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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

#81

Post by tpurves »

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's really both effects happening at once. AI is just like the invention of the assembly line, or the explosion of mass produced consumer packaged goods starting from the first cotton gin. Automation allows a massive increase in quantity of goods, and even when quantity comes with tradeoffs to quality vs artisanally produced goods, they still come to dominate. Processed cheese or instant coffee is pretty objectively worse that the 'real' thing, but that didn't stop cheap mass production still made those products compelling for many million/billion of consumers.

You can still find a tailor who will hand make you a bespoke clothing or sew your own clothes yourself (as even the boomer generation often did growing up), but tailored clothing is a tiny fraction of the amount of clothing in circulation. Do tailors and artisanal cheese makers still exist? Yep, they are not extinct. But they are hugely marginalized compared to machine-made alternatives.

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

#82

Post by MorehouseJ09 »

“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,”

I think this is going to make the difference between junior and senior engineers even more drastic than it is today. It's really hard to know what/how to even describe real problems to these tools, and the people who invest the most in their tooling now, are going to be most successful. It's hard for someone who hasn't designed a large codebase already to do this in an ai native way where they don't have the experience of abstracting at the right level and things like that.

Today's equivalent, I've often found some of the best engineers I know have insane setups with nvim or emacs. They invest in their tool chain, and are now bringing AI into.

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

#83

Post by hvb2 »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #78

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 configura…

> Programming has mainly been a career that requires the individual to understand English.

Disagree, programming is a career where in order to be good you can

1. Break down a big problem into smaller ones, creating abstractions

2. Implement those abstractions one by one to end up with a full program

3. Refactor those abstractions if requirements change or (better) reimplement an abstraction a different way

You do all of this to make complex software digestible by a human, so that they don't have to have the entire system 'in context'.

This prophesied view of software development will mean you end up with code that's likely only maintainable by the model itself.

I can't imagine the vendor lock in of that.... You have the source, but it is in such a state that no human can maintain it?

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

#84

Post by jbstack »

gchamonlive wrote: post #67
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…

Sure. My point is that it's not unusual for the quality of work of a junior coder to be fairly low, and that work typically needs to be double checked by someone more senior before it can be used in production. Often, an LLM will produce a higher quality output than that junior developer in which case, given that the work has to be checked by a senior coder no matter what, the LLM can replace the junior developer.

Also, not every project is highly complex or involves huge codebases and, for those that are, a junior developer might be assigned to a reasonably self contained and small module within the project (i.e. something that a LLM can do better at).

Finally, although this wasn't part of my original argument: before modern LLMs, let's say that a senior developer could produce N units of work per Y units of time. Now, with the help of a LLM, they are able to produce XN units of work per Y unit of time. I don't think it's too controversial to claim that some portion of developers are now more productive than they were before. And if developers in general are more productive, then you can expect some reduction in the number of developers that you need for a given project. So, in an indirect sense, LLMs are already capable of replacing coders.

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

#85

Post by pcthrowaway »

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.

When are you starting time from? AI has been a topic of research for over 70 years

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

#86

Post by ACCount37 »

bakugo wrote: post #43
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 that would prevent further improvements How can you say this when progress has so clearly stagnated already? The past year has been nothing but marginal improvements at best, culminating in GPT-5 which can barely be considered an upgrade over 4o in terms of pure intelligence despite the significant connotation attached to the number.

Marginal improvements? Were you living under a rock for the past year?

Even o1 was a major, groundbreaking upgrade over 4o. RLVR with CoT reasoning opened up an entire new dimension of performance scaling. And o1 is, in turn, already obsoleted - first by o3, and then by GPT-5.

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

#87

Post by kstenerud »

kazinator wrote: post #76
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".

It's more "you need to learn how a tool really works in order to use it most effectively"

Talking to a chat bot like you'd talk to a human is a quick way to be disappointed. They don't work that way, despite sometimes sounding like they do.

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

#88

Post by ACCount37 »

anthem2025 wrote: post #69
ACCount37 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

When you reach into a "statistical model" and find that it has generalized abstracts like "deceptive behavior", or "code error"? Abstracts that you can intentionally activate or deactivate - making an AI act as if 3+5 would return a code error, or as if dividing by zero wouldn't? That's abstract thinking.

Those are real examples of the kind of thing that can be found in modern production grade AIs. Not "anthropomorphizing" means not understanding how modern AI operates at all.

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

#89

Post by shinycode »

There is so much more than coding, it’s the business rules, the constraints held in other parts of the company, the undocumented code that holds a company with no written context … you start a project from scratch ? AI can help you but you better be highly specific because hallucinations and errors will be there along the way. Now for the hundreds or billion of loc of private source code softwares that holds thousands of companies with not tightly formatted context and most of it just in some people’s memory … how would AI replace that ? Try let an AI rewrite a full ERP responsible of business logic with costly consequences on business and money … It will be just a tool, where sometimes we loose time and most time save a bit of time if we use it well

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

#90

Post by tjr »

xenotux wrote: post #16
mikewarot wrote: post #3

There's been a strong theme recently here on HN of confusing programming (the act of writing code to meet specifications) and Engineering(the writing of specifications, and the oversight of said process, along with overview of testing). AI is definitely not ready for an Engineering role. My recent experience with ChatGPT5(Preview) via Visual Studio Code tells me that it might perform acceptably as a junior programmer…

> There's been a strong theme recently here on HN of confusing programming (the act of writing code to meet specifications) and Engineering(the writing of specifications, and the oversight of said process, along with overview of testing). You're making a distinction that might be interesting in some esoteric sense, but that doesn't exist in the industry. When it comes to software, the architects are also the construc…

You're making a distinction that might be interesting in some esoteric sense, but that doesn't exist in the industry.

Sure it exists. Not everywhere, not for all software, but it does exist.

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