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Control the Ideas, Not the Code

antirez.com

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Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#11

Post by logicprog »

m_ke wrote: post #2

I tried really hard to do this, but it turns out the models don't care about your ideas and want to do what's popular in their training data, so they will happily ignore anything you try to force down their throats, especially as context length grows or if you hit compaction. So to make best use of the models steer them down familiar paths, mention common pattern and frameworks, use popular packages and languages tha…

I do highly unusual, off the beaten path projects with AI.

For instance, a game engine written entirely in LuaJIT, but allocating almost all data structures using CFFI, a very unusual, custom object-orientation DSL I designed myself, and that uses SDL3's SDL_gpu library to do all rendering, a ton of GLSL 4.6 compute shaders cross compiled to SPIR-V and Metal (which constraints what GLSL can be written), and is a hybrid tile-oriented and 3D engine.

Another example is my Emacs-like live-modifiable image-based editor, again in LuaJIT+CFFI, with a kqueue+atomic lock-free ring buffer+pthread based actor model, each running a separate LuaJIT interpreter, with a custom advicing system, event bus, async/await implementation riding on the event bus, a custom process management and IO library, and testing via Tmux.

Even DeepSeek V4 Flash mostly does fine with this, once it's built a few memories in the memory system. Let alone something like DSv4-Pro or GLM 5.2. All I can say is skill issue.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#12

Post by dominotw »

echelon wrote: post #9
inigyou wrote: post #3

As a reminder, Redis was widely replaced by its non-vibe-coded fork Valkey.

As a reminder, Amazon and Google pillaged the Redis project and took all the profits of themselves. OSI purity is hyperscaler brainwashing. They don't want to pay you. They want to take your labor. Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars off of Redis while the original authors and the company formed around it have gotten none of that. The best licenses for new database projects are fair source and open core.…

> took all the profits of themselves.

some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#13

Post by antirez »

dominotw wrote: post #10
inigyou wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% of the employers I worked for since the time of Valkey had replaced Redis with Valkey.

i am currently working on this exact migration at my company. aws also kind of pushes valkey so ppl seem to choose the default.

Sure, it costs less, and AWS is in a dominant position. Users here are playing the side of the bully since they don't care about what is right and wrong with the hyperscalers. "BSD is better than AGPL!" And give money to the wrong side of the history. Nor that I expected anything better, the single person has a given sensibility, the mass, as a whole, do whatever is in a given moment convenient or believed to be more pure (license wise). However thanks to that, you will see how little progresses we will have (and we are having) in the space of open source system software with very open licenses. Developers of software mostly are not happy to bring OSS to the success to see them used by hyperscalers to capture all the value. However I did it again, with DwarfStart, to release code under the BSD license: even in the current situation, I think it is better to give back than to have a personal gain, but this is a position that very little folks can afford to take.

However: this conversation is completely out of topic but people instead of talking about AI and code, which is a tabu, will move the conversation to personal attacks and shit like that.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#14

Post by echelon »

dominotw wrote: post #12
echelon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a reminder, Amazon and Google pillaged the Redis project and took all the profits of themselves. OSI purity is hyperscaler brainwashing. They don't want to pay you. They want to take your labor. Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars off of Redis while the original authors and the company formed around it have gotten none of that. The best licenses for new database projects are fair source and open core.…

> took all the profits of themselves. some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too.

> some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too.

You must be joking.

Until the whole of AWS and GCP are open source, they're taking absurd margins on your business and locking you in.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#15

Post by Tade0 »

inigyou wrote: post #6
logicprog wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence for Valkey "widely replacing" Redis, instead of just rapidly gaining adoption as well ? Additionally, it's important to clarify that the replacement was 100% over licensing issues — iirc predating the vibe coding entirely — not the use of AI to code, and that furthermore, no one has to my knowledge pointed to any flaws in the Redis codebase even correlated with AI use. So this is a disingenuo…

100% of the employers I worked for since the time of Valkey had replaced Redis with Valkey.

To be honest until today I thought Kafka was the popular go-to Redis replacement, as almost none of my employers used Redis for its original, intended purpose, namely being an in-memory key-value store. What they really wanted was RabbitMQ.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#16

Post by alexpotato »

For some background on me to set the context for the following opinion:

- been a SRE/DevOps at banks/hedge funds for almost 20 years

- now work in L1 crypto

- have been coding since I was 12 and have also been using frontier models for the past year (including running multiple agents at the same time etc).

My thoughts:

The models are indeed amazing. They can read large codebases, find bugs, infer the root cause of an issue from partial logs etc etc.

They do still hallucinate. WAY less than they used to but it's still non-zero. In a way that's worse b/c the model will spit out a complex piece of software and say "Yep, no mistakes. I even wrote tests and they all pass!" You might think "Phew, that's great!" but in the same way we've all found bugs in production code written by smart people, there will be bugs here too.

I say this not to imply that you have to read all of the code. I say if only to underline that for big complex systems, the "let's write unit tests for the parts that ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE CORRECT" is still just as important as it ever was. I'm thinking of examples like:

- the order and execution handler of a trading system

- avionics flight controls

- healthcare related medical devices

- etc

As an example: I was working on a complex system. I wasn't sure if the LLM code was actually correct so I wrote up a quick script that I checked, line by line, to be 100% sure it was working as I expected. I then used that script to double check the LLM. I didn't read all of the code the LLM created. The sense of "ok, now this works" was astounding.

I'll add, a lot of the developers I work with are going this "hybrid" route too where they will have the LLM write code and tests but then go back in and double check.

In closing, a lot of these big rewrites with LLMs are possible only b/c the devs KNOW, FOR A FACT, that the unit/integration tests are correct. I'm still not convinced that you can have LLMs write all of the code and all of the unit tests and be 100% sure that it's all correct. (I will admit that this has always been difficult and even the pre-LLM days were not a guarantee that all of the code wa s correct)

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#17

Post by dominotw »

echelon wrote: post #14
dominotw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> took all the profits of themselves. some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too.

> some of those profits are passed on to users too. valkey on aws is cheaper for customers too. You must be joking. Until the whole of AWS and GCP are open source, they're taking absurd margins on your business and locking you in.

not sure i follow, thats the whole cloud hosting model. yeah you can self host to avoid that but thats a whole another tangent.

If you are already locked in then whats the benfit of choosing redis from a pointy haired boss prespective.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#18

Post by echelon »

antirez wrote: post #13
dominotw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am currently working on this exact migration at my company. aws also kind of pushes valkey so ppl seem to choose the default.

Sure, it costs less, and AWS is in a dominant position. Users here are playing the side of the bully since they don't care about what is right and wrong with the hyperscalers. "BSD is better than AGPL!" And give money to the wrong side of the history. Nor that I expected anything better, the single person has a given sensibility, the mass, as a whole, do whatever is in a given moment convenient or believed to be more…

I wish you'd chosen a "non free" fair source or open core license from the start.

Amazon has stolen enormous wealth from you and your collaborators.

People cheer for the hyperscalers even though AWS and GCP are not at all open source themselves, charge absurd margin, and do everything in their power to lock you in.

It's really unfortunate.

Thank you for Redis.

Hopefully AI gives them extra competition. There doesn't seem to be a moat for them yet apart from distribution. Hopefully that holds. The world needs competition and less concentration of power.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#19

Post by antirez »

echelon wrote: post #18
antirez wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it costs less, and AWS is in a dominant position. Users here are playing the side of the bully since they don't care about what is right and wrong with the hyperscalers. "BSD is better than AGPL!" And give money to the wrong side of the history. Nor that I expected anything better, the single person has a given sensibility, the mass, as a whole, do whatever is in a given moment convenient or believed to be more…

I wish you'd chosen a "non free" fair source or open core license from the start. Amazon has stolen enormous wealth from you and your collaborators. People cheer for the hyperscalers even though AWS and GCP are not at all open source themselves, charge absurd margin, and do everything in their power to lock you in. It's really unfortunate. Thank you for Redis. Hopefully AI gives them extra competition. There doesn't…

Thanks, I believe that as a whole choosing the BSD created a more positive effect, so I'm happy with that. It is just that it is really unfair to read a comment where people use ValKey to accuse you of AI slop :D It means that our community, and this site itself, is at this point really low quality. This will in turn discourage the many great folks that are here. A replacement is needed. But TLDR, I would release Redis again with the BSD license if I could go back in time.

Re: Control the Ideas, Not the Code

#20

Post by m_ke »

logicprog wrote: post #11
m_ke wrote: post #2

I tried really hard to do this, but it turns out the models don't care about your ideas and want to do what's popular in their training data, so they will happily ignore anything you try to force down their throats, especially as context length grows or if you hit compaction. So to make best use of the models steer them down familiar paths, mention common pattern and frameworks, use popular packages and languages tha…

I do highly unusual, off the beaten path projects with AI. For instance, a game engine written entirely in LuaJIT, but allocating almost all data structures using CFFI, a very unusual, custom object-orientation DSL I designed myself, and that uses SDL3's SDL_gpu library to do all rendering, a ton of GLSL 4.6 compute shaders cross compiled to SPIR-V and Metal (which constraints what GLSL can be written), and is a hybr…

It's not an issue of usual vs unusual, I'm saying the models are way better at writing and maintaining django or react code bases than your own hand rolled architecture that you define in some docs that it has to learn and keep in context. All of the models do an amazing job making local edits and working in small greenfield projects but once you get to full production systems with close to a million lines things start to rot. The code still works and the models are able to make progress but all of a sudden you have 3-4 different versions of your concepts sprinkled in random corners of your code base.

My second point is that the models are way better at things like Rust or Lua than Python or JS, because the average person producing code in those languages has way more programming experience, so the code quality of training data online in those languages is higher than the programming 101 medium blogspam type content you see in more popular intro languages.

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