51–60 of 99 posts
> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I'm not sure this is going to be a worthwhile goal for much longer. Rarely is anyone caring about the complexity and comprehensibility of the ASM that GCC or LLVM generates from higher-level C code. I think the code-generation abstraction is just moving even higher now into…
> when you build software, you own it No, I specifically don’t. My company owns it, and that bastard will lay me off without a second thought.
Now, becoming large is now a solved problem essentially, but that's still only maybe 10-20% of the software engineering work in the long run. I'm grateful I can delegate some grunt work to LLMs, but, essentially, the main reason why large projects slow down development has never been due to inability to write lots of code quickly.
This is why I don't use AI to write code directly but instead will use it to generate code snippets or ideas or critique, or even just use it as documentation I can talk to. By doing this I can still get the benefits of the technology including - and this is crucial - as a learning aid to improve my own skills, while not entirely outsourcing my own thinking to the machine.
I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up. Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.
I'm not OK with it, but I have no choice besides maybe quitting my job. I've also tried to understand the code that AI writes, but it's often insane and untangling it would slow me down so much that it would nullify the gains in speed that AI brings. To me, either companies realize they're spending a lot more money to ship crappier code and AI becomes a niche, or we'll just stop looking at code. I don't think there's…
For the AI Act, it is the case for images and videos, don't know about code.
> It’s crystal clear that AI can be a complexity factory. > I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what software would look like if we made keeping software understandable to humans a first-class design goal in the age of AI. I agree, and I've been thinking similarly. But I don't think there's anything "new" about what understandable and well-factored code should look like. It's the same principles as ever. A lot of a…
There are deterministically computable metrics for cognitive complexity and readability[0]. They’re not perfect by any means — and I suspect they’re already included in the RL process for coding evals, and have been for some time. I do think we’ll see ongoing improvement in this area though. [0] (pdf warning) https://www.sonarsource.com/docs/CognitiveComplexity.pdf