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The recurring dream of replacing developers

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Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#481

Post by fragmede »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #415
cudgy wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I went back because of course I could've just pointed out one picture but still wanted to give the whole picture. my conclusion is rather the fact that this is a very high stakes project (both emotionally and mentally and economically) and AI are still black boxes with chances of being much more error prone (atleast in this context) and chances of it missing something to cause the -75 million and deaths of many is mo…

Human beings are basically black boxes as far as the human brain is concerned. We don't blindly trust the code coming out of those black boxes, it seems illogical to do the same for LLMs.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#482

Post by teaearlgraycold »

Robdel12 wrote: post #402
pirates wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason everyone that says things like this never follow up with anything concrete, don’t share prompts or snippets, etc.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vizzly-testing/honeydiff I worked for Percy for 4 years. We were “stuck” with imagemagik to do diffing (I’m sure they still might). I was able to build my own differ with Claude/LLM help. That special enough for you? Or?

I looked at the source. It seems most of the code is not included in the GitHub repo, which itself contains a bit of JS glue. The .tgz uploaded to npm has various prebuilt binaries. Can I take a look at the rust code?

I'm not trying to imply LLMs aren't useful. I just want more info from GP so that I can evaluate their claims.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#483

Post by taneq »

davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

This, 100%. Semicolons and curly brackets aren’t the hard part of developing software. The hard part is figuring out what you want in the first place.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#484

Post by willhslade »

nebula8804 wrote: post #261
dijit wrote: post #53

I've watched this pattern play out in systems administration over two decades. The pitch is always the same: higher abstractions will democratise specialist work. SREs are "fundamentally different" from sysadmins, Kubernetes "abstracts away complexity." In practice, I see expensive reinvention. Developers debug database corruption after pod restarts without understanding filesystem semantics. They recreate monitoring…

Where have you worked? I have seen this mentality among the smartest most accomplished people I've come across who do things like debug kernel issues at Google Cloud. Yes, those people need to really know fundamentals. 90% of people building whatever junk their company needs does not. I learned this lesson the hard way after working at both large and tiny companies. Its the people that remain in the bubble of places…

Doesn't every personal computing device on the planet have a browser and thus Javascript? Aren't there more mobile devices than laptops and desktops? I'm an Excel dev and I'm pretty sure that Javascript is the largest development language in the world.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#485

Post by teaearlgraycold »

ako wrote: post #324
shimman wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't that impressive when there are mountains of training data dealing with exactly this... how about something truly unique and not something already available to the masses in hundreds of different forms? Like cool, you killed boiled a few gallons of the ocean but are you really impressed that you made a basic music app that is extremely limited?

So we’re now in a world where this isn’t impressive anymore? How quickly expectations change. Having started with basic and then 6502 assembly over 40 years ago, this still feels like science fiction to me. But most enterprise software does not need to be innovative, its needs to be customizable enough that enterprises can differentiate their business. This makes existing software ideas so much more configurable. No…

It looks cool to me.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#486

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

fragmede wrote: post #479
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sir your experience is unique and thanks for answering this. That being said, someone took the idea of you saying LLM's might be good at subsets of projects to consider we should use LLMs for that subset as well But I digress because (I provided more in depth reasoning in other comment as well) because if there is an even minute bug which might slip up past LLM and code review for subset of that and for millions of c…

> we won't know if LLM's might save a life I had friend who was in crisis while the rest of us were asleep. Talking with ChatGPT kept her alive. So we know the number is at least one. If you go to the Dr ChatGPT thread, you'll find multiple reports of people who figured out debilitating medical conditions via ChatGPT in conjunction with a licensed human doctor, so we can be sure the numbers greater than zero. It does…

Great for her, I hope she's doing okay now. (I do think we humans can take each other for granted)

If talking to chatgpt helps anyone mentally, then sure great. I can see as to why but I am a bit concerned that if we remove a human from the loop then we can probably get way too easily disillusioned as well which is what is happening.

These are still black boxes but in the context of traffic lights code (even partially) feels to me something that the probability of it might not saving a life significantly overwhelms the opposite.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#487

Post by sanderjd »

knollimar wrote: post #474
sanderjd wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve. None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doin…

I still think it's more likely to be more of the same thing but with less people. One man shops being the ideal, and I don't think there will be proportionately more of them

This doesn't mesh with anything that has happened in the development of computing, or technology in general.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#488

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

fragmede wrote: post #481
Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back because of course I could've just pointed out one picture but still wanted to give the whole picture. my conclusion is rather the fact that this is a very high stakes project (both emotionally and mentally and economically) and AI are still black boxes with chances of being much more error prone (atleast in this context) and chances of it missing something to cause the -75 million and deaths of many is mo…

Human beings are basically black boxes as far as the human brain is concerned. We don't blindly trust the code coming out of those black boxes, it seems illogical to do the same for LLMs.

Yes but at the end of the day I can't understand this take because what are we worried about for (atleast in this context) a few hundred thousand dollars for a human job than LLM?

I don't understand if its logical to deploy an LLM in any case, the problem is chances of LLM code slipping are very much more likely than the code of people who can talk to each other and decide on all meetings exactly how they wish to write and they got 10's of years of experience to back it up

If I were a state, there are so so many ways of getting money rather easily (hundreds of thousands of $ might seem a lot but they aren't for state) and plus you are forgetting that they went in manually and talked to real people

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#489

Post by hintymad »

davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

It looks there's a difference this time: copying the details of other people's work has become exceedingly easy and reliable, at least for commonly tried use cases. Say I want to vibe code a dashboard, and AI codes it out. It works. In fact, it works so much better than I could ever build, because the AI was trained with the best dashboard code out there. Yes, I can't think of all the details of a world-class dashboard, but hey, someone else did and AI correctly responds to my prompt with those details. Such "copying" used to be really hard among humans. Without AI, I would have to learn so much first even if I can use the open-source code as the starting point: the APIs of the libraries, the basic concepts of web programming, and etc. Yet, the AI doesn't care. It's just a gigantic Bayesian machine that emits code that nearly probability 1 for common use cases.

So it is not that details don't matter, but that now people can easily transfer certain know-how from other great minds. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), most people's jobs are learning and replicating know-hows from others.

Re: The recurring dream of replacing developers

#490

Post by sublinear »

hintymad wrote: post #489
davnicwil wrote: post #251

In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details. The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried. You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard. There is no level of abstraction that sav…

It looks there's a difference this time: copying the details of other people's work has become exceedingly easy and reliable, at least for commonly tried use cases. Say I want to vibe code a dashboard, and AI codes it out. It works. In fact, it works so much better than I could ever build, because the AI was trained with the best dashboard code out there. Yes, I can't think of all the details of a world-class dashboa…

I don't think anyone's job is copying "know-how". Knowing how goes a lot deeper than writing the code.

Especially in web, boilerplate/starters/generators that do exactly what you want with little to no code or familiarity has been the norm for at least a decade. This is the lifeblood of repos like npm.

What we have is better search for all this code and documentation that was already freely available and ready to go.

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