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The Eternal Sloptember

geohot.github.io

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101–110 of 389 posts

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#101

Post by sodafountan »

DeathArrow wrote: post #79
latentsea wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I don't have anything important to say other than I 100% agree with this comment. AI in its current state is akin to Stack Overflow and Google on steroids, but from my experience, it doesn't do well building out full-scale applications other than perhaps some initial scaffolding. We're currently using it to build out a full-scale application. It does as well as you care to coax into doing tbh. You have to inve…

>It does as well as you care to coax into doing tbh. You have to invest heavily in harness engineering, and at least my experience has been that as you do that, the results improve. That is also my experience. When starting a project I observe how the agent fails, I add new rules to the harness to prevent it from falling and repeat the process until I am happy with the output.

I'm unfamiliar with harness engineering. Is there any good documentation about the subject you could point me to?

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#102

Post by bluegatty »

wyager wrote: post #5

> They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming Are we really still doing this?

That's a very good way to describe what they do (better than 'AI') but ironically, it really well explains the mechanism, and how they are in fact able to 'code so well' which is contrary to the authors own premise.

Agents code extremely well.

They're not particularly good at 'architecture' and I think that's where his specific concerns about 'not being able to see the problems' arise - the issues are are almost never in the syntax, because the AI writes perfect code. The issue is that it's not doing exactly what you intended.

Instead of 'missing the target' ... it's 'hit the wrong target perfectly'.

Any senior developer working with AI daily should be able to have a baseline intuition for all of this, and would therefore reject the hyperbole of the premise 'it can't code!'.

Of course it's producing gargantuan amounts of slop - that's not because 'it can't code', that's something else entirely.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#103

Post by kelnos »

simianwords wrote: post #19

Nah this person is dead wrong. Lets come back in 2 years and check on it. I'm willing to make a reasonable bet on these terms: companies will go even more AI native, will use even more tokens and spend even more money. EDIT: To people downvoting me, please come up with a reasonable bet and lets try to work it out. EDIT 2: $500 bet paid to your account on whether LLM's are going to still be used productively or not. N…

The author is not arguing against your bet. I think the author wouldn't be surprised if you won that bet. But that doesn't change the argument he does make.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#104

Post by kelnos »

bluegatty wrote: post #85
nixgeek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like the author is a noob. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz In fact, he’s done several things that are truly hard, and has a well-deserved engineering reputation.

The author is absurdly wrong. It's ridiculous to suggest that 'AI can't code' - when the entire development world has moved into agentic coding, including all of the best developers in the world, and it's yielding positive results in most scenarios. It's a callow 'bad twitter take' the length of an article. He's not wrong to suggest that IA is a 'stochastic mechanism' over all the code that's ever been written, but t…

> when the entire development world has moved into agentic coding

Careful, your bubble is showing.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#105

Post by forgetfreeman »

"It’s definitely a better Google for most searches"

This is dangerously incorrect. AI summaries of search results consistently return incorrect information and grossly oversimplified and thus misleading summaries, neither of which are detectable unless one either has prior domain knowledge or spends time drilling into search results to validate the AI output.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#106

Post by bluegatty »

cafkafk wrote: post #74

I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…

Yes, exactly, it's 'us' not the AI, which is great.

Why on earth would we ever remotely compare a 'tool' to 'a software engineer' ?

The 'great delusion' is not that 'AI can't code' - because obviously it can, and very well.

The problem is the 'anthropomorphism' and all this AGI nonsense.

If we called it 'Stochastic Mechanisms' and did not 'personalize' our prompts, refer to them as 'chat' or give them 'personalities' but remained in the domain of 'Stochastic Language CLI' ... then our metaphors would pbably not cloud our judgments.

Let the philosophers argue about AGI.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#107

Post by neerajsi »

vips7L wrote: post #62
simianwords wrote: post #32

People misunderstand how AI is used in coding in normal work environments. New feature requirement comes - maybe you need a new service or some new classes. You need to do some research first. You guide the AI with some prompts and give it some guidance on how to scenario-test it. It makes some classes, test methods. Maybe ~2000 lines and you do a quick verification, check if the overall idea looks okay. Ask it to fi…

If you don’t know what library to use in your specific language, do you think you know enough to have an LLM generate most of it?

I just joined a new team and have been using copilot with opus models.

We have our core code in a weird dialect of C and rust. C I know well, but not rust. Our tests are in Python. The pipeline descriptions are in Yaml.

Outside of the core code there are so many arcana to learn. Writing syntactically and semantically correct yaml/Python test code would be a nightmare. The Agents have flaws, but they provide a huge leg up in improving the tests.

And they are great at providing a first pass review of the core code before bothering a human reviewer. Lastly we run some of our test failures through AI triage, which often enough finds the root cause or rules out simple failures.

This shows up in a higher checkin rate. I'm curious to see whether this will lead to quality end product since we have more support for the more manually written and reviewed core product code.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#108

Post by Alex_L_Wood »

DeathArrow wrote: post #61

To me this sounds like an old cobbler complaining that machines aren't producing good shoes if left unsupervised and that the old process of making shoes completely by hand is far superior. So what he is telling us? That agents are not infaillable and they are not capable to one shot complex software and they do not produce perfect code? We know what and the solution is to use agents for what they are good at and wor…

LLM proponents always use some language like "these old, stuck up dinosaurs with their manual labor vs us cool smart kids with automated labor", but they forget one thing - with automated labor the performance and cost difference was easily measurable in favor of the automation. With LLMs it's neither measurable nor visible (no better software, no faster delivery overall in the industry), and the costs are pretty bad. Besides personal anecdotes of someone toiling away at yet another AI harness project on GitHub.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#109

Post by Chaosvex »

mrec wrote: post #65
Chaosvex wrote: post #44

> and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t For something to take "longer and longer" to realise, doesn't they imply that it's been realised at least once before or that there was an expected deadline for the realisation? Okay, that's a nitpick.

I read it as "agents can't program, and with each new generation of agents it's taking longer and longer to realize that that specific iteration can't". Maybe taking the Principle of Charity too far, I dunno.

Nah, that's fair, I was just being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#110

Post by tonyedgecombe »

cafkafk wrote: post #74

I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is. Either you're a luddite or "ai pilled". In most cases, LLMs can get you 80-95% of the way, sometimes less, sometimes more. And heck, sometimes, it just gets you somewhere wrong. But it seems everyone is arguing about whether LLMs can be perfect software engineers in isolation running in a closet, and using that to say that LLMs do n…

>I think a lot of the problem with the current discourse is how black-and-white it is.

There is too much money involved for any rational debate.

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