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What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

epoch.ai

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Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#11

Post by Jdstanhope »

I have been using Claude to build a clone of Bash in Rust (https://github.com/jdstanhope/huck). It has been goin going on now for 81 days, 2600 commits and I have covered a good chunk of the features such that I can source by .bashrc with a number of extensions. It has been doing pretty good but it will sometimes spend hours to do few line fix and other times pushback on making big changes despite have over 3000 tests.

That being said, I am still guiding it on a regular basis and only recently let it run open ended trying fixing small to medium size bugs. The next stage will be try let it run in a loop trying to fix the 100 issues it has identified as well as getting most of the bash test suite to pass.

Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#13

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jdw64 wrote: post #2

I'm curious about that too. I'm building a language with AI, and when I leave the AI running on its own, it keeps generating code in strange directions. I wonder what kind of structure AI-only code would have.

Also building a language with AI.

It's decent at design and implementation, but strangely terrible at language consistency - and expectedly architecture.

Steering it on language consistency is easy. Steering it on architecture has required me to learn a lot more about compilers than I wanted to do for this project (since that's a lot more than I wanted to take on for something that was supposed to be a "fun" "side" project).

Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#14

Post by marginalia_nu »

thisisauserid wrote: post #12

I believe they can make ANY software project the largest it can be! This solution should look for more problems.

Yeah came here to say the same thing. The Hard Problem of software engineering isn't making a complex monstrosity with millions of lines of code and endless feature creep, but not doing that. This was as true 20 years as it is today.

Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#15

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #7
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would 100% non-human code possibly be safer?

well if driving is supposedly safer when automated, why not code

Is it actually safer? If you can't understand the code you can't verify it's safety, and AI code often has bugs in it. You can't trust implicitly.

Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#16

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

swframe2 wrote: post #9

Running a Loop on the well defined goal seems promising: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EtxdB7gpFqY

I'm a bit suspicious of this as there are open source excel clones already.

It's impressive AI can put together it's own version, but I can't help but feel it's probably just relying on existing excel clones as it's a well trodden space.

Novel applications are what impress me. Not a clone.

Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#19

Post by dd8601fn »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #7
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would 100% non-human code possibly be safer?

well if driving is supposedly safer when automated, why not code

The qualities of computation that make autopilots safer than human drivers aren’t the same qualities that produce better designed software products.

Re: What's the largest software project AI can complete on its own?

#20

Post by jdw64 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #13
jdw64 wrote: post #2

I'm curious about that too. I'm building a language with AI, and when I leave the AI running on its own, it keeps generating code in strange directions. I wonder what kind of structure AI-only code would have.

Also building a language with AI. It's decent at design and implementation, but strangely terrible at language consistency - and expectedly architecture. Steering it on language consistency is easy. Steering it on architecture has required me to learn a lot more about compilers than I wanted to do for this project (since that's a lot more than I wanted to take on for something that was supposed to be a "fun" "side" p…

I have a similar problem.

I'm not sure about architecture. When I first implemented the slot system in my language, I designed it around that implementation, and in the end, the architecture suffered. There were quite a few cases where consistency was simply unavoidable.

It's not easy to create a completely new architecture with something that doesn't exist in existing languages. Consistency doesn't come together as easily as you'd think.

In that sense, I really admire the people who first introduced something new.

When I started implementing it, I focused on one killer feature and just went for it—with the feeling that if this succeeds, my language will succeed. But once I started building around it, it turned out to be very different from other compiler architectures.

With CRUD or other well-established domains, it's easier to maintain consistency. But achieving internal consistency in a program seems to be a different kind of challenge.

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