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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#51

Post by rustystump »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #38
pacman128 wrote: post #16

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? Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming. Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand. That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever suppose…

While i dont disagree with the larger point here i do disagree that all the code we ever need has been written. There are still soooooo many new things to uncover in that domain.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#52

Post by adamiscool8 »

derrak wrote: post #47
pacman128 wrote: post #16

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?

Maybe you’re right about modern LLMs. But you seem to be making an unstated assumption: “there is something special about humans that allow them to create new things and computers don’t have this thing.” Maybe you can’t teach current LLM backed systems new tricks. But do we have reason to believe that no AI system can synthesize novel technologies. What reason do you have to believe humans are special in this regard?

After thousands of years of research we still don’t fully understand how humans do it, so what reason (besides a sort of naked techno-optimism) is there to believe we will ever be able to replicate the behavior in machines?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#54

Post by danaris »

derrak wrote: post #47
pacman128 wrote: post #16

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?

Maybe you’re right about modern LLMs. But you seem to be making an unstated assumption: “there is something special about humans that allow them to create new things and computers don’t have this thing.” Maybe you can’t teach current LLM backed systems new tricks. But do we have reason to believe that no AI system can synthesize novel technologies. What reason do you have to believe humans are special in this regard?

That's irrelevant.

The claim being made is not "no computer will ever be able to adapt to and assist us with new technologies as they come out."

The claim being made is "modern LLMs cannot adapt to and assist us with new technologies until there is a large corpus of training data for those technologies."

Today, there exists no AI or similar system that can do what is being described. There is also no credible way forward from what we have to such a system.

Until and unless that changes, either humans are special in this way, or it doesn't matter whether humans are special in this way, depending on how you prefer to look at it.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#55

Post by CamperBob2 »

rustystump wrote: post #51
CamperBob2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming. Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand. That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever suppose…

While i dont disagree with the larger point here i do disagree that all the code we ever need has been written. There are still soooooo many new things to uncover in that domain.

Like what?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#56

Post by badc0ffee »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #38
pacman128 wrote: post #16

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? Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming. Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand. That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever suppose…

You're probably using an IDE that checks your syntax as you type, highlighting keywords and surfacing compiler warnings and errors in real time. Autocomplete fills out structs for you. You can hover to get the definition of a type or a function prototype, or you can click and dig in to the implementation. You have multiple files open, multiple projects, even.

Not to mention you're probably also using source control, committing code and switching between branches. You have unit tests and CI.

Let's not pretend the C developer experience is what it was 30 years ago, let alone 50.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#57

Post by cratermoon »

deadbabe wrote: post #4

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

To an extent, these people have found their religion, and rational discussion does not come into play. As with previous tech Holy Wars over operating systems, editors, and programming languages, their self-image is tied to the technology.

Where the tech argument doesn't apply to upper management, business practices, the need to "not be left behind" and leap at anything that promises reducing headcount without reducing revenue, money talks. As long as it's possible to slop something together, charge for it, and profit, slop will win.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#58

Post by bryanrasmussen »

wiseowise wrote: post #42
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though, not by just making something up to leap to the conclusion considered most probable, so not sure if the comparison makes sense.

> most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though Citation needed.

sorry, that is just taken from my experience, and perhaps I am considering reasoning to be a broader category than others might.

To be lenient I will separate out bugs caused by insufficient knowledge as not being failures in reasoning, do you have forms of bugs that you think are more common and are not arguably failures in reasoning that should be considered?

on edit: insufficient knowledge that I might not expect a competent developer to have is not a failure in reasoning, but a bug caused by insufficient knowledge that I would expect a competent developer in the problem space to have is a failure in reasoning, in my opinion on things.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#59

Post by Fishkins »

idopmstuff wrote: post #27
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, I don't really accept the argument that AI makes mistakes and therefore cannot be trusted to write production code (in general, at least - obviously depends on the types of mistakes, which code, etc.). 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,…

> humans also make mistakes

This is broadly true, but not comparable when you get into any detail. The mistakes current frontier models make are more frequent, more confident, less predictable, and much less consistent than mistakes from any human I'd work with.

IME, all of the QA measures you mention are more difficult and less reliable than understanding things properly and writing correct code from the beginning. For critical production systems, mediocre code has significant negative value to me compared to a fresh start.

There are plenty of net-positive uses for AI. Throwaway prototyping, certain boilerplate migration tasks, or anything that you can easily add automated deterministic checks for that fully covers all of the behavior you care about. Most production systems are complicated enough that those QA techniques are insufficient to determine the code has the properties you need.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#60

Post by ffsm8 »

sd9 wrote: post #44
justonceokay wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most art forms do not have a wildly changing landscape of materials and mediums. In software we are seeing things slow down in terms of tooling changes because the value provided by computers is becoming more clear and less reliant on specific technologies. I figure that all this AI coding might free us from NIH syndrome and reinventing relational databases for the 10th time, etc.

LLMs are very much NIH machines

i'd go one step further, they're going to turbo charge the NIH syndrome and treat every code file as a seperate "here"
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