Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

askmike.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 91 posts

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#11

Post by Folcon »

trollbridge wrote: post #8
simonw wrote: post #2

I'm not completely convinced by this comparison between blind chess and prompting LLMs. In blind chess you get deterministic information about the state of the board: each mental update to your board model can be precise, and you have the full state at every point in time. LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. I suppo…

LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. An LLM can be made to be completely deterministic. I use them in this mode so I can reproduce test cases. Of course it requires complete control over the model, etc. but this myth that a computer program is non-deterministic needs to end. You can 100% predict where the weights “wi…

> You can 100% predict where the weights “will take you” given a set of inputs.

Do you mean reproduce?

Sorry it's just if you are saying what your statement implying then either the model is very simple, or you've figured out something incredible

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#12

Post by techpression »

trollbridge wrote: post #8
simonw wrote: post #2

I'm not completely convinced by this comparison between blind chess and prompting LLMs. In blind chess you get deterministic information about the state of the board: each mental update to your board model can be precise, and you have the full state at every point in time. LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. I suppo…

LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. An LLM can be made to be completely deterministic. I use them in this mode so I can reproduce test cases. Of course it requires complete control over the model, etc. but this myth that a computer program is non-deterministic needs to end. You can 100% predict where the weights “wi…

You should publish, likely a Nobel price or Turing award waiting, and generational wealth at some tech giant.

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#13

Post by simonw »

trollbridge wrote: post #8
simonw wrote: post #2

I'm not completely convinced by this comparison between blind chess and prompting LLMs. In blind chess you get deterministic information about the state of the board: each mental update to your board model can be precise, and you have the full state at every point in time. LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. I suppo…

LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. An LLM can be made to be completely deterministic. I use them in this mode so I can reproduce test cases. Of course it requires complete control over the model, etc. but this myth that a computer program is non-deterministic needs to end. You can 100% predict where the weights “wi…

By "can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next" I meant with your brain. The blind chess analogy suggests you can predict, using your own thought process, the exact output of a prompt.

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#14

Post by shakna »

trollbridge wrote: post #8
simonw wrote: post #2

I'm not completely convinced by this comparison between blind chess and prompting LLMs. In blind chess you get deterministic information about the state of the board: each mental update to your board model can be precise, and you have the full state at every point in time. LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. I suppo…

LLMs are notoriously non-deterministic, and even at temperature zero you still can't predict exactly where the weights will take you next. An LLM can be made to be completely deterministic. I use them in this mode so I can reproduce test cases. Of course it requires complete control over the model, etc. but this myth that a computer program is non-deterministic needs to end. You can 100% predict where the weights “wi…

Floating point matrix calculations are non-deterministic. You need to invent new hardware, that doesn't use floating point math, first. [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2506.09501

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#15

Post by yipinwong »

Analogies work at an abstraction, and gotta take the chess analogy at its face value, as deeper people go into what's different between the chess and real life (deterministic vs non-deministic), one is not getting the lesson the author is presenting.

Remember, analogy is not territory. Every analogies fail at some point

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#16

Post by lordnacho »

I think I agree. I guess I don't know enough about chess to be sure, but the idea seems to be that although to novices a blindfolded player must reconstruct the board in his mind, that is not actually what is done by the expert.

That is something I can agree with, having spent a heck of a long time coding in the trading domain.

I've managed to vibe code a trading system. It's a hobby project directed on my phone on my commute, but it does do all the things I find important about trading systems. I can connect to external exchanges and see that I have sent valid orders, I get fills, and I can see debug logs of the timestamps. It doesn't allocate memory on the hot path, cores can be pinned, and so on. There are benchmarks that say how fast the code is parsing messages. It works.

So I've somehow built a thing that I've barely examined in the traditional sense, which nonetheless satisfies certain business needs for this hobby project.

How could that be? If you transported me back two years, I would know exactly where to make whatever changes you desired. I had the IDE open all the time, and I knew where things were. Now, I don't even know what the internal structure is like, I just know whether consideration has been made for some aspect of the system.

And I think this is what seems so baffling to a lot of people. How are software developers getting such different experiences with LLMs? Some people genuinely are producing things with incredible pace, while others find the AI just produces slop for them.

Some people are ready for the blindfold, but many are not. It's incredibly frustrating, especially if you are reasonably advanced but not yet at that overview stage.

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#17

Post by throwawee »

danielovichdk wrote: post #9
NameError wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your take, particularly because of this line in the article: | the skills that define a strong blindfold chess player are the same as those of a programmer who can thrive behind a Claude Code terminal whilst not reading nor writing any code. If you're actually not reviewing the outputs, you're just getting a fuzzy description of the state of the chessboard. But I (and everyone I work with) use Claude Cod…

You learn a lot more by reading code than writing it. So reading the output i believe is an immensely big gift by an LLM, because if you actually take note - and of course know your skills - then ot becomes such a great pal to work with. I like reading what the LMM gives me, not always, but a lot of times.

> You learn a lot more by reading code than writing it.

Really? In my experience it's been the opposite. It's like how you can learn more about art by trying to recreate it than just looking.

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#18

Post by mikeaskew4 »

My dad just had a computer around and looked the other way when I spent all night on it. And I learned chess on my own.

This may not be the argument Mike makes here, I have always felt that seeing the board and not knowing what it means is more valuable than knowing everything about it without seeing it.

If you’re drowning, who do you want to save you, the lifeguard who can’t read or the author of the book on water lifesaving techniques who can’t swim?

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#19

Post by Supermancho »

dumbfounder wrote: post #4

Meh. Chess exists to entertain the players. Coding exists to solve problems. I see way too often the programmers think it’s all about the coder and the code. Solve the problem. Don’t write code at all to do that if you can (AI generated or otherwise).

Once you get past trivial problems, the issue is not just "solving the problem" but proving the solution "solves the problem".

This is the strongest argument as to why AI should only be used as small solvers (at this point).

Re: What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s

#20

Post by yellow_lead »

Is there anything new in this article? Yes, experts use AI better than non-experts for tasks in their domain. See LLMs reward expertise [1] and Terrance Taos conversation with LLM [2].

[1] https://www.seangoedecke.com/llms-reward-expertise/

[2] https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed...

Post reply on HN