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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

#211

Post by nofriend »

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…

> Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language

More proximately, the creator of the clang c compiler.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#212

Post by chongli »

sally_glance wrote: post #194
chongli wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to point back to my remark about everyday people. if you don't limit yourself to "advancing the state of the art at the far frontiers of human knowledge" but allow for ordinary people to make everyday contributions in their daily lives, you get even more This isn't a throwaway comment. I do this all the time myself, at work. Everywhere I've worked, I do this. I challenge the assumptions and try to make things…

Experimentation leads to experience, so I feel like this was included by the parent comment. And in the case of writing software, agents are able to experiment today. They run tests, check log output, search DBs... Sure, they can't have apples fall on their heads like Newton had but they can totally observe the apple falling on someones head in a video.

Experimentation leads to experience

Of course it does, but only after the fact. You don't have any experience of the result of the experiment before you perform it.

Sure, they can't have apples fall on their heads like Newton had but they can totally observe the apple falling on someones head in a video

I have strong doubts that LLMs have any understanding whatsoever of what's happening in images (let alone videos). The claim (I've sometimes heard) that they possess a world model and are able to interpret an image according to that model is an extremely strong one, that's strongly contradicted by the fact that they: a) continue to hallucinate in pretty glaring ways, and b) continue to mis-identify doctored (adversarial) images that no human would mis-identify (because they don't drastically alter the subject).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#213

Post by ggamezar »

I remember when I moved to C++ from Python when I was a Junior. After getting deeper into C++, I started questioning whether Python programmers are really programmers or what we now call vibe coders. Just through a bit of experience, I realised that in a sense, Python just operates on different layers of abstractions and allows you to do more , and much faster, if in skilful hands. On the other hand, an uneducated person will just generate what we now call slop. For some reason, this parallel resonates with the current state of affairs

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#214

Post by est »

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…

> AI tends to accept conventional wisdom

I wrote an article on that: Hard Things in Computer Science

https://blog.est.im/2026/stderr-04

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669591

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#215

Post by linolevan »

isaachinman wrote: post #204
evanmoran wrote: post #203

I’m writing a new type of CRDT that supports move/reorder/remove ops within a tree structure without tombstones. Claude Code is great at writing some of the code but it keeps adding tombstones back to my remove ops because “research requires tombstones for correctness”. This is true for a usual approach, but the whole reason I’m writing the CRDT is to avoid these tombstones! Anyway, a long story short, I did eventual…

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

How much is OpenAI paying you for this

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#216

Post by tehlike »

bluGill wrote: post #103

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wo…

C# back in 2000-2007 had a bunch of innovations. I expect we will have more.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#217

Post by parpfish »

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?

Something I think about frequently is that 20 years ago, there weren’t machines that could do visual object recognition/categorization and we didn’t really have a clue how humans did it either. We knew that neuron built fancier and fancier receptive fields that became “feature detectors”, but h the ere was a sense of “is that all it takes? There has to be something more sophisticated in order to handle illumination changes of out of plane rotation?”

But then we got a neural wr that was big enough and it turns out that feedforward receptive fields ARE enough. We don’t know whether this is how our brains do it, but it’s a humbling moment to realize that you just overthought how complex the problem was.

So ive become skeptical when people start claiming that some class of problem is fundamentally too hard for machines.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#218

Post by suzzer99 »

cratermoon wrote: post #49
suzzer99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For future greenfield projects, I can see a world where the only jobs are spec-writer and test-writer, with maybe one grumpy expert coder (aka code janitor) who occasionally has to go into the code to figure out super gnarly issues.

A good spec-writer, as the article notes, is writing code.

It's part of the job, but has never been the fun part for me. Solving the puzzle with code and that "holy shit it actually works" moment has always been the part I get the most satisfaction from.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#219

Post by foxglacier »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #189
g9yuayon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unless you're one of the bulk of 1x programmers who aren't doing anything novel. I think it will be like most industries that got very helpful technology - the survivors have to do more sophisticated work and the less capable people are excluded. Then we need more education to supply those sophisticated workers but the existing education burden on professionals is already huge and costly. Will they be spending 10 years at university instead of 3-4? Will a greater proportion of the population be excluded from the workforce because there's not enough demand for low-innate-ability or low-educated people?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#220

Post by ch4s3 »

coldtea wrote: post #155
peehole wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs still do forEach, it’s like wearing Tommy Hilfiger

That's one of the benefits of LLMs: they don't care for bullshit fashion

Sure they do, just whatever the average of "fashion" was across the training set.
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