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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#101

Post by analog31 »

derrak wrote: post #47
pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

Maybe you’re right about modern LLMs. But you seem to be making an unstated assumption: “there is something special about humans that allow them to create new things and computers don’t have this thing.” Maybe you can’t teach current LLM backed systems new tricks. But do we have reason to believe that no AI system can synthesize novel technologies. What reason do you have to believe humans are special in this regard?

>>> But do we have reason to believe that no AI system can synthesize novel technologies

We don’t even know if they want to. But in general, it’s impossible to conclusively prove that something won’t ever happen in the future.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#102

Post by peehole »

lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

LLMs still do forEach, it’s like wearing Tommy Hilfiger

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#103

Post by bluGill »

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there)

i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wouldn't have any innovations as the space is already well covered. Where I'm different from other compilers is more likely a case of I did something stupid that someone who knows how to write a compiler wouldn't.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#104

Post by stevekrouse »

woeirua wrote: post #84

The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.” First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful. Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than…

That's not my argument at all! Though I can see why you took that away; my bad for not making my argument clearer.

I believe that even when we have AGI, code will still be super valuable because it'll be how we get precise abstractions into human heads, which is necessary for humans to be able to bring informed opinions to bear.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#105

Post by dwaltrip »

stalfie wrote: post #86
deadbabe wrote: post #4

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

Well, to be fair, judging by the shift in the general vibes of the average HN comment over the past 3 years, better use of agents and advanced models DID solve the previous temporary setbacks. The techno-optimists were right, and the nay-sayers wrong. Over the course of about 2 years, the general consensus has shifted from "it's a fun curiosity" to "it's just better stackoverflow" to "some people say it's good" to "w…

If self-driving is any indication, it may take 10+ years to go from 90% to 95%.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#107

Post by fasterik »

thesz wrote: post #91
lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

> ...generate answers near the center of existing thought. This is right in the Wikipedia's article on universal approximation theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore... "n the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of ac…

It has been proven that recurrent neural networks are Turing complete [0]. So for every computable function, there is a neural network that computes it. That doesn't say anything about size or efficiency, but in principle this allows neural networks to simulate a wide range of intelligent and creative behavior, including the kind of extrapolation you're talking about.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002200008...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#108

Post by stevekrouse »

cratermoon wrote: post #48

Yet again we can pull out Edsger W.Dijkstra's 1978 article, "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"" "In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would…

Such a perfect quote! Thank you! Will add it to my collection

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#109

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

> Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1].

Well, of course. Despite people applying the label of AI to them, LLMs don't have a shred of intelligence. That is inherent to how they work. They don't understand, only synthesize from the data they were trained on.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#110

Post by lateforwork »

bluGill wrote: post #103

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wo…

> as the space is already well covered

The US patent commissioner in 1899 wanted to shutdown the patent office because "everything that can be invented has been invented." And yet, human ingenuity keeps proving otherwise.

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