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AI’s coding evolution hinges on collaboration and trust

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91–100 of 164 posts

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

#91

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.

There’s this saying that humans are terrible at predicting exponential growth. I believe we need another saying, those who expect exponential growth have a tough time not expecting it. It’s not under a decade for ai to get to this stage but multiple decades of work, with algorithms finally able to take advantage of gpu hardware to massively excel. There’s already feeling that growth has slowed, I’m not seeing the ris…

I'm not sure if there will be exponential growth, but I also don't believe that it's entirely necessary. Some automation-relevant performance metrics, like "task-completion time horizon", appear to increase exponentially - but do they have to?

All you really need is for performance to keep increasing steadily at a good rate.

If the exponential growth tops out, and AI only gains a linear two days per year of "task-completion time horizon" once it does? It'll be able to complete a small scrum sprint autonomously by year 2035. Edging more and more into the "seasoned professional developer" territory with each passing year, little by little.

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

#92

“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 too…

That quote really perfectly encapsulates the challenge with these tools. There is an assumption that inherently code is hard to write and so if you could code in natural language it would save time. But code isn’t actually that hard to write. Sure some people are genuinely bad at it just like I’m genuinely bad at drawing but a bit of practice and most people can be perfectly competent at it.

The hard part is the engineering. Understanding and breaking down the problem, and then actually solving it. If all we gain out of these tools is that we don’t have to write code by hand anymore they are moderately useful but they won’t really be a step change in software development speed.

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

#93
post #6

Using a calculator won't make you a mathematician, but a mathematicians with a calculator can show you amazing things.

Calculators wont give you completely wrong results, not even once, where "AI" does that way too often. If calculators did too, mathemeticians simply would not use them.

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

#94
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.

People are stupid, always have been - took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”.

Heck, people literally used to think eyes are the source of light since everything is dark when you close them.

People are immensely, incredibly, unimaginably stupid. It has taken a lot of miracles put together to get us where we are now…but the fundamentals of what we are haven’t changed.

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But don't forget, "we don't know how it really works".

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

#96
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…

There's a difference between taking one thing and putting something else in it's spot, and truly REPLACING something. Yes, some ads have AI generated actors. You know because you can tell because they're "not quite right", rather than focusing on the message of the ad. Noticing AI in ads turns more people off than on, so AI ads are treated by a lot of people as an easy "avoid this company" signal. So those AI ads are in lieu of real actors, but not actually replacing them because people don't want to watch AI actors in an ad. The ad ceases to be effective. The "replacement" failed.

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

#97

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…

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

LLM's do not act entirely like a human. If they did, we'd be celebrating AGI!

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

#98
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…

> Each one represents one less person that would have been paid

or equally, one more advert which (let's say rightly) wouldn't have been made.

seriously though, automation allows us to do things that would not have been possible or affordable before. some of these are good things.

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

#99
post #96

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…

There's a difference between taking one thing and putting something else in it's spot, and truly REPLACING something. Yes, some ads have AI generated actors. You know because you can tell because they're "not quite right", rather than focusing on the message of the ad. Noticing AI in ads turns more people off than on, so AI ads are treated by a lot of people as an easy "avoid this company" signal. So those AI ads are…

Realistic video generation only became a thing in the last year or so.

How long do you suppose it will be before we can't tell the difference between it and reality anymore? A few years at the most. Then what?

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

#100
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.

People are stupid, always have been - took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”. Heck, people literally used to think eyes are the source of light since everything is dark when you close them. People are immensely, incredibly, unimaginably stupid. It has taken a lot of miracles put together to get us where we are now…bu…

> took thousands of years to accept brain as the seat of thought because “heart beat faster when excited, means heart is source of excitement”

So what you are saying is that beings without a central nervous system cannot experience "excitement"?

or perhaps the meaning of too many words has changed, and their context. When Hippocrates claimed that the brain was an organ to cool the blood, perhaps he meant that we use our thought to temper our emotions, i.e. what he said agrees with our modern understanding.

However, many people read Hippocrates and laugh at him, because they think he meant the brain was some kind of radiator.

Maybe because we stopped talking about "excitable" people as being "hot-blooded"

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