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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

#141

Post by bluefirebrand »

dwheeler wrote: post #129

I don't like the phrase "real coder". It's not clear what it means. I really like the word "assistant" for what we have today. The AI code assistant tools available today, like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, can't replace humans in doing software development. Not even close. But they are often useful to human developers, and today, that's the more important measure. I've been spending time with various AI tools, esp…

> I don't know if they'll ever reach "full autonomy". They don't need to get there to be useful

They do, unless you just want to babysit them all the time

Maybe babysitting a bad machine sounds great to you, it sounds like the torment nexus to me

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

#143

Post by majormajor »

thunky wrote: post #133
MorehouseJ09 wrote: post #82

“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…

> It's really hard to know what/how to even describe real problems to these tools I would argue that if you can't describe the problem in plain language then you don't have a very good chance of solving it with code or otherwise. Personally I find that the act of describing the problem will often reveal a good solution...then it's just a matter of seeing if the LLM agrees with me or if it has a difference idea (for b…

As software grows the problems go such that the effort to completely describe the necessary changes in plain language is often not all that much shorter than the code. Especially if you have a really really good autocomplete for the boilerplate parts of the code. So LLMs being really good at the tedious autocomplete makes LLMs have less marginal utility for the "write the whole thing" for certain types of work.

But the sneakier part of the problem is that as business rules get more complex it's usually harder to completely describe the problem in plain language than in a more formally specified language. For instance, plain-language "apply the user's promo code" doesn't capture the nasty if/else tree you might hit when you're deep in the codebase and see that there's already a bunch of restrictions on other types of promo codes and the product manager didn't think about which of those restrictions should apply to this new promo code. And at this point you're gonna need to use plain language to describe and refine the problem with the product manager - but if you instead were relying on an LLM to turn your short sentence into the right code, it might pick the wrong thing when it comes to modifying that existing code.

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

#144

Post by majormajor »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #103

So the author is providing some personal annotations and opinions on a summary of a “new paper” which was actually published five months ago, which itself was a summary of research with the author’s personal annotations and opinions added? These are exactly the kind of jobs that I want AI to automate.

It's more likely that AI will let more people "write" random blogs and articles about things they haven't sufficiently actually researched... you're gonna get more spam, not less.

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

#146

Post by anon7000 »

roxolotl wrote: post #92
MorehouseJ09 wrote: post #82

“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 engi…

You hit the nail on the head too. Coding itself is very easy for anyone halfway decent in this career — and yet there were a ton of people in CS101 and even in later courses who struggled with things like for loops. It was very hard for them to succeed in this career.

What’s hard is coming up with the algorithm/system design, making the right choices that will scale and won’t become a maintenance nightmare, etc. And yeah, after almost a decade, I have picked up enough I can at least write an outline of a solution that will work alright. But there are still so many tricky edge cases and scaling problems that make it hard to turn “alright” into “really good!”

Sure, AI can help… but it mostly helps with greenfield projects. It doesn’t know about the conversations on slack & jira from a year ago. It doesn’t know about the dozens of other systems and ways the project interacts with other parts of the business. It doesn’t know why whatever regurgitated approach won’t be a good fit for our specific use case. And elaborating all of that detail is not easy! Part of what makes you a good employee is the shit you picked up over the past several months & years that is joe ingrained in your mind when you start working on new projects.

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

#147

Post by throwboy2047 »

krapp wrote: post #107
throwboy2047 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're confusing ignorance with stupidity. People at the time were coming to the best conclusions they could based on the evidence they had. That isn't stupid. If humans were truly "incredibly, unimaginably stupid" we wouldn't have even gotten to the point of creating agriculture, much less splitting the atom. We didn't get here through "miracles," we got here through hard work and intelligence. Stupid is people in 2…

Ignorance is when you don’t know something. Stupidity is when you think you know something and are presented with evidence to the contrary, but you dismiss it because of something stupid (i.e., irrational).

Of course, all these words have some overlap. My larger point is, people rarely come to rational conclusions organically, and it takes decades to centuries for even the most empirically verifiable idea to permeate, especially in the face of misinformation campaigns or when against “common sense”.

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

#148

Post by zaphirplane »

majormajor wrote: post #144
stocksinsmocks wrote: post #103

So the author is providing some personal annotations and opinions on a summary of a “new paper” which was actually published five months ago, which itself was a summary of research with the author’s personal annotations and opinions added? These are exactly the kind of jobs that I want AI to automate.

It's more likely that AI will let more people "write" random blogs and articles about things they haven't sufficiently actually researched... you're gonna get more spam, not less.

The solution is more AI, in the browser to tell you this link is to a rubbish AI blog, AI in the mail client to tell you which email content to ignore and AI in the fridge, in the bathroom. Till each person is so tightly locked in a group bubble they have no idea how colourful the world is and how many different personalities exist that for the most bring something to the table

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

#149

Post by hnaccount_rng »

tpurves wrote: post #81
mjr00 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I’m not sure if your statements are actually correct. What you are implying is that there are fewer tailors today than in the past. And I’m not sure if that holds. I’m not even sure that their relative position on the income ladder has deteriorated.

In the time before automated T-shirt production, almost nobody bought clothes. They were just far too expensive. There were of course people that did. And those paid extremely well. But those kinds of tailors still exist!

At the same time, I do think that the comparison is less than apt. And a better one would be comparing it to the fate of lectors and copywriters. A significant amount of those have been superseded by spellchecking tools or will be by AI “reformulations”.

Yet even here I’m not sure if those jobs have seen a significant decline in absolute numbers. Even while their relative frequency kind if obviously tends to 0

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

#150

Post by RamtinJ95 »

leptons wrote: post #93
xaindume wrote: 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.

Yes in terms of raw LLM, but with some tools or a MCP the “AI” will never be wrong.
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