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Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

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Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#271

Post by kakapo5672 »

globular-toast wrote: post #85

I don't usually post something like this, but this is so fucking stupid. I'm prepared to stand by that. Let's see in a few years if I'm right. "AI" is literally models trained to make you think it's intelligent. That's it. It's like the ultimate "algorithm" or addiction machine. It's trained to make you think it's amazing and magical and therefore you think it's amazing and magical.

Recently I needed to summarize about a thousand lengthy documents, and then translate those summaries into Mandarin.

I spent about a minute composing the prompt for this task, and then went for a cup of coffee. When I got back the task was done. I spot-checked the summaries and they were excellent.

I thought this was amazing and magical at the time. Am I wrong? Or is it simply the AI making me think this result was amazing and magical?

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#272

Post by ewoodrich »

kakapo5672 wrote: post #247
reconnecting wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is only getting better at consuming energy and wasting people's time communicating with this T9. However, if talented engineers continue to use it, it might eventually provide more accurate replies as a result. Answering your question, no matter how much I personally degrade or improve, I will not be able to produce anything even remotely comparable in terms of negative impact that AI brings to humanity these days…

I see this logical pairing a lot. 1) AI is basically useless, a mere semi-random word generator. 2) And it is so powerful that it is going to hurt (or even destroy) humanity. This is this is called "having your cake, and letting it eat you too".

That's a dishonest framing of their argument. There's nothing logically inconsistent in believing wide adoption of AI tools causes developers' skills to atrophy and that the tools also fail to deliver on the hype/promises.

You're inserting "destroy humanity" when OP is suggesting the problem is offloading all thinking to an unreliable tool (I don't entirely agree with their position but it's defensible and not as you stated).

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#273

Post by aoeusnth1 »

robotresearcher wrote: post #245

Andrej is 39 years old, according to Wikipedia. Douglas Adams on age and relating to technology: "1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-fi…

Is that really what he's saying here?

He's not against the technology, I think he's just feeling like there's a lot of potential that he's not quite grasping yet.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#274

Post by flumpcakes »

saulpw wrote: post #251
baq wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing stopping you from hand sculpting software like we did in the before times. Mass production however won’t stop, it’s barely started literally a couple months ago and it’s the slowest and worst it’ll ever be.

I keep hearing "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be" as though software ability and performance only ever increase and yet mass produced software is slower and enshittier than it was 10-15 years ago and we're all complaining about it. And you can't say "but it does so much more" because I never asked for 90% of the "more" and just want to turn most of it off.

I can think of a few things that could happen to sink "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be". Even ignoring things that could happen, I think in general we're hitting a ceiling with LLMs. All the annoyances and bugs and frankly incompetence with the current models are not going away soon, despite $tn of investments. At this point it is now just about propping up this bubble so the USA doesn't have another big recession.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#276

Post by casualscience »

simonw wrote: post #100
rambojohnson wrote: post #58

What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…

I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…

If you work at a megacorp right now, you know whats happening isn't people deciding to use less libraries. It's developers being measured by their lines of code, and the more AI you use the more lines of code and 'features' you can ship.

However, the quality of this code is fucking terrible, no one is reading what they push deeply, and these models don't have enough 'sense' to make really robust and effective test suites. Even if they did, a comprehensive test suite is not the solution to poorly designed code, it's a band aid -- and an expensive one at scale.

Most likely we will see some disasters happening in the next few years due to this mode of software development, and only then will people understand to use these agents as tools and not replacements.

...Or maybe we'll get AGI and it will fix/maintain the trash going out there today.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#277

Post by pca006132 »

reconnecting wrote: post #189
9dev wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again. With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented sev…

This sounds to me like a lack of resource management, as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring. As a creator of an open-source platform myself, I find trusting a semi-random word generator in front of users unreliable. Moreover, I believe it creates a bad habit. I've seen developers forget how to read documentation and instead trust AI, and of course, as a result AI m…

> as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.

Yeah this sounds interesting, and matches my experience a bit. I was trying out AI for the Christmas cuz people I know are talking about it. I asked it to implement something (refactoring for better performance) that I think should be simple, it did that and looks amazing, all tests passed too! When I look into the implementation, AI got the shape right, but the internals were more complicated than needed and were wrong. Nonetheless it got me started into fixing things, and it got fixed quite quickly.

The performance of the model in this case is not great, perhaps it is also because I am new to this and don't know how to prompt it properly. But at least it is interesting.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#278

Post by throwatdem12311 »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #78

Wow - can we coin "Slopbrain" for people who are so far gone into AI eventualism that they can no longer function? Liked "cooked" but "slopped" or something. Good grief lol. Talk about getting lost in the sauce...

I call it being "oneshot" by the AI.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#279

Post by lopatin »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #63
rambojohnson wrote: post #58

What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…

It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.

It's not that wild. I like building things. I like programming too, but less than building things.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#280

Post by flumpcakes »

packetlost wrote: post #193
wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... or how it's supposed to make any programmer worth their weight in salt 10x better. It doesn't. The only people I've seen claim such speedups are either not generally fluent in programming or stand to benefit financially from reinforcing this meme.

Our ops guy has thrown together several buggy dashboards using AI tools. They're passable but impossible to maintain.

I personally think that everyone knows AI produces subpar code, and that the infallible humans are just passing it along because they don't understand/care. We're starting to see the gaslighting now, it's not that AI makes you better, it's that AI makes you ship faster, and now shipping faster (with more bugs) is more important because "tech debt is an appreciating asset" in the world where AI tools can pump out features 10x faster (with the commensurate bugs/issues). We're entering the era of "move fast and break stuff" on steroids. I miss the era of software that worked.
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