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The Eternal Sloptember

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161–170 of 389 posts

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#161

Post by swiftcoder »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #110
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.

> There is too much money involved for any rational debate.

For the Sam Altmans of this world, sure, but how much money is the average AI booster commenting on HN actually standing to make?

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#162

Post by tardedmeme »

tra3 wrote: post #21
farhanhubble wrote: post #14

I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…

When every prompt produces a thousand line PR, you’re not very far from another million line monolith. I’m a little more hopeful than the author though. I feel like it’s possible to manage the process so that does not happen.

Monolith is an ordinary form of software btw - big ball of mud is the problem.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#163

Post by swiftcoder »

Nition wrote: post #17

With the level of ability that AI is at right now, I've found it useful personally to think of it something like a very good search over existing knowledge. Another step up in searchability in the lineage of reference books, stack overflow, GitHub etc. Programmers are rewriting and reinventing the same techniques more often than any other vocation I can think of, and so we were primed for a really good search over pr…

> Programmers are rewriting and reinventing the same techniques more often than any other vocation I can think of

And the answer to that is clearly a tool that makes rewriting/reinventing cheaper than actually packaging nice reusable libraries

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#164

Post by totetsu »

>When people see an artifact, they make assumptions about the process that was used to create it. Without even thinking about it, they assume the creator had a basically human state of mind. This assumption is no longer true. Things can be broken in ways that weren’t previously possible, and old proxies of underlying quality like syntax and grammar are useless. AI produced artifacts are not produced by the same process as human ones, and this difference, while extremely subtle in statistics, makes itself obvious when you try to interact with and build on the artifact in human ways.

Once Humans just had oral language, and we could us words to pass ideas from one human mind to another. Then with writing ideas could pass to minds that weren't immediately close together in space or time.. and with this we made complext global spanning civilization. When words just become noise, that one has to be suspect of each one as to whither they'er coming from another human mind, or just a statistical process, can this civilization even survive?

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#165

Post by gizajob »

bluegatty wrote: post #106
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'…

The saner philosophers don’t need to argue about AGI because we’re absolutely nowhere near it.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#167

Post by rusk »

sodafountan wrote: post #101
DeathArrow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Sounds like bag pipes to me LOL

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#168

Post by jay_kyburz »

esikich wrote: post #129
bluegatty wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

You are a tool. You're a human resource, from the perspective of the organization. That pushes buttons on bunch of other tools. That's why you compare it. Edit: I don't mean tool as a perjoritive.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Perhaps because people don't like the sentiment. But its true, people are hired as tools to write programs.

Both people and AI make mistakes. Perhaps the AI makes more, a lot more, but its so fast, and works around the clock, and has no ego, there is a chance that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#169

Post by tardedmeme »

peteforde wrote: post #114
asixicle wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an excellent point, and as a novice using LLMs for projects I could never previously dream of doing I find myself looking for the same, examples or citations of what exactly agents are writing incorrectly and how would the human do it better. I'm sure they're out there, maybe someone can refer some good content showing such examples. I have no doubt the top nth percent of coders could write circles around Cla…

Reality: the top nth percent of coders are seeing absurd, dramatic gains in productivity using LLMs. See: antirez, Simon Willison, Steve Yegge. The more experience you bring to the table, the more value you get from these tools. Look, about 12 years ago articles about how if you're not pair programming you're doing it wrong were on HN's home page every day. Doing well prompted plan -> agent -> debug cycles is like pa…

antirez is famous for creating Redis, which took a dump in quality and everyone switched to a fork called Valkey.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#170

Post by jay_kyburz »

SCdF wrote: post #141

So currently there are people who are buying grey market peptides[1], marked "not for human consumption" and injecting themselves with them based on dubious anecdotes and vibes, to make their skin clearer, build muscle mass, and so on. Are they are all suddenly turning into zombies? No. Do they have any real idea what that is going to do to their body a few years down the line? Also no. Could it be catastrophic? Mayb…

I think smart developers will be building isolated modules, so if your AI generated module keeps failing, you can amputate it and make a fresh one.
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