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AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

spectrum.ieee.org

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

#71

Post by tuyosvawnt »

biophysboy wrote: post #32
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.

You can’t see any bottlenecks? Energy? Compute power? Model limitations? Data? Money?

there are more of all these bottlenecks among the proprietary or open source project worlds, which have yet to collaborate amongst themselves to unify the patterns in their disparate codebases and algorithms into a monolith designed to compress representations of repeated structures edited for free by a growing userbase of millions and the maturing market of programmers who grew up with cheap GPUs and reliable optimization libraries

the article's subtitle is currently false, people collaborate more with the works of others through these systems and it would be extremely difficult to incentivize any equally signifciant number of the enterprise software shops, numerics labs, etc to share code: even joint ventures like Accenture do not scrape all their own private repos and report their patterns back to Microsoft every time they re-implement the same .NET systems over and over

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

#72

Post by kstenerud »

“If it takes longer to explain to the system all the things you want to do and all the details of what you want to do, then all you have is just programming by another name”

If it's taking you that long to direct the AI, then either you're throwing too small a problem at it, or too big a problem at it, or you're not directing its attention properly.

In a way, your prompts should feel like writing user documentation:

    Refactor all of the decode functions in decoder.rs to return the number of bytes decoded
    in addition to the decoded values they already return. While refactoring, follow these principles:

    * Use established best practices and choose the most idiomatic approaches.
    * Avoid using clone or unwrap.
    * Update the unit tests to account for the extra return values, and make sure the tests check the additional return values.

    When you're finished, run clippy and fix any issues it finds. Then run rustfmt on the crate.

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

#73

Post by MarcelOlsz »

kstenerud wrote: post #72

“If it takes longer to explain to the system all the things you want to do and all the details of what you want to do, then all you have is just programming by another name” If it's taking you that long to direct the AI, then either you're throwing too small a problem at it, or too big a problem at it, or you're not directing its attention properly. In a way, your prompts should feel like writing user documentation:…

And then for some bizarre reason sometimes it doesn't really work, AI added a bunch of random shit, then you can feel your rage bubbling up in real-time as you have to re-prompt it.

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

#74

Post by kstenerud »

MarcelOlsz wrote: post #73
kstenerud wrote: post #72

“If it takes longer to explain to the system all the things you want to do and all the details of what you want to do, then all you have is just programming by another name” If it's taking you that long to direct the AI, then either you're throwing too small a problem at it, or too big a problem at it, or you're not directing its attention properly. In a way, your prompts should feel like writing user documentation:…

And then for some bizarre reason sometimes it doesn't really work, AI added a bunch of random shit, then you can feel your rage bubbling up in real-time as you have to re-prompt it.

I've yet to have that happen. But then again so far I've only used it for Rust, and it's hard for the AI to maintain hallucinations with such a strict compiler.

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

#75

Post by the_af »

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.

> all this talk will sound as dumb as stating "MS Word spell checker will replace writers" or "Photoshop will replace designers".

You cannot use just a spell checker to write a book (no matter how bad) or photoshop (non-AI) plugins to automatically create meaningful artwork, replacing human intervention.

Business people "up the ladder" are already threatening with reducing the workforce and firing people because they can (allegedly) be replaced by AI. No writer was ever threatened by a spellchecker.

Hollywood studio execs are putting pressure on writers, and now they can leverage AI as yet another tool against them.

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

#76

Post by kazinator »

kstenerud wrote: post #72

“If it takes longer to explain to the system all the things you want to do and all the details of what you want to do, then all you have is just programming by another name” If it's taking you that long to direct the AI, then either you're throwing too small a problem at it, or too big a problem at it, or you're not directing its attention properly. In a way, your prompts should feel like writing user documentation:…

I feel you've done a decent job of disguising "you're not approaching it with the right mindset".

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

#77

Post by z2 »

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 not a "real coder" either, but it sounds like the "No True Scotsman" trap when people say, “AI can’t be a real coder,” and then redefine “real coder” to mean something AI can’t currently do (like full autonomy or deep architectural reasoning). This makes the claim unfalsifiable and ignores the fact that AI already performs several coding tasks effectively. Yeah, I get it, context handling, long-horizon planning, and intent inference all stink, but the tools are all 'real' to me.

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

#78

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

True, but it's catching up fast. A year ago, I used AI for small OS scripts. It worked fine and saved me the time of looking up switches for commands. Now, I can ask it to create a simple game of about 200 lines, and it does a pretty good job of writing bug-free code within a few seconds. It's only going to get better. Even if the tech doesn't improve further, I can see a future where all apps are endlessly configurable.

A big part of my career has been the modification of enterprise software to fit a company's needs. Rarely was any one addition more than a few hundred lines of code. I can see a future where there will be simple options for a non-coder to add to an app.

True, it's not a coder, but that doesn't mean it won't fundamentally change how apps are made and it will reduce the number of master programmers needed. It won't replace all programmers, but it will greatly reduce the number that are needed, which country they work in and the language they use to program apps.

Programming has mainly been a career that requires the individual to understand English. That is changing. I can see a future where code can be created in multiple human languages. Programming was well-paid because relatively few people had the expertise to do it. That won't be the case, and the pay will adjust downward as needed. AI might not be a coder, but it will let many more people become coders. In the future, coding will be in the same pay range as clerical work. Companies will be hiring Programming Clerks rather than Programming Engineers.

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

#79

Post by crooked-v »

worldsayshi wrote: post #17
crooked-v wrote: post #2

For me it's simple: even the best models are "lazy" and will confidently declare they're finished when they're obviously not, and the immensely increased amount of training effort to get ChatGPT 5's mild improvements on benchmarks suggests that that quality won't go away anytime soon.

Sounds like it's partially about a nuanced trade-off. It can just as well be too eager and add changes I didn't ask for. Being lazy is better than continuing on a bad path.

There's a long distance between "nuanced behavior" and what it actually does now, which is "complete 6 items of an explicit 10-item task list and then ask the user again if they want to continue".

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

#80

Post by amelius »

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.

> tired of anthropomorphization

The thing is trained on heaps and heaps of human output. You better anthropomorphize if you want to stay ahead of the curve.

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