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Software 3.1? – AI Functions

blog.mikegchambers.com

21–30 of 61 posts

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#21

Obvisouly you have never built software. English is a terrible programming language, you cannot have ambiguity in defining your computation.

> you cannot have ambiguity in defining your computation

nobody except for maybe nasa would make software in this scenario.

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#23
Why stop there? Just call the LLM with the data and function description and get it to return the result!

(I'll admit that I've built a few "applications" exploring interaction descriptions with our Design team that do exactly this - but they were design explorations that, in effect, used the LLM to simulate a back-end. Glorious, but not shippable.)

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#24
post #9

I can't even imagine how many joules would be used per function call! As an experiment, it's kind of cool. I'm kind of at a loss to what useful software you'd build with it though. Surely once you've run the AI function once it would be much simpler to cache the resulting code than repeatedly re-generate it? Can anyone think of any uses for this?

You just tell the AI: use as little energy as possible, by whatever means necessary!

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#25

Obvisouly you have never built software. English is a terrible programming language, you cannot have ambiguity in defining your computation.

Product owners and business people request code in vague English all the time. It's our job to parse it to code using our own judgement.

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#27
post #24
post #9

I can't even imagine how many joules would be used per function call! As an experiment, it's kind of cool. I'm kind of at a loss to what useful software you'd build with it though. Surely once you've run the AI function once it would be much simpler to cache the resulting code than repeatedly re-generate it? Can anyone think of any uses for this?

You just tell the AI: use as little energy as possible, by whatever means necessary!

Anthropic announces deal to buy 100% of Idaho's potato crop, in return for options, in new energy efficiency push

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#28
I’m quite sure that’s the en state of software except without the software around it. There will only be an AI and interface. For now, though, while tokens cost a non-trivial amount of energy, I think you can do something more useful if you have the LLM modify the program at runtime because it’s just may orders of magnitude cheaper. Fx, use the BEAM, it’s actor model, hot code reloading, and REPL introspection and you can build a program that an LLMs can change, e.g. user says “become a calculator” and “become a pdf to html converter”.

I’m not just making this stuff up of course, got the idea yesterday after reading Karpathy’s tweet about Nanoclaws contribution model (don’t submit PRa with features, submit PRs that tell an llm how to modify the program). Now I can’t concentrate on my day job. Can’t stop thinking about my little elixir beam project.

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#29
post #9

I can't even imagine how many joules would be used per function call! As an experiment, it's kind of cool. I'm kind of at a loss to what useful software you'd build with it though. Surely once you've run the AI function once it would be much simpler to cache the resulting code than repeatedly re-generate it? Can anyone think of any uses for this?

They're handy for situations where it would be impractical to anticipate the way your input might vary. Like say you want to accept invoices or receipts in a variety of file formats where the data structure varies but you can rely on the LLM to parse and organize. AI Functions lets you describe how that logic should be generated on-demand for the input received, with post-conditions (another Python function the dev write) which define what successful outcomes look like. Morgan wrote about the receipt parser scenario here: https://dev.to/morganwilliscloud/the-python-function-that-im... (FYI I'm on the Strands Agents team)

Re: Software 3.1? – AI Functions

#30

Haven’t we been seeing libraries that implement this pattern going on two years now? Take the docstring and monkey patch the function with llm generated code, with optional caching against an AST hash key. The reason it hasn’t take off is that it’s a supremely bad and unmaintable idea. It also just doesn’t work very well because the LLM doesn’t have access to the rest of the codebase without an agentic loop to ground…

The real reason its bad is because its not really easier to be more productive doing this:

> You write a Python function with a natural language specification instead of implementation code. You attach post-conditions – plain Python assertions that define what correct output looks like.

Vs

> You write a Python function with ~~a natural language specification instead of~~ implementation code.

In many cases.

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