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Understanding is the new bottleneck

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#151

Post by equinumerous »

champagnepapi wrote: post #62

How does everyone feel about the “don’t read the code” stuff that folks are saying? I certainly do not support it but I’m curious to hear what other folks thoughts are

I believe it's only a strategy that works in the short-term. If you ever expect the software to be stable, quality, and human-maintainable, you're going to need a good test suite (hopefully not AI-generated) to get away with that little ownership of the code. That said, this is great for prototypes or throw-away software, provided you don't mind being entirely reliant on an LLM for maintaining the code (speaking from experience, a human usually does not want to touch a fully vibe-coded application that they've never reviewed).

If I'm wrong about this, I would expect to see a new field of LLM-automated software engineering with at least the same level of rigor and quality as the existing human-led processes, and in the absence of this, we're just further degrading software quality for dubious gains (is it to go "faster", is it because we are being compelled to by leadership, is it out of fear of being left behind by competitors?). I can't imagine any other engineering discipline as critical as software being "vibed" - if I had learned that the local bridge had no human inspection, simply was "vibe-checked", it might be a good bridge, but I'm not going to be the one to test it.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#152

Post by zombot »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #75
flossly wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User forgot to tell LLM not to duplicate. LLM produced a lovely, working, big line count PR: manager of LLM was happy, keeps paying for it, so all is good right?

I don't really care about the dev future as a few years ago I started to divert from it and most of my income is in other things. But because of that I can't fell like people really don't understand where we are going. I have a conspiracy theory that even VCs are on it. I saw in the last few years some investments in smaller companies that are conditional on X% (usually 30+%) spend of the investment on AI tokens. I a…

Entire countries have fought entire wars with this m.o. First you make money destroying everything, and then you make money building everything up again.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#154

Post by chris_armstrong »

A small bone to pick, but describing an AI that is operating autonomously as creative seems wrong - at best, this process is accretive, because the AI is adding and adding, but has no ability or incentive to shape its output toward something a human would find of value. Value is subjective (individual), changing over time. An AI doesn't know when it needs to be taking away - removal is a key part of the creative process.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#155

Post by vladvasiliu »

alecbz wrote: post #6

We have LLMs try to generate descriptions of PRs for us and they're pretty universally disliked. They're always overly-complex descriptions of the mechanical changes and have no sense of motivation. Also, a huge reason to understand the code yourself is to make sure the LLM isn't wrong, but this doesn't work if an LLM is itself generating the understanding.

> They're always overly-complex descriptions of the mechanical changes and have no sense of motivation.

This is funny to me. Coding isn't a main part of my job, but I know someone whose it is. And he says the exact same thing about his colleagues. And not just about PRs, but also comments in code in general.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#156

Post by zahlman »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #123
odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped posting here because of AI scrapping, but fucking hell I had to login to comment. I has this stupid same shit done in a PR just a few weeks ago. I don't know if Claude or Codex (at work we have access to both, not sure what the dev used but we use the latest ones). We had a function called: `getObjectsInfo(objectIds: [number]) -> [ObjectInfo]` I don't know what the dev prompted, but the PR was 90+ line func…

Exactly. Precisely. Definitely. I see what you describe all the time , because I do review the code the models do produce. It's not just incredibly verbose: it's constantly missing that there's an obvious, elegant, small, way to solve what was asked and instead it goes ballistic and creates nonsense. And the way they use tools is just the same: it's insane trial and testing until something more or less produce the wa…

> And all the people here who are saying that "it works" have no idea as to the amount of technical debt they're creating.

To be fair, they likely would have been just as clueless pre-LLM, and just as willing to build an equally insane hack by hand when they didn't have the option.

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#158

Post by zahlman »

est wrote: post #127

I found the linked article "books don't work" from the quiz part highly interesting https://andymatuschak.org/books/ It explains a lot and works really well. I tried out in ChatGPT with a simple prompt: > ...paste link... Give me series of quiz see if I really understood the article well. Ask & answer one by one in turns. Really fun experience.

It's been submitted many times before: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=books+don%27t+work

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#159

Post by simianwords »

chris_armstrong wrote: post #154

A small bone to pick, but describing an AI that is operating autonomously as creative seems wrong - at best, this process is accretive , because the AI is adding and adding, but has no ability or incentive to shape its output toward something a human would find of value. Value is subjective (individual), changing over time. An AI doesn't know when it needs to be taking away - removal is a key part of the creative pro…

No incentive? Do you not know how RL is done?

Re: Understanding is the new bottleneck

#160

Post by keeeba »

_ink_ wrote: post #146
madrox wrote: post #82

I think it funny how much average engineers are beginning to discover the challenges of engineering leadership and program management. This has always been the bottleneck. It's why managers and PMs want to be in standup. It's why slack exists and engineers are constantly being poked on it. It's why execs always talk about not getting too far away from the work. It's how seagull management happens. It's why program ma…

What book would you recommend?

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