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AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

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Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#51

Post by snapcaster »

dakolli wrote: post #37
cyanydeez wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's a malefactor of: 1. Amazing, you just tweaked 1% efficiency 2. You idiot, you just spent an hour trying to trouble shoot a hallucinated api. On average, it's really hard to tell which ones going to win here.

Its not hard to tell at all, just look at how much it costs to run a 10T param model (especially with parallelized agents). Those costs are not worth the occasional slot machine-eque jackpot you get. For an entity like Google it might be worth it, but that's it. They definitely aren't going to let us use these things for cost they are now for much longer. Imagine going back to 2020 and tell people in 6 years going to…

Do you realize you're fighting a strawman or do you actually think this is a compelling argument?

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#52

Post by Groxx »

dekhn wrote: post #30
alecco wrote: post #9

Are Googlers themselves happy using Gemini coding agent instead of Claude Code or Codex? (no snark, I'm really asking)

If you mean specifically the Gemini VS Code Extension: it's terrible compared to Claude Code or Codex. I don't know how they can get away with it. Just constant timeouts, weird failure modes, have to start a new chat to switch modes... but I don't think any of that is specific to gemini the model- it seems to be the extension. As for actual solutions to problems ignoring the VS Code extension aspect, I find all three…

The overall quality of LLM coding tools is shockingly bad. I haven't found a single one without major issues, and many have the same problems reappear every few months, sometimes bad enough to almost break the entire thing (e.g. 100% failure rate in editing files, broken for weeks, with the same cause each time, multiple times in a year).

I'd say I'm surprised by it, but uh

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#53

Post by kubb »

dinfinity wrote: post #50
kubb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the next decade. Won't get funded.

Private investment in the US has grown from 100 billion in 2024 to almost 300 billion USD in 2025 [0]. Add public investments worldwide and private investments in at least China and Europe. I'm pretty sure money is not going to be the blocker. [0] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

The money will go to LLMs.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#54

Post by stijntonk »

I wish that Google would focus on bringing their Gemini 3.x models to GA, and provide enough capacity such that one not constantly has to fight with 429 errors.

It often feels like they do not want me to develop applications for corporate clients using their Vertex API. It is just such a shame, given that their models were so great for document analysis etc.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#55

Post by AndrewKemendo »

From the comments it seems that this community (mostly career software people) is starting to move into a new phase of grief about the median software engineer losing their hoped for permanent place in society.

-2021-2024 was Denial

-2024-2025 was Anger and Bargaining

-2026 seems to be some combo of anger, bargaining and acceptance depending mostly on your class/age

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#56

Post by [deleted] »

dinfinity wrote: post #50
kubb wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the next decade. Won't get funded.

Private investment in the US has grown from 100 billion in 2024 to almost 300 billion USD in 2025 [0]. Add public investments worldwide and private investments in at least China and Europe. I'm pretty sure money is not going to be the blocker. [0] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

[deleted]

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#57

Post by dgellow »

kubb wrote: post #53
dinfinity wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private investment in the US has grown from 100 billion in 2024 to almost 300 billion USD in 2025 [0]. Add public investments worldwide and private investments in at least China and Europe. I'm pretty sure money is not going to be the blocker. [0] https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

The money will go to LLMs.

Why not both? You don’t need 1trillion allocated before you have a proof of concept to demonstrate your non-LLM model, and once you have a PoC you will definitely have the larger investors interested

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#59

Post by TranquilMarmot »

poisonfountain wrote: post #34
momojo wrote: post #25

This reminds me of Antirez's "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype" [0] In a sentence: These foundation models are really good at optimizing these extremely high level, extremely well defined problem spaces (ie multiply matrices faster). In Antirez's case, it's "make Redis faster". There have been two reactions: "Oh it would never work for me" and "I have seen months of my life accomplished in an hour", and I think they'…

>I think the rest of us should rest easy knowing that LLM's can't (and maybe were never meant to) tackle the tacit-knowledge-filled, human-system-centric, ambiguously-defined-problem-space jobs most mortals work I don't believe that anymore, to be honest. Models are starting to get good at ambiguity. Claude Code now asks me when something is ambiguous. Soon, all meetings will be recorded, transcribed and stored in a…

> Soon, all meetings will be recorded, transcribed and stored in a well-indexed place for the agents to search when faced with ambiguity (free startup idea here!)

We were doing that over at Vowel a few years back, unfortunately it didn't pan out because you're competing directly against Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. They are all (slowly) catching up to where we were as a scrappy startup 4 years ago.

It was truly game-changing to have all of your meetings in an easily searchable database. Even as a human.

Re: AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields

#60

Post by drysine »

kubb wrote: post #41
dinfinity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the rest of us should rest easy knowing that LLM's can't [...] What if (when?) (AI-assisted) research moves AI beyond LLMs? Do you think that can't happen?

Not in the next decade. Won't get funded.

Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), a new Paris-based startup cofounded by Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, announced Monday it has raised more than $1 billion to develop AI world models.

LeCun argues that most human reasoning is grounded in the physical world, not language, and that AI world models are necessary to develop true human-level intelligence. “The idea that you’re going to extend the capabilities of LLMs [large language models] to the point that they’re going to have human-level intelligence is complete nonsense,” he said. [0]

[0] https://www.wired.com/story/yann-lecun-raises-dollar1-billio...

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