Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
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Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
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Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#2Post author here btw, happy to take questions, whether they're about Hegel in particular, property-based testing in general, or some variant on "WTF do you mean you wrote rust bindings to a python library?"
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#3As possibly the one community on earth where it's actually better to post the code than the blog post: TL;DR this is a universal property-based testing protocol (https://github.com/hegeldev/hegel-core) and family of libraries (https://github.com/hegeldev/hegel-rust, more to come later).
I've talked with lots of people in the PBT world who have always seen something like this as the end goal of the PBT ecosystem. It seemed like a thing that would happen eventually, someone just had to do it. I'm super excited to actually be doing it and bringing great PBT to every and any language.
It doesn't hurt that this is coming right as great PBT in every language is suddenly a lot more important thanks to AI code!
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#4Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#5Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased:
Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him."
Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?"
Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news."
Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?"
Will: "No, probably not."
(Which is to say: You're entirely right. But we thought the name was funny so we kept it. Sorry for the philosophical inaccuracy)
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#6Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
"Not that it matters ...", What? Of course it matters! I only come to HN for extended arguments on the meaning of the Dialectic.
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#7Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased: Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him." Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?" Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news." Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?" Will: "No, probably not." (Wh…
If I had been wearing my fiendish CEO hat at the time, I might have even said something like: "somebody pointing this out will be a great way to jumpstart discussion in the comments."
One of the evilest tricks in marketing to developers is to ensure your post contains one small inaccuracy so somebody gets nerdsniped... not that I have ever done that.
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#8> property-based testing is going to be a huge part of how we make AI-agent-based software development not go terribly.
There's no doubt, I think, testing will remain important and possibly become more important with more AI use, and so better testing is helpful, PBT included. But the problem remains verifying that the tests actually test what they're supposed to. Mutation tests can allow agents to get good coverage with little human intervention, and PBT can make tests better and more readable. But still, people have to read them and understand them, and I suspect that many people who claim to generate thousands of LOC per day don't.
And even if the tests were great and people carefully reviewed them, that's not enough to make sure things don't go terribly wrong. Anthropic's C compiler experiment didn't fail because of bad testing. Not only were the tests good, it took humans years to write the tests by hand, and the agents still failed to converge.
I think good tests are a necessary condition for AI not generating terrible software, but we're clearly not yet at a point where they're a sufficient one. So "a huge part" - possibly, but there are other huge parts still missing.
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#9Not that it matters at this point but the hegelian dialectic is not thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Usually attributed to Hegel but as I understand it he actually pushed back on this mechanical view of it all and his views on these transitory states was much more nuanced.
Conversation with Will (Antithesis CEO) a couple months ago, heavily paraphrased: Will: "Apparently Hegel actually hated the whole Hegelian dialectic and it's falsely attributed to him." Me: "Oh, hm. But the name is funny and I'm attached to it now. How much of a problem is that?" Will: "Well someone will definitely complain about it on hacker news." Me: "That's true. Is that a problem?" Will: "No, probably not." (Wh…
If that's not motivation enough for you to rename it, well, TypeScript already has a static type checker called Hegel. https://hegel.js.org/ (It's a stronger type system than TypeScript.)
Re: Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
#10Post author here btw, happy to take questions, whether they're about Hegel in particular, property-based testing in general, or some variant on "WTF do you mean you wrote rust bindings to a python library?"
TBH reading the first few words of that section I was definitely expecting it to continue "so we used Claude to rewrite Hypothesis in Rust..." so that was quite a surprise!