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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#11

Post by conartist6 »

GlickWick wrote: post #4
conartist6 wrote: post #3

Does it really keep rising? Many of my fondest memories of technology come from times past...

The tower is not about fondness, its about growth

Is growth enough if technology makes our lives worse? Is a tower the pride of the civilization if a strong gust of wind could bring it down? It is before the gust, when all that matters is that the tower is tall rather than strong. After the gust, things are a bit more nuanced. Fingers are pointed.

The tricky part here is that you can't tell if a once-topmost part of the tower is sturdy until a great deal more tower is resting on it. Well, now a lot the economy is resting on little other than AI dreams. Your move, rational people.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#12

Post by calvinmorrison »

sixtyj wrote: post #5

> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people c…

I don't know. some stuff has gotten less. Major databases now ship effective HA tooling, microservices seem on their way out, structured databases seem to be back in instead of NoSQL.

HTML and pre-rendering are back in, HTMx, liveview

The degaussing of CSS and the hacks we did, hell i was trying to explain how we debugged web pages in IE6 to a younger staff member today.

Some things are more complex, some things got good enough to make them less complex.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#13

Post by Animats »

tekacs wrote: post #6

I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…

The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely, multiple similar implementations of roughly the same thing appear in different parts of the project. This is a known problem of vibe coding now.

We need some way to make AI-driven coding strive for parsimony.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#14

Post by Xirdus »

prymitive wrote: post #2

It used to be that you need a good reason to make huge refactorings, because it’s often so much work. Now agent can rewrite half of your code if your prompt is vague enough and you don’t actual try to review it all. And so the “soul” of a program can change dramatically every single day. It’s both great and very much not so.

The biggest obstacle to huge refactoring has always been minimizing the risk of bugs, not losing any features, and ensuring compatibility with the existing ecosystem. The reason it's become easier in the age of AI is because we stopped caring about these things.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#15

Post by jagged-chisel »

... and narrowing.

Where the "tower" was once a company (or team?) of human devs, it can now be a single dev and their agents.

The right engineer can likely replace non-technical co-founders with a couple LLMs. Geez, I can't wait to write that article...

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#16

Post by snarf21 »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #7

My comment is not directly responding to the essay, but it got me thinking about about how agentic programming is much more akin to management than it is to actual programming. Managers generally only have a high level idea of what ICs are working on and often don't have the time, bandwidth, and in some cases ability to understand everything the ICs they're supervising are doing. As more and more software gets writte…

It feels to me like I'm stuck doing code reviews for a junior dev all day so I use it as little as possible and mostly to look for things I may have missed.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#17

Post by alwa »

I come back to Babel and the Bruegel image too, although taking from it a little less optimism.

I feel these systems rising and sprawling with wee myopic agents developing out their little corners of this unknowably vast whole… a tower with 50 parapets on one side and some wacky cantilevered maiden tower on the other, and a very serviceable adobe roof over some patio for god-knows-why, and thatch over the landing next to it…

Some grotesque fatberg of designs that make sense at the level of individual design efforts, but that lack the fractal sort of levels of policy and judgment that unify the overall enterprise.

The overall language, as it were.

And language takes discipline to establish and maintain through any sufficiently large group of people—witness the company-speak or army-speak of pretty much any successful organization.

We feel like we’ve conquered the problem of talking the same language as our “Gastown Mayors” (who in turn are talking the same language as their “polecats” and so on all the way down the chain of golems)… but it’s only when it’s all built that the good Lord will humble us… that we’ll realize the understanding we thought we’d transmitted perfectly from our thrones wasn’t quite so shared as we’d imagined.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#18

Post by paulryanrogers »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #12
sixtyj wrote: post #5

> There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people c…

I don't know. some stuff has gotten less. Major databases now ship effective HA tooling, microservices seem on their way out, structured databases seem to be back in instead of NoSQL. HTML and pre-rendering are back in, HTMx, liveview The degaussing of CSS and the hacks we did, hell i was trying to explain how we debugged web pages in IE6 to a younger staff member today. Some things are more complex, some things got…

> Major databases now ship effective HA tooling

Which ones? PostgreSQL doesn't have HA in core.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#19

Post by [deleted] »

prymitive wrote: post #2

It used to be that you need a good reason to make huge refactorings, because it’s often so much work. Now agent can rewrite half of your code if your prompt is vague enough and you don’t actual try to review it all. And so the “soul” of a program can change dramatically every single day. It’s both great and very much not so.

[deleted]

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#20

Post by conartist6 »

Animats wrote: post #13
tekacs wrote: post #6

I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…

The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…

Why would it? It has optimized what it was built to optimize: this is the token-selling industry. Take note that the people hawking the dream of a gold rush are not actually mining but selling shovels
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