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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

#281

Post by teaearlgraycold »

scorpioxy wrote: post #222
foxglacier wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

To add, just keeping up in this industry was already a problem. I don't know of many professions[1] with such demands on time outside of a work day to keep your skills updated. It was perhaps an acceptable compromise when the market was hot and the salaries high. But I am hearing from more and more people who are just leaving the field entirely labeling it as "not worth it anymore". [1] Medicine may be one example of…

I never really felt this. If you have a job where you're actively learning by doing the work then you shouldn't need to learn outside of the job.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#282

Post by ramshanker »

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…

Anther perspective, AI is fast turning [0.1x to 0.5x] low cost X-world Sofwate Engineers into >1x engineers.

Contrary to pre AI era, one of my close relative he has become very good "understand / write the requirement" guy. HN may be dominated by >1x engineers, another revolution is happening at lower /bulk end of spectrum as well.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#283

Post by slopinthebag »

parpfish wrote: post #217
derrak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Are modern visual recognition & categorisation systems comparable to human capabilities? From what I can tell, they aren't even close (although still impressive!).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#284

Post by lukebechtel »

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…

so we need to make some crazy llms...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#285

Post by slopinthebag »

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…

That's your fault for still writing C in Ed :P

But I do broadly agree that we still write code for a lot of shit that should have been automated long before. I'm not actually sure why it hasn't been automated yet. LLM's can kind of do it, I just wish we had automated it with something deterministic and human.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#287

Post by bluegatty »

agentultra wrote: post #248
bluegatty wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The AI made a compiler, but it wasn't that novel, so AI is not novel" is a very poor rhetorical foundation Man - just think about what you said Two years ago that would have been beyond shocking. If 'AI is making compilers' - then that's 'beyond disruptive'. It's very true that AI has 'reversion to the mean' characteristics - kind of like everything in life .. ... but it's just unfair to imply that 'AI can't be crea…

The LLM didn’t make a compiler. It generated code that could plausibly implement one. Humans made the compilers it was trained on. It took many such examples and examples of other compilers and thousands of books and articles and blog posts to train the model. It took years of tweaking, fitting, aligning and other tricks to make the model respond to queries with better, more plausible output. It never made, invented,…

"I’m sure its possible that there are cases where these tools can be useful. I’m not sure this is it though. "

You are arguing against the internet, motor cars and electricity.

It's like 1998, and you're saying: "I'm sure it's possible there are cases where the internet can be useful. I'm not sure it is though"

On 'hackernews' of all places.

It's pretty wild to see that, and I think it says something about what hn has become (or maybe always was?).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#288

Post by sally_glance »

chongli wrote: post #212
sally_glance wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

In software, they can and do perform experiments (make a change then observe the log output). I don't think they possess a "world model" or that it's worth spending too much thought on... My reasoning is more along the lines that our brains are also just [very advanced] inference machines. We also hallucinate and mis-identify images (there are image/video classification tasks where humans have lower scores).

For me the most glaring difference to how humans work is the lack of online learning. If that prevents them from being able to innovate, I'm not so sure.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#289

Post by hrmtst93837 »

stalfie wrote: post #86
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.

Well, to be fair, judging by the shift in the general vibes of the average HN comment over the past 3 years, better use of agents and advanced models DID solve the previous temporary setbacks. The techno-optimists were right, and the nay-sayers wrong. Over the course of about 2 years, the general consensus has shifted from "it's a fun curiosity" to "it's just better stackoverflow" to "some people say it's good" to "w…

[flagged]

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#290

Post by jofzar »

elgertam wrote: post #174
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…

You know where LLMs boost me the most? When I need to integrate a bunch of systems together, each with their own sets of documentation. Instead of spending hours getting two or three systems to integrate with mine with the proper OAuth scopes or SAML and so on, an LLM can get me working integrations in a short time. None of that is ever going to be innovative; it's purely an exercise in perseverance as an engineer to…

> Instead of spending hours getting two or three systems to integrate with mine with the proper OAuth scopes or SAML and so on

As someone who's job is handling oauth and saml scope, I am not convinced anyone can get these right.

Saml atleast acts nice, oauth on the other hand is a fucking nightmare.

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