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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

#121

Post by bluGill »

3836293648 wrote: post #113
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…

You could probably do it in a few days, C is not that hard to compile

Claude built an optimizer as well. (Not a great one) that takes a lot more. Yes I could lively brute force a C compiler that works much faster.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#122

Post by tossandthrow »

oblio wrote: post #63
picafrost wrote: post #61

So much of society's intellectual talent has been allocated toward software. Many of our smartest are working on ad-tech, surveillance, or squeezing as much attention out of our neighbors as possible. Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.

Those are business goals that don't just go away because tech changes.

Likely, but through regulation, not AI

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#123

Post by antonvs »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #109
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.

You could say the same thing about Chris Lattner. How did he advance the state of the art with Swift? It’s essentially just a subjective rearranging of deck chairs: “I like this but not that.” Someone had to explain to Lattner why it was a good idea to support tail recursion in LLVM, for example - something he would have already known if he had been trained differently. He regurgitates his training just like most of us do.

That might read like an insult to Lattner, but what I’m really pointing out is that we tend to hold AIs to a much higher standard than we do humans, because the real goal of such commentary is to attempt to dismiss a perceived competitive threat.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#124

Post by CamperBob2 »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #80
CamperBob2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming. Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand. That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever suppose…

If all problems were solved, we should have already found a paradise without anything to want for. Your editing workflow being the similar to another for a 1970s era language does not have any relevance to that question.

If all problems were solved

Now that's extrapolation of the sort that, as you point out elsewhere, no LLM can perform.

At least, not one without serious bugs.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#125

Post by lateforwork »

irishcoffee wrote: post #117
lateforwork wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have a shred of intelligence. ... They don't understand, only synthesize from the data they were trained on. Couldn't you say that about 99% of humans too?

The LLM was trained on 100% of humans, the 99% you’re scoffing at is feeding the LLM answers.

100% (or close to it) of material AI trains on was human generated, but that doesn't mean 100% of humans are generating useful material for AI training.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#126

Post by randcraw »

Krouse points to a great article by Simon Willison who proposes that the killer role for vibe coding (hopefully) will be to make code better and not just faster.

By generating prototypes that are based on different design models each end product can be assessed for specific criteria like code readability, reliability, or fault tolerance and then quickly be revised repeatedly to serve these ends better. No longer would the victory dance of vibe coding be simply "It ran!" or "Look how quickly I built it!".

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#127

Post by two_tasty »

idopmstuff wrote: post #20
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.

As a former PM, I will say that if you want to stop something from happening at your company, the best route is to come off very positive about it initially. This is critical because it gives you credibility. After my first few years of PMing, I developed a reflex that any time I heard a deeply stupid proposal, I would enthusiastically ask if I could take the lead on scoping it out. I would do the initial research/pl…

Very well said. So many engineers balk at "coming off as positive" as a form of lying or as a pointless social ritual, but it's the only thing that gets you a seat at the table. Engineers who say "no" or "that's stupid" are never seen as leaders by management, even if they're right. The approach you laid out here is how you have _real_ impact as an engineering leader, because you keep getting a seat at the table to steer what actually happens.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#128

Post by somewhereoutth »

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?

In the grand scale of things, a computer is not much more than a fancy brick. Certainly it is much closer to a brick than to a human. So the question is more 'why should this particularly fancy brick have abilities that so far we have only encountered in humans?'

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#129

Post by _pdp_ »

Remember Deep Thought, the greatest computer ever built that spent 7.5 million years computing the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? The answer was 42, perfectly correct, utterly useless because nobody understood the question they were asking.

That's what happens when you hand everything to a machine without understanding the problem yourself.

AI can give you correct answers all day long, but if you don't understand what you're building, you'll end up just like the people of Magrathea, staring at 42 and wondering what to do with it.

True understanding is indistinguishable from doing.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#130

Post by neversupervised »

The author’s intuition is still backward calibrated, even though he talks about the future. He doesn’t have an intuition for the future. All code will be AI generated. There’s no way to compete with the AI. And whatever new downsides this brings will be solved in ways we aren’t fully anticipating. But the solution is not to walk back vibecoding. You have to be blind to believe not most code will be vibecoded very soon.
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