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

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

#61

Post by gridspy »

youre-wrong3 wrote: post #55
gridspy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true, you can be confident that it works in a way you personally understand. Because you understood it in the past. Also, if you finish your work on a module with care - you return to a module you can trust with clear boundraries and known flaws. This is not true of AI output.

No. You can absolutely build things with AI small or large and understand it. If you don’t understand it. Then you’re not caring about the output to begin with and not guiding it to build the solution you want.

The word "understand" seems to mean something different to you.

If I understand something, I could write it in assembly if I wanted to. It might take a long time, but I know every level of the stack under my code down to bare metal.

Maybe an AI level of "understand" i.e the same understanding a Senior has of a Junior's code based on daily check-ins is enough for 95% of "boring" programming. But for some tasks you need to either fully understand the code or just tolerate bugs.

At the level of complexity I work at, it's (often) faster to just code it myself than to expect AI to converge on a result I like and then hand check it.

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

#62

Post by csallen »

gridspy wrote: post #54
andai wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you're going to end up with a system you don't 100% understand very quickly This has been my experience with all software projects. Even if I wrote all the code, my understanding of how everything works and fits together decays. ( See the Forgetting Curves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus )

While that may be true, you can be confident that it works in a way you personally understand. Because you understood it in the past. Also, if you finish your work on a module with care - you return to a module you can trust with clear boundraries and known flaws. This is not true of AI output.

I'm skeptical of this. I have yet to build a codebase using AI that I wasn't able to subsequently understand after taking the time to do so, esp. when aided by AI that will tirelessly answer my questions. I mean, LLMs don't always code the exact way I do, but it's not writing totally alien code that's incomprehensible to the human mind here.

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

#63

Post by rsalus »

csallen wrote: post #62
gridspy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that may be true, you can be confident that it works in a way you personally understand. Because you understood it in the past. Also, if you finish your work on a module with care - you return to a module you can trust with clear boundraries and known flaws. This is not true of AI output.

I'm skeptical of this. I have yet to build a codebase using AI that I wasn't able to subsequently understand after taking the time to do so, esp. when aided by AI that will tirelessly answer my questions. I mean, LLMs don't always code the exact way I do, but it's not writing totally alien code that's incomprehensible to the human mind here.

exactly, and realistically if you test the crap out of a given module, you'll have a pretty damn accurate idea of how it behaves.

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

#64

Post by rsalus »

gridspy wrote: post #61
youre-wrong3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You can absolutely build things with AI small or large and understand it. If you don’t understand it. Then you’re not caring about the output to begin with and not guiding it to build the solution you want.

The word "understand" seems to mean something different to you. If I understand something, I could write it in assembly if I wanted to. It might take a long time, but I know every level of the stack under my code down to bare metal. Maybe an AI level of "understand" i.e the same understanding a Senior has of a Junior's code based on daily check-ins is enough for 95% of "boring" programming. But for some tasks you nee…

what a patronizing response. I'd be embarrassed.

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

#65

Post by georgemcbay »

andai wrote: post #26
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…

>you're going to end up with a system you don't 100% understand very quickly This has been my experience with all software projects. Even if I wrote all the code, my understanding of how everything works and fits together decays. ( See the Forgetting Curves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus )

> Even if I wrote all the code, my understanding of how everything works and fits together decays.

Some understanding decays, but in my experience it never fully decays to the point of never having known how it worked.

My code from 3 years ago is more foreign to me than code I wrote yesterday, but if I need to I'll get back up to speed on it much quicker than I will on code someone else wrote that I never understood.

Even with the decay of time, remnants of the experience persist, roughly in the same way that if you get in really good shape and then allow yourself to fall out of shape, getting back into shape is difficult, but not as hard as it was the first time. Your nervous system has made adaptations the first time through that make running it back much easier even if you've let years pass.

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

#67

Post by thec0d3 »

simonw wrote: post #40
andai wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you're going to end up with a system you don't 100% understand very quickly This has been my experience with all software projects. Even if I wrote all the code, my understanding of how everything works and fits together decays. ( See the Forgetting Curves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus )

Yeah, that's a fair point. I have plenty of older projects where I no longer understand how they work despite having written the code myself. I guess the key thing is that you need to be able to demonstrate to yourself that you understand the code at least once, because that means you should be able to revise how it works in the future. You also can't evaluate if a solution is fit for purpose if you don't understand…

You don't buy the article's position but have forgotten a lot and not known a lot; so no need to care about your opinion I guess

This is my beef with modern software engineers; complete detachment from physical reality where entropy is eroding structure (memory, generational churn).

Code is just a euphemism for a desired electrical state. No need to dump biz contexts in code. Just make a game engine that efficiently handles geometry on screen and label the presentation layer.

All ya'll are doing is recreating front end rendering technology, forgetting in time and recreating it in new semantics. It's absolutely fucking asinine.

I look forward to models in chips and a tiny universal code base coupled to the machine.

This whole allowing a bunch of unelected rhetoricians tell myself and other hardware engineers we need them to use our property is exhausting.

It's rhetorical nonsense that goes in these broad loops recreating old work.

Time to move on from what titillated you all as children. Or you will just end up entitled Boomers.

Writing code like its 1970s is not high tech. It's old low tech

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

#68

Post by gridspy »

rsalus wrote: post #64
gridspy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "understand" seems to mean something different to you. If I understand something, I could write it in assembly if I wanted to. It might take a long time, but I know every level of the stack under my code down to bare metal. Maybe an AI level of "understand" i.e the same understanding a Senior has of a Junior's code based on daily check-ins is enough for 95% of "boring" programming. But for some tasks you nee…

what a patronizing response. I'd be embarrassed.

I guess you didn't understand my comment ;)

Look, goals can differ. If you don't need to understand and predict every part of the code the AI is generating and you just need it to meet a "sketch" of what you want - by all means use AI. I do use AI in that situation for related or unimportant code.

But if you need full understanding, in my experience the only way to get that is to program it yourself. Unless what the AI is generating is so trivial you already understand it and it's grunt work, you will learn the detail by doing it yourself. Controlling the approach here is important.

However often the best way to handle grunt work is to write better abstractions, something AI sucks at.

It's the programming equivalent of many PG essays. https://www.paulgraham.com/useful.html for instance. There was one on how PG refined their thoughts via writing. It's in there somewhere.

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

#69

Post by youre-wrong3 »

gridspy wrote: post #61
youre-wrong3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You can absolutely build things with AI small or large and understand it. If you don’t understand it. Then you’re not caring about the output to begin with and not guiding it to build the solution you want.

The word "understand" seems to mean something different to you. If I understand something, I could write it in assembly if I wanted to. It might take a long time, but I know every level of the stack under my code down to bare metal. Maybe an AI level of "understand" i.e the same understanding a Senior has of a Junior's code based on daily check-ins is enough for 95% of "boring" programming. But for some tasks you nee…

> At the level of complexity I work at, it's (often) faster to just code it myself than to expect AI to converge on a result I like and then hand check it.

Would love an example because no one has ever been able to give a coding example that AI isn’t helpful for. I had one person on linked in try claim their undocumented audio hardware won’t work with ai but when we got ai to probe it and build docs it ended up solving a bunch of complex bugs they couldn’t fix.

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

#70

Post by youre-wrong3 »

gridspy wrote: post #68
rsalus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what a patronizing response. I'd be embarrassed.

I guess you didn't understand my comment ;) Look, goals can differ. If you don't need to understand and predict every part of the code the AI is generating and you just need it to meet a "sketch" of what you want - by all means use AI. I do use AI in that situation for related or unimportant code. But if you need full understanding, in my experience the only way to get that is to program it yourself. Unless what the…

> However often the best way to handle grunt work is to write better abstractions, something AI sucks at.

If you checked out of ai in 2023 then this is true. It’s simply not true anymore. If you struggle then it’s a skill issue not an AI issue

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