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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

#181

Post by GardenLetter27 »

lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

Reinforcement Learning changes this though - remember Move 37?

The issue is you need verifiable rewards for that (and a good environment set-up), and it's hard to get rewards that cover everything humans want (security, simplicity, performance, readability, etc.)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#182

Post by chaghalibaghali »

justonceokay wrote: post #22
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?

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.

This was one of my predictions in https://thomshutt.com/2026/03/17/predictions/ - fiddling around with creating new languages and lower level tooling becomes less rewarding versus figuring out what we can get agents to build on top of the existing ones

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#183

Post by roxolotl »

randcraw wrote: post #126

Krouse points to a great article by Simon Willison who proposes that the killer role for vibe coding (hopefully) will be to make code better and not just faster. By generating prototypes that are based on different design models each end product can be assessed for specific criteria like code readability, reliability, or fault tolerance and then quickly be revised repeatedly to serve these ends better. No longer woul…

This is my hope as well. We now have time to write things a bit better. Comment on the pr with a quick improvement and it can just happen. But I’m failing to convince people at work. The majority seem to just be happy for code to go away and for us to never think about it again.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#184

Post by stevekrouse »

ihodes wrote: post #179

I agree that programming language can be a better (denser, more precise) encapsulator of intent than natural language. But the converse is more often true; natural language is a denser and more precise encapsulator of intent than programming language. I think there's some irony in using Russell's quote being used this way. My intent will often be less clear to a reader once encoded in a language bound inextricably to…

I think we're in agreement. My Dijkstra quote is the perfect rejoinder to your Wittgenstein:

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

— Edsger Dijkstra

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#185

Post by ihodes »

stevekrouse wrote: post #184
ihodes wrote: post #179

I agree that programming language can be a better (denser, more precise) encapsulator of intent than natural language. But the converse is more often true; natural language is a denser and more precise encapsulator of intent than programming language. I think there's some irony in using Russell's quote being used this way. My intent will often be less clear to a reader once encoded in a language bound inextricably to…

I think we're in agreement. My Dijkstra quote is the perfect rejoinder to your Wittgenstein: The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra

That's good—you guys should come out to visit sometime!

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#186

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #24
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…

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.

The end result is the same either way, as is the resolution.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#187

Post by drzaiusx11 »

allthetime wrote: post #46
suzzer99 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I imagine it has to be utterly thankless being the code janitor right now when all the hype around AI is peaking. You're basically just the grumpy troll slowing things down. And God forbid you introduce a regression bug trying to clean up some AI slop code. Maybe in the future us olds will get more credit when apps fall over and the higher ups realize they actually need a high-powered cleaner/fixer, like the Wol…

I’ve got a “I haven’t written a line of code in one year” buddy whose startup is gaining traction and contracts. He’s rewritten the whole stack twice already after hitting performance issues and is now hiring cheap juniors to clean up the things he generates. It is all relatively well defined CRUD that he’s just slapped a bunch of JS libs on top of that works well enough to sell, but I’m curious to see the long term…

I've had to slowly and painfully learn the lesson that early on in a company's lifycycle it doesn't really matter how terrible the code is as long as it mostly works. There are of course exceptions like critical medical applications and rocket/missile guidance systems but as a general rule code quality is only a problem when it inevitably bites you much farther down the line, usually when customers start jumping ship when it's obvious you can't scale or reach uptime contact targets. By then you'll hopefully have enough money saved from your initial lax approach to put some actual effort into shoring up the losses before they become critical. Sometimes you just get by with "good enough" for decades and no one cares. For someone that cares about the quality of their work it can be sad state of affairs, but I've seen this play out more times than I'd care to.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#188

Post by sarchertech »

derrak wrote: post #79
sophrosyne42 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not an assumption, it is a fact about how computers function today. LLMs interpolate, they do not extrapolate. Nobody has shown a method to get them to extrapolate. The insistence to the contrary involves an unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

As long as agnosticism is the attitude, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t let mythology about human intelligence/computational capacity stop us from making progress toward that end. > unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know. For me this isn’t an assumption, it’s a corollary that follows from the Church-Turing thesis.

That certainly doesn’t follow from the Church-Turing thesis because the Church Turing thesis doesn’t demonstrate that human intelligence is computational. That it is still an unstated assumption.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#189

Post by ehsanu1 »

g9yuayon wrote: post #157
lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

> Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI I don't think the replacement is binary. Instead, it’s a spectrum. The real concern for many software engineers is whether AI reduces demand enough to leave the field oversupplied. And that should be a question of economy: are we going to have enough new business problems to solve? If we do, AI will help us but will not replace us. If not, well, we are go…

Business problems are essentially neverending. And humans have a broader type of intelligence that LLMs lack but are needed to solve many novel problems. I wouldn't worry.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#190

Post by Verdex »

derrak wrote: post #62
adamiscool8 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Church-Turing thesis comes to mind. It would at least suggest that humans aren’t capable of doing anything computationally beyond what can be instantiated in software and hardware. But sure, instantiating these capabilities in hardware and software are beyond our current abilities. It seems likely that it is possible though, even if we don’t know how to do it yet.

Church turing is about computable functions. Uncomputable functions exist.

For example how much rain is going to be in the rain gauge after a storm is uncomputable. You can hook up a sensor to perform some action when the rain gets so high. This rain algorithm is outside of anything church turing has to say.

There are many other natural processes that are outside the realm of was is computable. People are bathed in them.

Church turing suggests only what people can do when constrained to a bunch of symbols and squares.

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