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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#121

Post by candiddevmike »

AuthAuth wrote: post #54
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

If I include licensed code in a prompt and have a LLM include it in the output, is it still licensed?

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#122

Post by mattgreenrocks »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #64
socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

A tangent, I keep hearing this good base, but I've never seen one, not in the real world. No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base. Over time the needs change, there's no sticking to the plan. Often it's a change that requires rethinking a major part. What we loathe as tight coupling was just efficie…

It’s not about perfectly architected code. It’s more about code that is factored in such a way that you can extend/tweak it without needing to keep the whole of the system in your head at all times.

It’s fascinating watching the sudden resurgence of interest in software architecture after people are finding it helps LLMs move quickly. It has been similarly beneficial for humans as well. It’s not rocket science. It got maligned because it couldn’t be reduced to an npm package/discrete process that anyone could follow.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#123

Post by sarchertech »

softwaredoug wrote: post #115
nayroclade wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really true though. Pre-training for coding models is just a mass of scraped source-code, but post-training is more than simply generating compiling code. It includes extensive reinforcement learning of curated software-engineering tasks that are designed to teach what high quality code looks like, and to improve abilities like debugging, refactoring, tool use, etc.

Well and also a lot of Claude Code users data as well. That telemetry is invaluable.

Yeah but how is that any different. The vast majority of prompts are going to be either for failed experiments or one off scripts where no one cares about code quality or by below average developers who don’t understand code quality. Anthropic doesn’t know how to filter telemtry for code we want AI to emulate.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#124

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

userbinator wrote: post #112
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

Do you give attribution to all the books, articles, etc. you've read? Everything is a derivative work.

You mean there are no new ideas? I think that's a big claim. As a for instance, how is mergesort "derivative work" of bubblesort?

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#125

Post by sarchertech »

nayroclade wrote: post #113
bsenftner wrote: post #65

People need to consider / realize that the vast majority of source code training data is Github, Gitlab, and essentially the huge sea of started, maybe completed, student and open source project. That large body of source code is for the most part unused, untested, and unsuccessful software of unknown quality. That source code is AI's majority training data, and an AI model in training has no idea what is quality sof…

This isn't really true though. Pre-training for coding models is just a mass of scraped source-code, but post-training is more than simply generating compiling code. It includes extensive reinforcement learning of curated software-engineering tasks that are designed to teach what high quality code looks like, and to improve abilities like debugging, refactoring, tool use, etc.

There’s no objective measurement for high quality code, so I don’t think model creators are going to be particularly good at screening for it.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#126

Post by wtetzner »

airstrike wrote: post #11
Forgeties79 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so intriguing, I wonder if the people who are against it haven't even used it properly. I feel like this is a common refrain that sets an impossible bar for detractors to clear. You can simply hand wave away any critique with “you’re just not using it right.” If countless people are “using it wrong” then maybe there’s something wrong with the tool.

Illogical. I had Claude read a 2k LOC module on my codebase for a bug that was annoying me for a while. It found it in seconds, a one line fix. I had forgotten to account for translation in one single line. That's objectively valuable. People who argue it has no value or that it only helps normies who can't code or that sooner or later it will backfire are burying their heads in the sand.

This feels like a strawman. Most criticisms of AI for coding are about how overblown the claimed benefits are, not that there are no benefits.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#127

Post by [deleted] »

ctoth wrote: post #57

I'm working on a paper connecting articulatory phonology to soliton physics. Speech gestures survive coarticulatory overlap the same way solitons survive collision. The nonlinear dynamics already in the phonetics literature are structurally identical to soliton equations. Nobody noticed because these fields don't share conferences. The article's easy/hard distinction is right but the ceiling for "hard" is too low. Th…

[deleted]

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#128

Post by sdf2erf »

SoftTalker wrote: post #107
otterley wrote: post #63

If coding was always the “easy part,” what was the point of leetcode grinding for interview preparation?

Filtering for people willing to jump through unreasonable hoops.

Yeah this basically. They are trying to find a particular kind of person.

The people who are truly exceptional at what they do wouldnt waste their time on leetcode crap. Theyd find/create a much better alternative opportunity to allocate their precious resources toward.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#129

Post by sdf2erf »

Nition wrote: post #59
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know if AI is coming up with anything really novel (yet) but it's certainly a nice database of solved problems. I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves. [1]…

I view LLMs akin to a dictionary - has a bunch of stuff in there but by itself it doesn't add any value. The value comes from the individual piecing together the stuff. Im observing this in the process of using Grok to put together a marketing video - theres a whole bunch of material that the LLM can call upon to produce an output. But its on you to prompt/provide it the right input content to finesse what comes out (this requires the individual to have a lot of intelligence/taste etc....) . Thats the artistry of it.

Now that Im here Ill say Im actually very impressed with Groks ability to output video content in the context of simulating the real-world. They seemingly have the edge on this dimension vs other model providers. But again - this doesnt mean much unless its in the hands of someone with taste etc. You cant one-shot great content. You actually have to do it frame-by-frame then stitch it together.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#130

Post by xeromal »

zozbot234 wrote: post #80
rockinghigh wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called problem decomposition and agentic coding systems do some of this by themselves now: generate a plan, break the tasks into subgoals, implement first subgoal, test if it works, continue.

That's nice if it works, but why not look at the plan yourself before you let the AI have its go at it? Especially for more complex work where fiddly details can be highly relevant. AI is no good at dealing with fiddly.

That's exactly what Claude does. It makes a comprehensive plan broken into phases.
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