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In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?
In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?
I figure that all this AI coding might free us from NIH syndrome and reinventing relational databases for the 10th time, etc.
I don't know that people are saying code is dead (or at least the ones who have even a vague understanding of AI's role) - more that humans are moving up a level of abstraction in their inputs. Rather than writing code, they can write specs in English and have AI write the code, much in the same way that humans moved from writing assembly to writing higher-level code. But of course writing code directly will always m…
> But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English. Unless the defect rate for humans is greater than LLMs at some point. A lot of claims are being made about hallucinations that seem to ignore that all software is extremely buggy. I can't use my phone witho…
In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?
For example, my company makes a new framework, and we have a skill we can point an agent at. Using that skill, it can one-shot fairly complicated code using our framework.
The skill itself is pretty much just the documentation and some code examples.
> If you know of any other snippet of code that can master all that complexity as beautifully, I'd love to see it. Electric Clojure: https://electric.hyperfiddle.net/fiddle/electric-tutorial.tw...
I don't know that people are saying code is dead (or at least the ones who have even a vague understanding of AI's role) - more that humans are moving up a level of abstraction in their inputs. Rather than writing code, they can write specs in English and have AI write the code, much in the same way that humans moved from writing assembly to writing higher-level code. But of course writing code directly will always m…
> But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English. Unless the defect rate for humans is greater than LLMs at some point. A lot of claims are being made about hallucinations that seem to ignore that all software is extremely buggy. I can't use my phone witho…
The reality is we have built complex organizational structures around the fact that humans also make mistakes, and there's no real reason you can't use the same structures for AI. You have someone write the code, then someone does code review, then someone QAs it.
Even after it goes out to production, you have a customer support team and a process for them to file bug tickets. You have customer success managers to smooth over the relationships with things go wrong. In really bad cases, you've got the CEO getting on a plane to go take the important customer out for drinks.
I've worked at startups that made a conscious decision to choose speed of development over quality. Whether or not it was the right decision is arguable, but the reality is they did so knowing that meant customers would encounter bugs. A couple of those startups are valuable at multiple billions of dollars now. Bugs just aren't the end of the world (again, most cases - I worked on B2B SaaS, not medical devices or what have you).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have a term for that already and it is called "comprehension debt". This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more". > now requiring engineers to manually review AI changes [2] (which slows them down even with AI). What does this say about the "code review" process if people cant understand the things they didn't write? Maybe we have had the wrong hiring criteria. The "…
> This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more". Yeah but that takes years to play out. Now developers are cranking out thousands of lines of “he doesn’t work here anymore” code every day.
https://www.invene.com/blog/limiting-developer-turnover has some data, that aligns with my own experience putting the average at 2 years.
I have been doing this a long time: my longest running piece of code was 20 years. My current is 10. Most of my code is long dead and replaced because businesses evolve, close, move on. A lot of my code was NEVER ment to be permanent. It solved a problem in a moment, it accomplished a task, fit for purpose and disposable (and riddled with cursing, manual loops and goofy exceptions just to get the job done).
Meanwhile I have seen a LOT of god awful code written by humans. Business running on things that are SO BAD that I still have shell shock that they ever worked.
AI is just a tool. It's going from hammers to nail guns. The people involved are still the ones who are ultimately accountable.
When I started my professional life in the 90s, we used Visual J++ (Java) and remember all this damn code it generated to do UIs... I remember being aghast at all the incomprehensible code and "do not modify" comments - and also at some of the devs who were like "isn't this great?". I remember bailing out asap to another company where we wrote Java Swing and was so happy we could write UIs directly and a lot less cod…
In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?
People are doing this now. It's basically what skills.sh and its ilk are for -- to teach AIs how to do new things. For example, my company makes a new framework, and we have a skill we can point an agent at. Using that skill, it can one-shot fairly complicated code using our framework. The skill itself is pretty much just the documentation and some code examples.