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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#171

Post by csallen »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #162
csallen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that hard to predict that obviously useful new technology is going to improve over time. Guns, wheels, cars, ships, batteries, televisions, the internet, smartphones, airplanes, refrigeration, electric lighting, semiconductors, GPS, solar panels, antibiotics, printing presses, steam engines, radio, etc. The pattern is obvious, the forces are clear and well-studied. If there is (1) a big gap between current c…

That list cherry picks all the successful cases where the technology improved while ignoring the many, many others where it didn't and the technology improved no further. That's dishonest. It isn't even a good job of cherry picking: we never got mainstream supersonic passenger aircraft after the Concorde because aerospace technology hasn't advanced far enough to make it economically viable and the decrease in progres…

You're not factoring in the list of constraints I provided.

There's no broad social acceptance of supersonic flight because it creates incredibly loud sonic booms that the public doesn't want to deal with. And despite that, it's still a bad counterexample, as companies continue to innovate in this area e.g. Boom Supersonic.

At best you can say, "It's taking longer than expected," but my point was never that it will happen on any specific schedule. It took 400 years for guns to advance from the primitive fire lances in China to weapons with lock mechanisms in the 1400s. Those long time frames only prove my point even more strongly. Progress WILL happen, when there is appetite and acceptance and incentive and room to grow, and time is no obstacle. It's one of the more certain things in human history, and the forces behind it have been well studies.

Just as certain: the people and jobs who are obsoleted by these new technologies often remain in denial until they are forgotten.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#172

Post by hokkos »

csallen wrote: post #55
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Refreshing to see an honest and balanced take on AI coding. This is what real AI-assisted coding looks like once you get past the initial wow factor of having the AI write code that executes and does what you asked. This experience is familiar to every serious software engineer who has used AI code gen and then reviewed the output: > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious…

I'll take the other side of this. Professional software engineers like many of us have a big blind spot when it comes to AI coding, and that's a fixation on code quality. It makes sense to focus on code quality. We're not wrong. After all, we've spent our entire careers in the code. Bad code quality slows us down and makes things slow/insecure/unreliable/etc for end users. However, code quality is becoming less and l…

If strongly typed languages are preferred for AI coding, maybe the fixation on code quality make LLM produce better code.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#173

Post by csallen »

vlovich123 wrote: post #128
csallen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point? In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.

Im arguing that code quality very much still matters and will only continue to matter. AI will get better at making good maintainable and explainable code because that’s what it takes to actually solve problems tractably. But saying “code quality doesn’t matter because AI” is definitely not true both experientially and as a prediction. Will AI do a better job in the future? Sure. But because their code quality improv…

Well then sure, we can agree there, it's just a matter of phrasing then.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#175

Post by lowsong »

csallen wrote: post #169
2ccg wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your whole argument is based on 'the technology improves'. Ok, so another fundamental proposition is monetary resources are needed to fund said technology improvement. Whats wrong with LLMs? They require immense monetary resources. Is that a problem for now? No because lots of private money is flowing in and Google et al have the blessing of their shareholders to pump up the amount of cash flows going into LLM based…

This has literally never happened in the history of humanity. Name one technology where development permanently stopped due to lack of funding, despite there being... 1. lots of room for progress, i.e. the theoretical ceiling dwarfed the current capabilities 2. strong incentives to continue development, i.e. monetary or military success 3. no obviously better competitors/alternatives 4. social/cultural tolerance from…

AI has none of these things.

1. As I said before, we've long since reached diminishing returns on models. We simply don't have enough compute or training data left to make them dramatically better.

2. This is only true if it actually pans out, which is still an unknown question.

3. Just... not using it? It has to justify its existence. If it's not of benefit vs. the cost then why bother.

4. The public hates AI. The proliferation of "AI slop" makes people despise the technology wholesale.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#176

Post by csallen »

lowsong wrote: post #130
csallen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again it's the opposite. A landscape of vibe coded micro apps is a landscape of buggy, vulnerable, points of failure. When you buy a product, software or hardware, you do more than buy the functionality you buy the assurance it will work. AI does not change this. Vibe code an app to automate your lightbulbs all you like, but nobody is going to be paying millions of dollars a year on vibe coded slop apps and apps li…

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with li…

> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run.

"Renting your ability to do your job"?

I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites."

In other words, democratizing is not about people who who have jobs as programmers. It's about the people who don't know how to code, who are not software engineers, who are suddenly gaining the ability to produce software.

Three years ago, you could not pay money to produce software yourself. You either had to learn and develop expertise yourself, or hire someone else. Today, any random person can sit down and build a custom to-do list app for herself, for free, almost instantly, with no experience.

> The improvement in AI models requires billions of dollars a year in hardware, infrastructure, end energy. Do you think that investors will continue to pour that level of investment into improving AI models for a payout that might only come ten to fifteen years down the road? Once the economic bubble pops, the models we have are the end of the road.

10-15 year payouts? Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW. Many tens of thousands of already gotten insanely rich, three years ago, and two years ago, and last year, and this year. If you think investors won't be motivated, and there aren't people currently in line to throw their money into the ring, you're extremely uninformed about investor sentiment and returns lol.

You can predict that the music will stop. That's fair. But to say that investors are worried about long payout times is factually inaccurate. The money is coming in faster and harder than ever.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#177

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

cloche wrote: post #56

Really great to see a realistic experience sans hype about AI tools and how they can have an impact. > But when I reviewed the codebase in detail in late January, the downside was obvious: the codebase was complete spaghetti...It was extremely fragile; it solved the immediate problem but it was never going to cope with my larger vision...I decided to throw away everything and start from scratch This part was interest…

> Fred Brooks "throw one away" philosophy

Everybody remembers that soundbite but nobody remembers that he changed his mind about it later and switched to advocating iterative refinement.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#178

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

zozbot234 wrote: post #140
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these are not really the right way to use AI to code with. There are two basic ways to code with AI that work: 1. Autocomplete. Pretty simple; you only accept auto-completes you actually want, as you manually write code. 2. Software engineering design and implementation workflow. The AI makes a plan, with tasks. It commits those plans to files. It starts sub-agents to tackle the tasks. The subagents create te…

> when Claude fucking Code has been produced this way for like 6 months And people can look at the results (illegally) because that whole bunch of code has been leaked. Let's just say it's not looking good. These are the folks who actually made and trained Claude to begin with, they know the model more than anyone else, and the code is still absolute garbage tier by sensible human-written code quality standards.

Yet it works anyway. What does that say about human code quality standards?

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#179

Post by vlovich123 »

csallen wrote: post #173
vlovich123 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im arguing that code quality very much still matters and will only continue to matter. AI will get better at making good maintainable and explainable code because that’s what it takes to actually solve problems tractably. But saying “code quality doesn’t matter because AI” is definitely not true both experientially and as a prediction. Will AI do a better job in the future? Sure. But because their code quality improv…

Well then sure, we can agree there, it's just a matter of phrasing then.

Then you may want to clarify what your phrasing meant because I couldn’t find a more charitable interpretation

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#180

Post by vlovich123 »

csallen wrote: post #171
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list cherry picks all the successful cases where the technology improved while ignoring the many, many others where it didn't and the technology improved no further. That's dishonest. It isn't even a good job of cherry picking: we never got mainstream supersonic passenger aircraft after the Concorde because aerospace technology hasn't advanced far enough to make it economically viable and the decrease in progres…

You're not factoring in the list of constraints I provided. There's no broad social acceptance of supersonic flight because it creates incredibly loud sonic booms that the public doesn't want to deal with. And despite that, it's still a bad counterexample, as companies continue to innovate in this area e.g. Boom Supersonic. At best you can say, "It's taking longer than expected," but my point was never that it will h…

If code quality only stops mattering in 400 years (whatever that definition happens to be) then the prediction that it makes is worthless in terms of what you should do today. You use it to argue it’s unimportant deal with it, but if it’s a 400 year payoff you’ve made the wrong bet.
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