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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#111

Post by munk-a »

pishpash wrote: post #107
bluefirebrand wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perhaps how some humans code but frankly if you have those people employed to build software for you, you have big problems

That's some idealistic nostalgia. Software is generally poorly built today, and it's evidently not big enough a problem to fix.

Large companies that can keep themselves alive with regulatory capture - absolutely. For smaller companies that need to compete the software quality and ongoing cost of maintaining that software is a real consideration.

That isn't to say software is perfectly built, but it's usually pragmatically built to balance costs of development and correctness - well chosen abstractions let us push up both qualities at once.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#112

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Software construction needs to become like Mission Control - everyone can see everyone else's screen. Maybe that's a monitor bank for passive monitoring, and letting anyone hop into any tmux and steer any agent - and an agent pool works on tasks from the backlog, rather than engineers being assigned tasks and using agents to do them. It needs to be more like an orchestra, where things are being directed in real time - designating a conductor who steers things. Maybe it's like a ship's crew, with roles, a chain of command, and lots of overlap. So each day someone gets to be Captain.

It was all good when change was slow and needed deep contemplation. Things sped up this year. Chaos is harder to defeat now. It really does need a different paradigm than "people facing into corners each doing today's task".

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#113

Post by 4b11b4 »

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…

Hah Tetris that really matches my "everyone has to draw their own line constantly".

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#115

Post by archonis »

jambalaya8 wrote: post #50
a2dam wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Conversely, Rexx scripting on the desktop was glorious in 1995.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#116

Post by archonis »

conartist6 wrote: post #11
GlickWick wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cancer is also growth.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#117

Post by archonis »

abraxas wrote: post #92
overfeed wrote: post #61

AI replaces a single tower with millions of 5-over-1s[1]. The aggregate height, and speed of construction mind-boggling, but when each building is considered individually, not very impressive. 1. Perhaps with a handful of skyscrapers sprinkled in.

so the post-AI landscape is software as a shanty town? That's not a bad analogy. We won't like the looks of it and it will barely function but like real life shanty towns it will function nonetheless.

Kowloon Walled City.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#118

Post by gnatolf »

conartist6 wrote: post #89
tekacs wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labs are trying to make long-horizon work. Even if you're a coding agent, adding more and more surface area is distracting to that goal. There is reason that RL over long traces should, at least in principle, optimize for building in ways that help the result fit in the model's context window. A meaningful risk of course is that the tools available to the model (ripgrep + fancier semantic approaches) allow it to do a…

Does that not sound a little silly to you when you say it? Should I invest in becoming a memory athlete as a way of becoming a better software engineer? ...or should I learn how to build and use tools?

While I don't disagree, memory certainly was more of a restrictions on us humans than it is on llms. Therefore, the answer may not be as obvious as it seems. We build abstractions to reduce (memory) footprint of features, right?

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#119

Post by archonis »

jdw64 wrote: post #76

Since GPT 5.2, AI has been writing code much better than I can. In 5.6, it beat Tourlist in competitive coding. After seeing that, I only practice about an hour a day just to keep the feel of coding. Honestly, rather than pointless debates about whether human coding is bad or AI coding is bad, I just think it's good to build tools that help me understand the world. I don't really care whether it's hand-coded or bad c…

Indeed. This is an awkward era where we're using these artificial language tools to target abstractions made for humans to manually write.

At some point the path from human language to machine code is not going to require an interstitial step writing to higher level languages as we know them.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#120

Post by mattmatheus »

ssivark wrote: post #27

The core thesis of this essay is reminiscent of the Lisp Curse [1] / Bipolar Lisp Programmer [2]. It's been a few years since I read these, but if I recall the argument there, it was that Lisp makes it so easy to build stuff and scratch exactly your own itch, that there's no real strong push for lisp programmers to come together and collaborate to build non-trivial and general purpose artifacts. And that is why the l…

Assembly programmers made the same argument. It seems that we revisit this same trope each time the practice of software engineering undergoes a paradigm shift.

Some have a harder time with the transition than others.

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