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AI makes programming differently difficult

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Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#121

Post by bluefirebrand »

chungusamongus wrote: post #52
twa927 wrote: post #15

> Code becomes only one representation of thought among many overlapping ones. This is wrong, code is the concrete "truth" being executed, the rest (plans, prompts, agent instructions) are just temporary artifacts used to generate the code. What's left is the code alone. LLMs don't have any semantics, they can't execute anything with 100% certainty. So far programming languages are the only langugues that can do that…

Nope. Code is a representation. Even low level code. The fact that you do not understand this is concerning.

No? Code is literally instructions to the machine. Especially low level code. It's not a representation of anything, it's a list of commands in sequence for the computer to execute

The fact that you do not understand that is concerning.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#122

Post by kypro »

sgarland wrote: post #117
kypro wrote: post #25

It's way easier. People don't need to read code anymore, nor will they have to care about building mental models about the system as this article suggests. The way to think about coding agents is that a good one should in theory literally replace the developer entirely. No, a whole organisation of developers. In theory a product owner should just be able to dictate how they want to product to function at a high level…

If my experience with RDBMS generalizes, I predict that this trend will result in companies hiring skilled developers to unfuck their codebases. Furthermore, I predict they will identify massive structural issues, propose huge lifts to redo it correctly, and will instead be told to do patchwork fixes to stop the bleeding. Now, I do think AI is (or will be) good enough to implement these patchwork fixes when given exp…

> The problem is if you don’t understand the root cause, you’ll at best feed the LLM a list of symptoms

Today maybe.

When Cloudflare has an outage does the CEO need to know the root cause though? If he just assigns some engineers to investigate, fix and report back to him – what's the issue with that?

Assuming you agree with my analogy, can you explain what it is that you feel an agent or group of agents assigned to an engineering tasks could not do that a human can? And if can't do it today, why do you believe it wouldn't able to do it in the future?

Are we just disagreeing about timelines here or whether humans have some magical quality which algorithms and AI can never capture?

I feel like it's reasonable to disagree on timelines. It's quite unreasonable to assume human coders are special.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#123

Post by dudeinhawaii »

typon wrote: post #101
techteach00 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called the bargaining phase.

I am using a model that runs on a 100 GB300s, near AGI, all bets are off, $10B training run on a 1GW cluster, and it can't realize that when I told it to "please implement v2 of feature X" that I mean delete v1, not support v1 and v2 together, in a weird Frankenstein's monster of the two. Sorry, but I think my job is quite secure for the forseeable future.

This is a perpetual pet peeve of mine with LLMs. They will always opt to ensure "backwards compatibility" with a codebase built 30 seconds ago.

I always have to explicitly state, "we are making a clean break to v1.0, do not implement any compatibility layers".

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#124

Post by sgarland »

kypro wrote: post #122
sgarland wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my experience with RDBMS generalizes, I predict that this trend will result in companies hiring skilled developers to unfuck their codebases. Furthermore, I predict they will identify massive structural issues, propose huge lifts to redo it correctly, and will instead be told to do patchwork fixes to stop the bleeding. Now, I do think AI is (or will be) good enough to implement these patchwork fixes when given exp…

> The problem is if you don’t understand the root cause, you’ll at best feed the LLM a list of symptoms Today maybe. When Cloudflare has an outage does the CEO need to know the root cause though? If he just assigns some engineers to investigate, fix and report back to him – what's the issue with that? Assuming you agree with my analogy, can you explain what it is that you feel an agent or group of agents assigned to…

My personal belief is that the most effective leaders do in fact deeply understand the technical side of their business, yes. To be fair, I am biased, because I was previously a nuclear reactor operator on a USN fast attack submarine, and the Commanding Officer is absolutely expected to fully understand technical issues. I think that a lot of organizational and technical problems would be solved if companies took several notes from the Nuclear Navy’s playbook. FWIW, Google’s SRE program was heavily influenced by it.

I of course don’t have a crystal ball, and can’t say with certainty that AI will never replace human intelligence and judgment. However, I don’t see a viable path forward where that occurs, and we all still have jobs. Why would I be kept around if a superhuman AI can do my job 1000x better and faster, and at a drastically cheaper price? Or, if I was kept around as a human QA agent, why would I be paid nearly what I am now?

I don’t see humans allowing AI to replace them. UBI is a pipe dream that would be destroyed by rent-seeking behavior anyway, and there’s no way billionaires would go for an AI tax, so we’ll be at an impasse.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#125

Post by prophesi »

gjvc wrote: post #61
leke wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, I feel fortunate that programmers that made it well before AI are going to be very sort after in a world where software development is going to explode and be in very high demand.

"sought"

They need to improve their spec on writing responses on Hacker News. Or maybe typos are an improvement by design to look human / increase engagement.

Not suggesting anything, but I'm wondering where the culture of having obvious misspellings without editing them out became the norm on HN. It's become the new em dash warning flag for me on forums.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#126

Post by CyberDildonics »

echelon wrote: post #94
overgard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh cool, you're remaking things that already exist. You know why you can few shot those things? Because they already exist.

Everything already exists. We only have incremental changes. The average moves over time. The ball is moving towards open source and this will include fine tunes and LoRAs, and even more fertile growth after that. There's an abundant future market in that direction. Several billion dollar businesses started as open source clones of existing things. Some found unique business lines, others simply did a better job.

Everything already exists

Then why are you trying to make something?

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#127

Post by echelon »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #126
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything already exists. We only have incremental changes. The average moves over time. The ball is moving towards open source and this will include fine tunes and LoRAs, and even more fertile growth after that. There's an abundant future market in that direction. Several billion dollar businesses started as open source clones of existing things. Some found unique business lines, others simply did a better job.

Everything already exists Then why are you trying to make something?

Why make new music or new movies? The same things have been said by every previous generation. Just listen to your parents' music, right? Use the same technology, the same fashion, everything.

Why?

Because it's incremental improvement.

Because it's making a dent in the world.

Because creation feels better than consumption.

Because we're maybe 10-20 iterations away (250 years, tops?) from brain uploads and everlasting life harvesting the energy of distant stars. Or at least our descendants are. And that's pretty cool.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#128

Post by chungusamongus »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #121
chungusamongus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Code is a representation. Even low level code. The fact that you do not understand this is concerning.

No? Code is literally instructions to the machine. Especially low level code. It's not a representation of anything, it's a list of commands in sequence for the computer to execute The fact that you do not understand that is concerning.

Hah, think about what you're saying. An instruction is itself a representation.

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#129

Post by [deleted] »

bnfcl wrote: post #7

Quote of the main point in the article: In other words, the hard part moves from recall (“How do I write this?”) to judgment (“Does this actually make sense?”) This is very true. But to evaluate if it makes sense, you first need experience writing the code. I am glad I learned software development over 15 years ago, and not today. AI is a super power, but without the experience to guide it, it can go horribly wrong r…

[deleted]

Re: AI makes programming differently difficult

#130

Post by sph »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #123
typon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using a model that runs on a 100 GB300s, near AGI, all bets are off, $10B training run on a 1GW cluster, and it can't realize that when I told it to "please implement v2 of feature X" that I mean delete v1, not support v1 and v2 together, in a weird Frankenstein's monster of the two. Sorry, but I think my job is quite secure for the forseeable future.

This is a perpetual pet peeve of mine with LLMs. They will always opt to ensure "backwards compatibility" with a codebase built 30 seconds ago. I always have to explicitly state, "we are making a clean break to v1.0, do not implement any compatibility layers".

This is hilarious and blindingly obvious in hindsight that an LLM would fall for that
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