on generated data and hoping that it doesn’t just cause the entire thing degrade.

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

#66

Post by semi-extrinsic »

mjr00 wrote: post #50
kazinator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Were AI-generated actors chosen over real actors, or was the alternative using some other low-cost method for an advertisement like just colorful words moving around on a screen? Or the ad not being made at all? The existence of ads using generative AI "actors" doesn't…

Yes, this. I recently used Midjourney to generate a super-convincing drone shot video for a presentation. The alternative would have been a stock photo.

Probably took me the same amount of time to generate a pleasing video as I would have spent browsing Shutterstock. Only difference is my money goes to one corporation instead of the other.

As far as the video is concerned, it adds a bit of a wow factor to get people interested, but ultimately it's the same old graphs and bullet points with words and numbers that matter. And those could just as well have been done on an overhead transparency in 1987.

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

#67

Post by gchamonlive »

jbstack wrote: post #63

But what is meant by "real coder"? Does it mean an experienced senior coder? In that case, no, AI isn't ready to replace one. How about a junior coder who is fresh out of university and starting his first job? Surely that counts as a "real coder"? I'd argue that AI can and does already replace such coders, depending on the type of work they have been assigned.

Could you elaborate your argument? I'd say AI is far from replacing any human contributor at this point.

Context doesn't work the same way as memory + experience in humans. While humans have an impression and a flexible mental model of any single domain, AI needs hard data, which is hard to manage with context and can't really be worked around by fine-tuning in practice, lest you have to retrain the model on each and every code merge.

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

#68

Post by nine_k »

mjr00 wrote: post #50
kazinator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Were AI-generated actors chosen over real actors, or was the alternative using some other low-cost method for an advertisement like just colorful words moving around on a screen? Or the ad not being made at all? The existence of ads using generative AI "actors" doesn't…

It means that being a live actor is less of a differentiator. Of course great movie stars will remain, playing live, or animating computer characters, no matter. But simpler works like ads featuring a human now become more accessible.

Among other things, this will remove most entry-level jobs, making senior-level actors more rare and expensive.

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

#69

Post by anthem2025 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #57
phailhaus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It doesn’t develop any thinking, it’s just predicting tokens based on a statistical model.

This has been demonstrated so many times.

They don’t make mistakes. It doesn’t make any sense to claim they do because their goal is simply to produce a statistically likely output. Whether or not that output is correct outside of their universe is not relevant.

What you’re doing is anthropomorphizing them and then trying to explain your observations in that context. The problem is that doesn’t make any sense.

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

#70

Post by codingdave »

ACCount37 wrote: post #27
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.

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 took closer to 100 years for AI to get to this stage. Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...

I suspect once you have studied how we actually got to where we are today, you might see why your lack of seeing any limitations may not be the flex you think it is.

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