291–300 of 668 posts
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I'm waiting for Anthropic to realise they can just set a few thousand agents loose to do just that, and monopolize the entire software market overnight. I'm not sure why they haven't done this yet.
Because a lot of valuable software is the implicit / organizational / human domain knowledge .. not the trillions of lines of code LLms all scraped and trained on.
LLMs are exceptionally good at building prototypes. If the professor needs a month, Bob will be done with the basic prototype of that paper by lunch on the same day, and try out dozens of hypotheses by the end of the day. He will not be chasing some error for two weeks, the LLM will very likely figure it out in matter of minutes, or not make it in the first place. Instructing it to validate intermediate results and to profile along the way can do magic.
The article is correct that Bob will not have understood anything, but if he wants to, he can spend the rest of the year trying to understand what the LLM has built for him, after verifying that the approach actually works in the first couple of weeks already. Even better, he can ask the LLM to train him to do the same if he wishes. Learn why things work the way they do, why something doesn't converge, etc.
Assuming that Bob is willing to do all that, he will progress way faster than Alice. LLMs won't take anything away if you are still willing to take the time to understand what it's actually building and why things are done that way.
5 years from now, Alice will be using LLMs just like Bob, or without a job if she refuses to, because the place will be full of Bobs, with or without understanding.
For the people arguing that the output is the code and the faster we generate it the better.. I do wonder where all the novel products produced by 10x devs who are now 100x with LLMs, the “idea guys” who can now produce products from whole clothe without having to hire pesky engineers.. where is the one-man 10 billion dollar startups, etc? We are 3-4 years into this mania and all I see on the other end of it is the L…
I'm waiting for Anthropic to realise they can just set a few thousand agents loose to do just that, and monopolize the entire software market overnight. I'm not sure why they haven't done this yet.
When people talk about the 'plateau of ability' agents are widely expected to reach at some point, I suspect a lot of it will boil down to skyrocketing costs and plummeting accuracy past a certain point of number of agents involved. This seems to me like a much harder limit than context windows or model sizes.
Things like Gas Town are exploring this in what you might call a reckless way; I'm sure there are plenty of more careful experiments being conducted.
What I think the ultimate measure of this new tech will be is, how simple of a question can a human put to an LLM group for how complex of a result, and how much will they have to pay for it? It seems obvious to me there is a significant plateau somewhere, it's just a question of exactly where. Things will probably be in flux for a few years before we have anything close to a good answer, and it will probably vary widely between different use cases.
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> The specific subjects have changed over time, but the production of specialist mathematicians hasn't really changed. It takes hard work, grunt work, struggling, making mistakes and learning from them, as well as expert supervision. The problem with AI is that it encourages and incentivizes intellectual laziness, the opposite of what is required to produce specialists Let's take the example of economics. Economists…
> I'm simply claiming that not everyone needs to be Linux Kernel specialists. This is an uninteresting and indeed silly claim, because nobody has ever asserted the opposite. The point is that society needs some Linux kernel specialists, and some astrophysicists, but AI is undermining their production. > This is precisely what AI is allowing: it automates things I don't need to know deeply so that I can focus on thing…
> Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.
If we both agree that an astrophysicist may not need to understand things (even in their own domain) to make progress then we are in agreement. Not all the things a researcher works on while writing their paper is useful or necessarily done by them manually. In such cases it becomes necessary to let LLM take over.
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But if Bob doesn't know rust syntax and library modules well, how can he be expected to evaluate the output generating Rust code? Bugs can be very subtle and not obvious, and Rust has some constructs that are very uncommon (or don't exist) in other languages. Human nature says that Bob will skim over and trust the parts that he doesn't understand as long as he gets output that looks like he expects it to look, and th…
Then perhaps Bob should have it use functional Scala, where my experience is that if it compiles and looks like what you expect, it's almost certainly correct.
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> if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things I’ve been reminded lately of a conversation I had with a guy at hacker space cafe around ten years ago in Berlin. He had been working as a programmer for a significantly longer time than me. Long enough that for many years of his career, he had been programming in assembly. He was lamenting that these days, software was written in higher level languages, and that m…
I see these analogies a lot, but I don't like them. Assembly has a clear contract. You don't need to know how it works because it works the same way each time. You don't get different outputs when you compile the same C code twice. LLMs are nothing like that. They are probabilistic systems at their very core. Sometimes you get garbage. Sometimes you win. Change a single character and you may get a completely differen…
LLMs don't make it impossible to do anything yourself, but they make it economically impractical to do so. In other words, you'll have to largely provide both your own funding and your own motivation for your education, unless we can somehow restructure society quickly enough to substitute both.
With assembly, we arguably got lucky: It turns out that high-level programming languages still require all the rigorous thinking necessary to structure a programmer's mind in ways that transfer to many adjacent tasks.
It's of course possible that the same is true for using LLMs, but at least personally, something feels substantially different about them. They exercise my "people management" muscle much more than my "puzzle solving" one, and wherever we're going, we'll probably still need some puzzle solvers too.
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They can’t write maintainable code because they don’t have real world experience of getting your hands dirty in a company. The only way to get startup experience is to build a startup or work for one
What. Are you saying maintainable code is specifically related to startups? I can accept companies as an answer (although there are other places to cut your teeth), but startups is a weird carveout.
For the people arguing that the output is the code and the faster we generate it the better.. I do wonder where all the novel products produced by 10x devs who are now 100x with LLMs, the “idea guys” who can now produce products from whole clothe without having to hire pesky engineers.. where is the one-man 10 billion dollar startups, etc? We are 3-4 years into this mania and all I see on the other end of it is the L…
Marketing is the moat llms haven't been able to overcome. Being able to create a Word clone is easier but the difficulty of selling it is as hard or harder than ever. Show me an llm that can sell my product and find market fit. In reality llms are taking away profitable tools and keeping the revenue themselves.
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My point is it doesn’t matter whether he can fix things without agents. The real world isn’t an exam hall where your boss tells you “no naughty AI!”, you just get stuff done, and if Bob can do that with agents, nobody cares how he did it.
> The real world isn’t an exam hall where your boss tells you “no naughty AI!”, you just get stuff done, and if Bob can do that with agents, nobody cares. Indeed. That's why Anthropic had to hire real engineers to make sure their vibe-coded shit doesn't consume 68GB of RAM. Because real world: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
I personally haven't tried Claude Code because I can't install it on my PC. I'm starting to get the impression that they banned non Claude products from using their subscription, because their products are of such a poor quality that everyone is fleeing from them.