We have what I've dreamed of for years: the reverse dictionary. Put in a word and see what it means? That's been easy for at least a century. Have a meaning in mind and get the word? The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was. Now it's always available.
"The only way to get this before was to read a ton of books and be knowledgable or talk to someone who was" Did you have trouble with this part?
People have to stop talking like LLMs solved programming. If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language. But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all. So here we're seeing yet another text about…
Yes, but the people who talk to me as Software Engineer about what to build also talk to me only in natural language, not a formal language.
It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code. Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the evidence you need.
> Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities, windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this amazing new software and software quality or increased productivity…
You are measuring differently..they measure in how much stuff they ship. They don't measure if it's going to break , if it is not very maintainable, or how much it will cost to keep using the LLM I. The future. Remember its an extraction grift: buy now, pay later. Preferably after you have made the model an intrinsic part of the process. Oh snap, now we definitely need to bailout LLMs cause noone knows how this stuff works. Please help. Useful idiots all around. Classic case of not using their brains the way they evolved for.
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of somet…
One thing that I realized was that a lot of our so-called "craft" is converged "know-how". Take the recent news that Anthropic used Claude Code to write a C compiler for example, writing compiler is hard (and fun) for us humans because we indeed need to spend years understanding deeply the compiler theory and learning every minute detail of implementation. That kind of learning is not easily transferrable. Most stude…
writing a C compiler is a 1st year undergrad project
C was explicitly designed to make it simple to write a compiler
I'm actually extremely good at programming. My point is I love computers and computing . You can use technology to achieve amazing things (even having fun). Now I can do much more of that than when I was limited to what I can personally code. In the end, it's what computers can do that's amazing, beautiful, terrifying... That thrill and to be on the bleeding edge is always what I was after.
The downside is that whatever you (Claude) can do so can anyone else too. So you're welcome to make the 100000000th Copy of the same thing that nobody cares about anymore.
It's so easy to build things that I don't need anyone to care about it, I just need to the computer to do what I want it to do.
Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things. There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking. There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads. There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.
Love this extension of the analogy, particularly. Especially because, like a woodworker inspecting IKEA assembled by a taskrabbit, the craftsmanship of a finished product becomes less and less impressive the longer you inspect it
If you must use these tools, when using one thay has the option, please press thumbs down when a response was good, and thumbs up when the response is bad. Dont train your replacements, better yet lets stop using them whenever we can.
Why don't you take a more proactive role in AI safety and alignment? I think that community would suit you better than some of the AI-maximalists/accelerationists here.
I do agree with some of your points, AI may result in a techno-feudalist world and yes as a direct result of "taking humans out of the equation." The solution isn't to be a luddite as you may suggest, it's to take a more proactive role in steering these models.
Two years ago I decided to give up my career as an industry researcher to pursue a tenure-track professor position at a community college. One of the reasons I changed careers is because I felt frustrated with how research at my company changed from being more self-directed and driven by longer-term goals to being directed by upper management with demands for more immediate productization. I feel generative AI is bei…
It's not just tech it's everything. This is an existential crisis because we have rolled back almost two centuries. We are just handing the keys to the kingdom to these sociopaths, and we are thanking them for it. They are not even having the decency to admit they really just want to use us as numbers, this was always the case since the industrial revolution. Dozens of generations worldwide have toiled and suffered collectively to start creating life changing technology and these bloodsucking vampires that can't quench their thirst just live in their own reality and it doesn't include the rest of us. It's really been the same problem for ages but now they really seem to have won for the last time.
Oh good lord. Spare us the beatings of the chest and rending of the garments. "crafting code by hand" like some leftover hipsters from 2010s crafting their own fabric using a handloom. It's fucking code. Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?
If you’re repeatedly prompting, I will defer to my usual retort when it comes to LLM coding: programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language. It’s generally much faster for me to write the terse language directly than play a game of telephone with an intermediary in the verbose language for it to (maybe) translate my intentions into the terse l…
> programming is about translating unclear requirements in a verbose (English) language into a terse (programming) language Why are we uniquely capable of doing that, but an LLM isn't? In plan mode I've been seeing them ask for clarifications and gather further requirements Important business context can be provided to them, also
We are uniquely capable of doing that because we invented that :) It’s a self-serving definition, a job description.
This isn’t an argument against LLMs capability. But the burden of proof is on the LLMs’ side.