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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#41

Post by swiftcoder »

Gud wrote: post #37
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…

Do you believe "micro services" can make a comeback? local daemons with an exposed API, each daemon vibe coded?

Unless we are planning to deploy them all individually to an expensive serverless platform like Lambda, the coordination challenges and overprovisioning are going to more than outweigh whatever architectural benefit you reap (in human-centred development, micro services are solving an entirely different problem - Conway's Law)

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#43

Post by hilariously »

endorphine wrote: post #33
calvinmorrison wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A database with built-in HA is a significantly more complex system than one without it.

And one built without it and not coordinating with it is often much harder to reason about when you bolt it on later.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#44

Post by a2dam »

conartist6 wrote: post #3

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

This isn't really a good way to judge things. In the future, the fondest memories someone else has about technology will be about the present. The past is not better, you're just nostalgic for it.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#45

Post by guessbest »

I don't know why people hold on to all this extra software and features when with the tools its easier than ever to strip that out and refactor the end product in to a much more compact deliverable. Maybe once upon a time it was useful to keep legacy parts of the software solution around, but it can be recreated with fresh eyes if needed given the power of the new LLM models. My philosophy is if its not needed, it needs to be removed.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#46

Post by ashdksnndck »

conartist6 wrote: post #20
Animats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same issue happens in models trained by organizations who aren’t selling tokens. I believe it’s because being parsimonious is simply harder. Achieving the task at hand independently and declaring the job done is easier than building an abstraction and reconciling between every use case.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#47

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.

It's not really news, though. Programming as Theory Building (Peter Naur) was published in the 80s, I think?

Maybe the younger entrants to this field never came across it, but even if you never came across it, it was common knowledge amongst experienced devs that understanding of the system you are about to change is crucial.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#49

Post by pixl97 »

qsera wrote: post #34
pixl97 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Since Nov 30, 2022 BC everything has become… more complex. FTFY Increasing complexity is the story of mankind. It's the story of civilization. Someone from 20,000 BC would wander around the earth trying to find food, trying not to freeze, and trying not to get eaten. Someone from 5,000 BC would be trying to grow food, hoping it rains, and hoping disease didn't wipe out the village. The second one increases the compl…

>LLMs be able to coordinate their understanding I think the next time I see "LLMs" and "Understanding" in the same sentence, I am going to lose it....

[flagged]

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#50

Post by jambalaya8 »

a2dam wrote: post #44
conartist6 wrote: post #3

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

This isn't really a good way to judge things. In the future, the fondest memories someone else has about technology will be about the present. The past is not better, you're just nostalgic for it.

Every time I think the past was better, I think about how terrible ksh scripting was in 1995. And look at how great peoples' bash scripting is now compared to when we though bash had reached its apex in like 2009.
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