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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#341

Post by jwpapi »

Aurornis wrote: post #335
dmm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to the author specifically? Or a specific hypocritical person you know? If you're making a general statement about groups of online people you might be falling for the group attribution error[1], where the characteristics of an individual are assumed to be reflective of the whole group. In any case, two things can be simultaneously true: 1. Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop fe…

I think it's obvious that they're not referring to the author or a specific person at all. They're talking about how the zeitgeist has changed. Look at Hacker News archives 3 or more years ago and it would be really hard to find anyone arguing that coding speed is not a bottleneck or that engineers need to spend more time in collaboration. You would find a lot of arguments that leaving engineers alone to code is the…

Needing focus to think is not the same as needing focus to write code..

It can take a whole day to find 10 good lines to write.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#342

Post by aspenmartin »

crabbone wrote: post #314
aspenmartin wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better practices do you mean? Are you saying we just need different more agentic-friendly practices that ensure scaled reliability beyond what we can manually check? If so I totally agree. AI is 100% capable fundamentally of making new processes. Look I mean it’s not like I think opus 4.7 is all you need, but how can you argue with the fact that adoption since 4.5 has been an inflection point? That’s kind of pro…

> What better practices do you mean? I literally listed examples above... Code reviews weren't the norm until some time around 2010-ish. Then programmers realized that reviews help improve the code quality, and, eventually, this became so popular that today virtually everyone does it. Anyways, I'll give an example from something that I've personally experienced / contributed to, which isn't as massive of a thing as c…

Right no I understand what you mean, I asked to be sure and you’ve confirmed my understanding.

I think we’re talking past each other because your comment is like 99% interesting and insightful and also I agree with it completely but there is only one part of your claim that I have an issue with which is

> It won't imagine a new Git feature because it has no idea what it could possibly be because its authors don't know that either.

I left comments in other threads with a lot of detail but this is a fairly common misconception. It is true in a sort of practical sense today, and I have many experiences as you do with respect to this, but the gist is: this is a world of RL with verifiable rewards, you are not bounded by human ability at all and that is why we have the adoption, funding, and frothy excitement. It is not simply mimicking human coding. In early stages it will because human programming traces are used as kind of a bootstrap to get to an RL phase without any limitation on performance. This is a very well studied field and it just isn’t that much of a question of if and now it’s not even really a question of when.

> What did it invent?

This is a perpetual question with constantly moving goal posts so I’ve given up convincing anyone but by now it’s solving unsolved Erdos problems, not sure how convincing you find that (not opus though but that hardly matters now)

The point I’m trying to make is: we aren’t there yet but it’s a crazy idea to think that isn’t imminent given all of the measurement and observations we have.

Additionally my point on 4.5 being a turning point is adoption. You wouldn’t see adoption numbers if we were not accelerating rapidly from say 3.x performance along the scaling trend that we’ve known for years now

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#343

Post by PakG1 »

robocat wrote: post #339
sermah wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

til https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

The collective smarts on the Internet can't come up with a better name that might help our brains tag the concept? Although at least it has some cross-cultural references. Why is naming so hard.

Memes help things to become popular. I guess the question would be how popular would it have been without the meme name? We'll never know.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#344

Post by ares623 »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Then there's the other kind of engineer, who would rather see the world burn and their friends destitute than spend another second in an agile meeting.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#345

Post by serf »

advael wrote: post #337
nuancebydefault wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you a very smart writer or are you using smart tools, I'm not sure?

Wouldn't know if I'm a smart writer, but I see little value in writing with a model if that's what you're asking. Language models are good for searching, getting alright at structured outputs like code, and trash at meaningfully expressing my thoughts in prose. Frankly, it concerns me that people think vomiting their thoughts onto the internet could possibly benefit from computational assistance

>Frankly, it concerns me that people think vomiting their thoughts onto the internet could possibly benefit from computational assistance

it concerns you because you have a good authority over your spoken language, and like most people with those skills I presume the language flows easily from you.

that ability isn't guaranteed, for a lot of people expression is tough, and those people felt equally alienated when confronted with an essay of word salad about why their opinion is wrong.

An LLM is a tool. In the 90s I would read columns and editorials about the disgusting faux pas of replying to a wedding invitation via such a cheap trendy medium like internet e-mail , now you receive death certificates that way.

It's not all bad, simpletons can use LLMs to have the critiquing essays turned into 5 word ELI5 statements that they can become enraged over once all the nuance is stripped. That's fun!

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#346

Post by threethirtytwo »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Nah they're reaching for something they're good at. Same with you bro.

The stark reality is this. Both coding and project management can be done with AI. I think coding is more important than all the fluff surrounding project management but with AI both are now ready to become obsolete.

The thing with project management is that it's a bit harder for AI to tackle because it's not just pure tokens it needs to deal with. We need to give the agent more tools to interact with real time and real world events for AI to fully take over this aspect of the job, but make no mistake... project management is easier in terms of skill (not in terms of effort).

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#347

Post by ern »

For something that was supposedly always unimportant, huge amounts of energy were spent recruiting developers based on how they produced and interacted with code.

FizzBuzz was a litmus test that showed how hopeless the average developer was. Coding interviews were the real test of programming ability. Now we're being told none of that ever mattered for real?

We should just admit that the game has changed (possibly, I'm not 100% convinced). Code WAS the bottleneck and coding ability was the bottleneck, but it may not be going forward.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#348

Post by Pannoniae »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #299

As software engineer, we should collectively realize that this is all cope. Every article or comment about how AI will never be smart enough, etc, etc will only be true until its not. One of our main valuable skill sets is now partially automated. Some of us are completely obsolete and its coming for the specialists and more experienced ones within a decade tops. You're not going to convince anyone that "um actually…

Yeah, you're definitely right about the shifting goalposts ("it's a stochastic parrot" -> "it hallucinates all the time, it can't even get APIs right" -> "it can generate functions but can't reason about the codebase" -> "the bottleneck was never shipping code")

At the same time, humans can move up the abstraction ladder faster than the LLMs can. At least, some humans. Agents can produce lots of code. They can also do the entirely wrong thing. The impact of wrong decisions have been massively write-amplified with more and more intelligent LLMs. With earlier ones, it got a sentence or a function wrong, you reprompted, the cost of a mistake was 10 seconds. Now, you can burn hours or even days of work on the entirely wrong thing without a competent human operator stepping in and course-correcting.

The trajectory of agents have been bigger and bigger context windows, bigger autonomy, but at the same time, a bigger blast radius. In this context, I don't think the human experts will be out of their jobs any time soon.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#349

Post by taneq »

I’ve been saying for decades that the “hard problem” of programming isn’t curly brackets or any of that shit, it’s figuring out what you actually want, in enough detail that you can explain it to a computer.

The amount of detail required is less these days and the computer is better at interpreting handwavey explanations but the principle still applies.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#350

Post by safetytrick »

kccqzy wrote: post #309
jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

For veterans engineers that might be true. But for a junior engineer pre-AI, velocity has always been technical. I know junior engineers who after a whole year of writing C++ still does not grok std::unique_ptr; and this person consistently has the least velocity on their whole team. When I used to write performance reviews for junior engineers, their performance really was dominated by their velocity, which was roug…

Being a junior engineer was a good time!
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