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

Scaling long-running autonomous coding

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 112 posts

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#11

Post by brianjeong »

janoelze wrote: post #7
simonw wrote: post #3

One of the big open questions for me right now concerns how library dependencies are used. Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO. The two that stand out for me as more notable are html5ever for parsing HTML and taffy for handling CSS grids and flexbox - that's vendored with an explanation of some minor changes here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf103…

Any views on the nature of "maintainability" shifting now? If a fleet of agents demonstrated the ability to bootstrap a project like that, would that be enough indication to you that orchestration would be able to carry the code base forward? I've seen fully llm'd codebases hit a certain critical weight where agents struggled to maintain coherent feature development, keeping patterns aligned, as well as spiralling in…

I think there's a somewhat valid perspective that the Nth+1 model can simply clean up the previous models mess.

Essentially a bet that the rate of model improvement is going to be faster than the rate of decay from bad coding.

Now this hurts me personally to see as someone who actually enjoys having quality code but I don't see why it doesn't have a decent chance of holding

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#12

Post by kimixa »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #8

I am waiting for that guy or a team that uses LLMs to write the most optimal version of Windows in existence, something that even surpasses what Microsoft has done over the years and honestly looking at the current state of Windows 11, it really feels like it shouldn't even be that hard to make something more user friendly

Considering Microsoft's significant (and vocal) investment in LLMs, I fear the current state of Windows 11 is related to a team trying to do exactly that.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#13

Post by g947o »

kimixa wrote: post #12
vivzkestrel wrote: post #8

I am waiting for that guy or a team that uses LLMs to write the most optimal version of Windows in existence, something that even surpasses what Microsoft has done over the years and honestly looking at the current state of Windows 11, it really feels like it shouldn't even be that hard to make something more user friendly

Considering Microsoft's significant (and vocal) investment in LLMs, I fear the current state of Windows 11 is related to a team trying to do exactly that.

I noticed that dialog that has worked correctly for the past 10+ years is using a new and apparently broken layout. Elements don't even align properly.

It's hard to imagine a human developer misses something so obvious.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#15

Post by shubhamjain »

simonw wrote: post #3

One of the big open questions for me right now concerns how library dependencies are used. Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO. The two that stand out for me as more notable are html5ever for parsing HTML and taffy for handling CSS grids and flexbox - that's vendored with an explanation of some minor changes here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf103…

Why attempt something that has abundant number of libraries to pick and choose? To me, however impressive it is, 'browser build from scratch' simply overstates it. Why not attempt something like a 3D game where it's hard to find open source code to use?

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#16

Post by ramraj07 »

halfcat wrote: post #10

So AI makes it cheaper to remix anything already-seen, or anything with a stable pattern, if you’re willing to throw enough resources at it. AI makes it cheap (eventually almost free) to traverse the already-discovered and reach the edge of uncharted territory. If we think of a sphere, where we start at the center, and the surface is the edge of uncharted territory, then AI lets you move instantly to the surface. If…

The fundamental idea that modern LLMs can only ever remix, even if its technically true (doubt), in my opinion only says to me that all knowledge is only ever a remix, perhaps even mathematically so. Anyone who still keeps implying these are statistical parrots or whatever is just going to regret these decisions in the future.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#17

Post by Banditoz »

shubhamjain wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #3

One of the big open questions for me right now concerns how library dependencies are used. Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO. The two that stand out for me as more notable are html5ever for parsing HTML and taffy for handling CSS grids and flexbox - that's vendored with an explanation of some minor changes here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf103…

Why attempt something that has abundant number of libraries to pick and choose? To me, however impressive it is, 'browser build from scratch' simply overstates it. Why not attempt something like a 3D game where it's hard to find open source code to use?

Is something like a 3D game engine even hard to find source code for? There's gotta lots of examples/implementations scattered around.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#18

Post by tornikeo »

halfcat wrote: post #10

So AI makes it cheaper to remix anything already-seen, or anything with a stable pattern, if you’re willing to throw enough resources at it. AI makes it cheap (eventually almost free) to traverse the already-discovered and reach the edge of uncharted territory. If we think of a sphere, where we start at the center, and the surface is the edge of uncharted territory, then AI lets you move instantly to the surface. If…

> The volume of a sphere grows faster than the surface area. But if traversing the interior is instant and frictionless, what does that imply?

It's nearly frictionless, not frictionless because someone has to use the output (or at least verify it works). Also, why do you think the "shape" of the knowledge is spherical? I don't assume to know the shape but whatever it is, it has to be a fractal-like, branching, repeating pattern.

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#19

Post by teaearlgraycold »

simonw wrote: post #3

One of the big open questions for me right now concerns how library dependencies are used. Most of the big ones are things like skia, harfbuzz, wgpu - all totally reasonable IMO. The two that stand out for me as more notable are html5ever for parsing HTML and taffy for handling CSS grids and flexbox - that's vendored with an explanation of some minor changes here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf103…

It looks like JS execution is outsourced to QuickJS?

Re: Scaling long-running autonomous coding

#20

Post by heavyset_go »

ramraj07 wrote: post #16
halfcat wrote: post #10

So AI makes it cheaper to remix anything already-seen, or anything with a stable pattern, if you’re willing to throw enough resources at it. AI makes it cheap (eventually almost free) to traverse the already-discovered and reach the edge of uncharted territory. If we think of a sphere, where we start at the center, and the surface is the edge of uncharted territory, then AI lets you move instantly to the surface. If…

The fundamental idea that modern LLMs can only ever remix, even if its technically true (doubt), in my opinion only says to me that all knowledge is only ever a remix, perhaps even mathematically so. Anyone who still keeps implying these are statistical parrots or whatever is just going to regret these decisions in the future.

Yeah, Yann LeCun is just some luddite lol
Post reply on HN