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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”

#391

Post by throwaway150 »

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 an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all.

But this is a highly non-trivial problem. How do you even possibly manually verify that the test suite is complete and tests all possible corner cases (of which there are so many because synchronizing state is a hard problem)?

At least React solves this problem in a non-stochastic, deterministic manner. What can be a good reason to replace something like React that works determinstically with LLM-assisted code that is generated stochastically and there's no easy way to manually verify if the implementation or the test suite is correct and complete?

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

#392

Post by qazxcvbnmlp »

simonw wrote: post #208
roadside_picnic wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all. I've had plenty of junior devs justify massive code bases of random scripts and 100+ line functions with the same logic. There's a reason senior devs almost always push back on this when it's encountered. Everything hinges on that "if". But you're baking a tautolog…

I'm not arguing for using LLMs as an abstraction. I'm saying that a key component of the dependency calculation has changed. It used to be that one of the most influential facts affecting your decision to add a new library was the cost of writing the subset of code that you needed yourself. If writing that code and the accompanying tests represented more than an hour of work, a library was usually a better investment…

Without commenting if parent is right or wrong. (I suspect it is correct)

If its true, the market will soon reward it. Being able to competently write good code cheaper will be rewarded. People don't employ programmers because they care about them, they are employed to produce output. If someone can use llms to produce more output for less $$ they will quickly make the people that don't understand the technology less competitive in the workplace.

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

#393

Post by sod22 »

tjr wrote: post #346
lithocarpus wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess fear of losing market share and valuable data, as well as pressure to appear to be winning the AI race for the companies' own stock price. i.e competition. If there were only one AI company, they would probably not release anything close to their most capable version to the public. ala Google pre-chatgpt.

I’m not sure that really answers the question? Or perhaps my interpretation of the question is different. If (say) the code generation technology of Anthropic is so good, why be in the business of selling access to AI systems? Why not instead conquer every other software industry overnight? Have Claude churn out the best office application suite ever. Have Claude make the best operating system ever. Have Claude make…

Im waiting for people to realise that software products are much more than just lines of code.

Getting sick and tired of people talk about their productivity gains when not much is actually happening out there in terms of real value creation.

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

#395

Post by avaika »

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…

I don't trust LLM enough to handle the maintenance of all the abstraction buried in react / similar library. I caught some of the LLMs taking nasty shortcuts (e.g. removing test constraints or validations in order to make the test green). Multiple times. Which completely breaks trust.

And if I have to closely supervise every single change, I don't believe my development process will be any better. If not worse.

Let alone new engineers who join the team and all of a sudden have to deal with a unique solution layer which doesn't exist anywhere else.

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

#396

Post by bopbopbop7 »

_pdp_ wrote: post #380

Over 20 years professional experience here. LLM tools feel great. A single person can now accomplish what used to require many teams.

Over 30 years code artisan here. AI has made me 100x more productive. No, I will not provide proof. Sam Altman is the best.

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

#397

Post by sod22 »

leshow wrote: post #388
viraptor wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not something that suddenly changed. "I'll generate some code" is as nondeterministic as "I'll look for a library that does it", "I'll assign John to code this feature", or "I'll outsource this code to a consulting company". Even if you write yourself, you're pretty nondeterministic in your results - you're not going to write exactly the same code to solve a problem, even if you explicitly try.

It's not the same, LLM's are qualitatively different due to the stochastic and non-reproducible nature of their output. From the LLM's point of view, non-functional or incorrect code is exactly the same as correct code because it doesn't understand anything that it's generating. When a human does it, you can say they did a bad or good job, but there is a thought process and actual "intelligence" and reasoning that we…

Correct. The thing has no concept of true or false. 0 or 1.

Therefore it cannot necessarily discern between two statements that are practically identical in the eyes of humans. This doesnt make the technology useless but its clearly not some AGI nonsense.

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

#398

Post by mlinhares »

throwaway150 wrote: post #391
simonw wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all. But this is a highly non-trivial problem. How do you even possibly manually verify that the test suite is complete and tests all possible corner cases (of which there are so many because synchronizing state is a hard problem)? At least React solves this problem in…

You don't, same as for the "generate momentjs and use it". People now firmly believe they can use an LLM to build custom versions of these libraries and rewrite whole ecosystems out of nowhere because Claude said "here's the code".

I've come to realize fighting this is useless, people will do this, its going to create large fuck ups and there will be heaps of money to be made on the cleanup jobs.

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

#399

Post by sod22 »

whstl wrote: post #243
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would the average programmer have a problem with it? The average programmer is already being pushed into doing a lot of things they're unhappy about in their day jobs. Crappy designs, stupid products, tracking, privacy violation, security issues, slowness on customer machines, terrible tooling, crappy dependencies, horrible culture, pointless nitpicks in code reviews. Half of HN is gonna defend one thing above or…

Say it louder.

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

#400

Post by zephen »

skybrian wrote: post #66
rishabhaiover wrote: post #2

For the longest time, the joy of creation in programming came from solving hard problems. The pursuit of a challenge meant something. Now, that pursuit seems to be short-circuited by an animated being racing ahead under a different set of incentives. I see a tsunami at the beach, and I’m not sure whether I can run fast enough.

I see it more like a playing a text adventure game. You give it commands and sometimes it works, and sometimes the results are unexpected.

Personally, I've never been interested in being a character in someone else's story.

But now you've got me thinking. Has anyone studied whether the programmers who are more enamored of AI are also into RPGs?

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