IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.
I may have bad news for you on how compilers typically work.
You'll need to share with the class because compilers are pretty damn deterministic.
LLMs as the new high level language
121–130 of 396 posts
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying that AI can't figure out how to handle bugs (it absolutely can; in fact even a decade ago at AWS there was primitive "AI" that essentially mapped failure codes to a known issues list, and it would not take much to allow an agent to perform some automation). I'm saying there will be situations the AI can't handle, and it's really absurd that you think a product owner will be able to solve deeply technic…
There are definitely issues in human software engineering which reach some combination of the following end states: 1. The team is unable to figure it out 2. The team is able to figure it out but a responsible third-party dependency is unable to fix it 3. The team throws in the towel and works around the issue At the end of the day it always comes down to money: how much more money do we throw at trying to diagnose o…
> I don't see why this would ipso facto be different with AI
Because humans can learn information they currently do not have, AI cannot?
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#123IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.
A compiler that can turn cash into improved code without round tripping a human is very cool though. As those steps can get longer and succeed more often in more difficult circumstances, what it means to be a software engineer changes a lot.
What compiler accepts cash as input?
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#124Can we stop repeating this canard, over and over?
Every "classic computing" language mentioned, and pretty much in history, is highly deterministic, and mind-bogglingly, huge-number-of-9s reliable (when was the last time your CPU did the wrong thing on one of the billions of machine instructions it executes every second, or your compiler gave two different outputs from the same code?)
LLMs are not even "one 9" reliable at the moment. Indeed, each token is a freaking RNG draw off a probability distribution. "Compiling" is a crap shoot, a slot machine pull. By design. And the errors compound/multiply over repeated pulls as others have shown.
I'll take the gloriously reliable classical compute world to compile my stuff any day.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#125Can we stop repeating this canard, over and over? Every "classic computing" language mentioned, and pretty much in history, is highly deterministic, and mind-bogglingly, huge-number-of-9s reliable (when was the last time your CPU did the wrong thing on one of the billions of machine instructions it executes every second, or your compiler gave two different outputs from the same code?) LLMs are not even "one 9" reliab…
Agreed, yet we will have to keep seeing this take over and over again. As if I needed more reasons to believe the world is filled with morons.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#126Isn't this a little bit of a category error? LLMs are not a language. But prompts to LLMs are written in a language, more or less a natural language such as English. Unfortunately, natural languages are not very precise and full of ambiguity. I suspect that different models would interpret wordings and phrases slightly differently, leading to behaviors in the resulting code that are difficult to predict.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#127Why using agents if there are absolutely zero need for them? It's the usual, here, we spent a shitton of money on this, now find out how we MUST include this horrible thing into our already bloated dev environment.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
PureScript is a programming language. English is not. A better analogy would be what would you say about someone who uses a No Code solution that behind the scenes writes Java. I would say that's a much better analogy. NoCode -> Java is similar to LLM -> Java. I'm not debating whether LLMs are amazing tools or whether they change programming. Clearly both are true. I'm debating whether people are using accurate analo…
> PureScript is a programming language. English is not. Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write. If it can do that, why couldn’t it be used to tell a computer exactly what program to write?
> Why can’t English be a programming language? You would absolutely be able to describe a program in English well enough that it would unambiguously be able to instruct a person on the exact program to write
Various attempt has been made. We got Cobol, Basic, SQL,… Programming language needs to be formal and English is not that.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#129One of the reasons we have programming languages is they allow us to express fluently the specificity required to instruct a machine.
For very large projects, are we sure that English (or other natural languages) are actually a better/faster/cheaper way to express what we want to build? Even if we could guarantee fully-deterministic "compilation", would the specificity required not balloon the (e.g.) English out to well beyond what (e.g.) Java might need?
Writing code will become writing books? Still thinking through this, but I can't help but feel natural languages are still poorly suited and slower, especially for novel creations that don't have a well-understood (or "linguistically-abstracted") prior.
Re: LLMs as the new high level language
#130Are these kinds of articles a new breed of rage bait? They keep ending up on the front page with thriving comment sections, but in terms of content they're pretty low in nutritional value.
So I'm guessing they just rise because they spark a debate?