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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#151

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

robocat wrote: post #125
godwinson__4-8 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of "categorisation and understanding dependencies" and "intelligence" and "fruit": Interestingly, the Bible does not specify what kind of fruit was on the Tree of Knowledge. The association between the forbidden fruit and an apple was a derivative of later translations. Imagine the consternation if the claim had become Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tomato. Then this incessant controversy regarding the to…

> knowing what questions to ask in the first place That's my 2nd hardest skill when trying to use AI. 3rd hardest is better filtering. I keep having flashbacks to learning how to use Google effectively. I'm an arthiest, but I'm in a historically christian society so bible stuff comes up and I often delve in. Whenever I do look into the bible, it amazes me just how extremely bullshitty vague the bible actually is. I d…

I am also not religious, but yes the Bible is everywhere. So like you, I acquaint myself for similar reasons.

Though I take issue with one statement you made - "If I wanted to argue about vague shit I'd be into philosophy..." though I do sympathize.

Modern analytic philosophy in particular, if it is good, is all about trying to be exceedingly precise, often in domains where objects like the Bible (as you noted) are exceedingly vague. Philosophy has some catching up to do, but ultimately one should not disparage it so cavalierly. After all, the best philosophers were usually also the members of society most against the sort of uncritical religiosity that seems to appeal to so many, as it does now and even more severely through the ages, before the efforts of such thinkers to enlighten their fellow human were realized.

If there is a subject that seeks to answer the question of "how to ask questions" it is surely philosophy. The best mathematicians were often well acquainted. In the most famous times of "human flourishing" the philosophers and the mathematicians were one and the same.

But yes, there is a lot of bad philosophy. And there is a lot of religion pretending to be science. Sad, but it has always been true.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#152

Post by conrs »

chongli wrote: post #146
conrs wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the trick here is plural; I guarantee no single human knows all 1 million lines. Note this is different than knowing how to orient yourself in a million line codebase quickly. The limit here I think the ancestor comments are getting at is cognitive load, which is real and measured. We only have so much memory to devote to a "stack" when executing, and it's usually quite constrained.

Note this is different than knowing how to orient yourself in a million line codebase quickly. Hence my library mention. Humans have been doing this for millennia: orienting ourselves within a library (the physical kind, full of books) and calling upon its information resources as needed to accomplish tasks (research). Ultimately, it's all just one big cache hierarchy. Your short term memory, your long term memory, t…

Fair, my mistake.

I've built a lot with LLM's, my experience sort of but not really tracks that. I've had to course correct a few bad abstractions but the larger the code base becomes the better it seems to be at reusing things. Maybe this is because of types, or spec-first development (with OpenAPI), or black box integration testing - but also maybe not. But generally I have to think about the abstractions and let the LLM fill in the details with rare exception.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#153

Post by sixtyj »

jgalt212 wrote: post #56
lelanthran wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chang…

> It's not really news, though. Programming as Theory Building (Peter Naur) was published in the 80s, I think? The news is that Agentic Programming has made this always challenging task even more challenging.

Challenging. Adventurous. And tiring.

It’s global madness fired up by continuous stream of news from LLM providers. It’s like The Verge that is almost about FAANG only, but multiplied as it is “magic” for most people, as vibe coding is “so easy” and dopamine-producing activity that it is similar to runners that don’t want to stop as it stimulates them (and in this case ofc it is healthy :)

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#154

Post by Aeolos »

sroerick wrote: post #135
baq wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lisp can do things that make the currently accepted as standard best practice software engineering processes redundant, but it needs a different set of processes which I’m not sure are written about anywhere since apparently nobody is running with e.g. hot patching of application code

I'm doing fully interpreted Lisp with the AST stored in Postgres. I can access the REPL remotely and I honestly dont know if I'm ever going to build an API or CLI again

This sounds super interesting. Do you have any blog or pointers where I could read more about this?

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#156

Post by galaxyLogic »

throwaway219450 wrote: post #80
overgard wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like with software, things have gotten way too complicated (just layer's upon layers upon layers). But to deal with that complexity, now we're using something that just creates WAY more complexity. I've been coding for a while, and I remember the 90s and early 00s where people could make pretty powerful applications with like visual basic or php with essentially no formal training. Those technologies weren't g…

I had a discussion with folks at work about what information is worth retaining in the face of AI doing everything for us. A lot of what we have in our heads to qualify as "domain experts" is pretty esoteric. How to invoke command line tools, gotchas because library A uses one convention over library B, AWS vs GCP; so much is specific to a tool rather than a method. There are also a lot of entrenched tools that are e…

Yes I think the problem is not that AI "has all the answers". It is that we don't have "all the questions". If we don't understand the whole of what AI produces for us, we can't ask it to make parts of it different. We are not in control any more of what exactly is produced, and we don't want to give AI all the control, because then it would not be doing what we want it to do.

Therefore it is critical that whatever AI produces is understandable to us humans. That is why we must demand that AI tools and agents produce "well designed" well-structured software. That's the bottlenexk to progress I think. Even AI can't deal with exponential complexity explosion.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#157

Post by conartist6 »

conrs wrote: post #152
chongli wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note this is different than knowing how to orient yourself in a million line codebase quickly. Hence my library mention. Humans have been doing this for millennia: orienting ourselves within a library (the physical kind, full of books) and calling upon its information resources as needed to accomplish tasks (research). Ultimately, it's all just one big cache hierarchy. Your short term memory, your long term memory, t…

Fair, my mistake. I've built a lot with LLM's, my experience sort of but not really tracks that. I've had to course correct a few bad abstractions but the larger the code base becomes the better it seems to be at reusing things. Maybe this is because of types, or spec-first development (with OpenAPI), or black box integration testing - but also maybe not. But generally I have to think about the abstractions and let t…

I built a web-OS, a graphical IDE, and a version control system to replace git, all in about 40,000 lines of highly abstracted Javascript. If you're thinking about how important it is to be able to maintain million-line codebases, I suspect you might have substituted a metric for the actual end goal.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#158

Post by ColdStream »

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…

The question is that if it can go beyond the upper limit of human mind complexity, would we be able to understand it or use it?

I cannot remember who it was but there was an author who was traveling with their dog. They noticed that their dog would always pee on various tree to mark them as their territory. On their travels they ended up need some giant Red wood trees and figured, "I want to give my dog the ultimate claim of territory."

So he took his dog up to the Red wood tree and it did nothing, instead the dog wandered over to a smaller sapling and peed on that instead. The problem was the Red wood was so big and alien to the dog, it didn't recognize it as a tree.

I do wonder how many things are like that in our universe, that even if we could see them, we just wouldn't be able to understand it because it just goes beyond what we are capable of understanding. We think we have a grasp of the universe and use models to codify it but that is no guarantee that we can truly 'get it'.

Could higher level AI code be like that, would we know when we see it?

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#159

Post by softwaredoug »

One day we'll get to the plateau of productivity of this hype cycle and wonder WTF were we thinking.

Not that we won't have most code written by agents. I truly beleive that to be true. But that we got so far down the "never look at code" rabbit hole that our abstractions will become so divorced from the reality that is the actual.. freaking... code. We will truly have spaghetti code, bloated towers of babble.

We'll tut-tut these times and think "if you only spent half a day thinking about the big picture, looking at code, dare I say write some code you could have saved the project a whole mess of trouble".

In the meantime we're going to be generate 10K in spaghetti what should probably be 500 reasonably understandable LoC.

Spending a day reading some code can save you $100s of tokens, and weeks of headaches.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#160

Post by petra »

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…

That's an interesting question.

What happens if we take the most abstract libraries in any given field - and:

1. Bound to the llm to only use those as building blocks. Does it affect his reasoning ? Will it think more abstractly ?

2. Train the llm on those, so maybe it will get a feel for abstraction ?

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