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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

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Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#131

Post by alganet »

imiric wrote: post #126
alganet wrote: post #98

This idea that some developers have some "mental model" and others not is an extraordinary claim, and I don't see extraordinary evidence. It sounds like a good thing, right? "Wow, mental model. I want that, I want to be good and have big brain", which encourages you to believe the bullshit. The truth is, this paper is irrelevant and a waste of time. It only serves the purpose of creating discussion around the subject…

You couldn't be more wrong. If you've ever programmed, or worked with programmers, that is not an extraordinary claim at all, but a widely accepted fact. A mental model of the software is what allows a programmer to intuitively know why the software is behaving a certain way, or what the most optimal design for a feature would be. In the vast majority of cases these intuitions are correct, and other programmers shoul…

> You couldn't be more wrong.

Explanation missing.

> If you've ever programmed, or worked with programmers, that is not an extraordinary claim at all.

One step ahead of you. I already say this is engineered to encourage belief "I want to be good, big brain, and open source is good, I want to be good big brain".

It's marketing.

> A mental model of the software is what allows a programmer [yadda yadda]

I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying the paper doesn't provide any relevant information regarding the phenomena.

> Those neural pathways can only be activated by natural learning and manual programming.

Again, probably true. But the paper doesn't provide any relevant information regarding this phenomena.

---

Your answer seems to disagree with me, but displays a disjointed understanding of what I'm really addressing.

---

As a lighthearted fun analogy, I present:

https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

The paper does not prove the existence of chickens. It says chicken a lot, but never addresses the phenomena of chickens existing.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#132

Post by la_fayette »

mlyle wrote: post #107
candiddevmike wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" ...and then it still doesn't actually fix it

So, I recently have done my first couple heavily AI augmented tasks for hobby projects. I wrote a TON of LVGL code. The result wasn’t perfect for placement, but when I iterated a couple of times, it fixed almost all of the issues. The result is a little hacked together but a bit better than my typical first pass writing UI code. I think this saved me a factor of 10 in time. Next I am going to see how much of the clea…

When you argued that it saved you time by a factor of 10, have you even measured that properly? I initially also had the feeling that LLMs save me time, but in the end it didn't. I roughly compared my performance to past performance by the amount of stories done and LLMs made me slower even if I thought I am saving time...

From several month of deep work with LLMs I think they are amazing pattern matchers, but not problem solvers. They suggest a solution pattern based on their trained weights. This even could result in real solutions, e.g., when programming Tetris or so, but not when working on somewhat unique problems...

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#133

Post by imiric »

alganet wrote: post #131
imiric wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn't be more wrong. If you've ever programmed, or worked with programmers, that is not an extraordinary claim at all, but a widely accepted fact. A mental model of the software is what allows a programmer to intuitively know why the software is behaving a certain way, or what the most optimal design for a feature would be. In the vast majority of cases these intuitions are correct, and other programmers shoul…

> You couldn't be more wrong. Explanation missing. > If you've ever programmed, or worked with programmers, that is not an extraordinary claim at all. One step ahead of you. I already say this is engineered to encourage belief "I want to be good, big brain, and open source is good, I want to be good big brain". It's marketing. > A mental model of the software is what allows a programmer [yadda yadda] I'm not saying i…

I'm confused by what your point is, then. You want evidence of an abstraction that exists in the minds of experienced developers? That's like asking for evidence of humor or love. We accept these things as real because of shared experiences, not because of concrete evidence.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#134

Post by brazzy »

candiddevmike wrote: post #80
dawnerd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I love about LLMs. You can spot it doesn't know the answer, tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" It scares me how much code is being produced by people without enough experience to spot issues or people that just gave up caring. We're going to be in for wild ride when all the exploits start flowing.

> tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" ...and then it still doesn't actually fix it

My favourite recent experience was switching multiple times between using a library function and rolling its own implementation, each time claiming that it's "simplifying" the code and making it "more reliable".

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#135

Post by daxfohl »

pennomi wrote: post #81
antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

This is the most frustrating thing LLMs do. They put wide try:catch structures around the code making it impossible to actually track down the source of a problem. I want my code to fail fast and HARD during development so I can solve every problem immediately.

Seems like there's a need for github to create a separate flow for AI-cretaed PRs. Project maintainers should be able to stipulate rules like this in English, and an AI "pre-reviewer" would check that the AI has followed all these rules before the PR is created, and chat with the AI submitter to resolve any violations. For exceptional cases, a human submitter is required.

Granted, the compute required is probably more expensive than github would offer for free, and IDK whether it'd be within budget for many open-source projects.

Also granted, something like this may be useful for human-sourced PRs as well, though perhaps post-submission so that maintainers can see and provide some manual assistance if desired. (And also granted, in some cases maybe maintainers would want to provide manual assistance to AI submissions, but I expect the initial triaging based on whether it's a human or AI would be what makes sense in most cases).

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#136

Post by wrsh07 »

munificent wrote: post #113

> The inability of developers to tell if a tool sped them up or slowed them down is fascinating in itself, probably applies to many other forms of human endeavour, and explains things as varied as why so many people think that AI has made them 10 times more productive, why I continue to use Vim, why people drive in London etc. In boating, there's a notion of a "set and drift" which describes how wind and current push…

Something I noticed early on when using AI tools was that it was great because I didn't get blocked. Somehow, I always wanted to keep going and always felt like I could keep going.

The problem, of course, is that one might thoughtlessly invoke the ai tool when it would be faster to make the one line change directly

Edit

This could make sense with the driving analogy. If the road I was planning to take is closed, gps will happily tell me to try something else. But if that fails too, it might go back to the original suggestion.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#137

Post by rectang »

dawnerd wrote: post #69
antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

That's what I love about LLMs. You can spot it doesn't know the answer, tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" It scares me how much code is being produced by people without enough experience to spot issues or people that just gave up caring. We're going to be in for wild ride when all the exploits start flowing.

> "You're absolutely right."

I admit a tendency to anthropomorphize the LLM and get irritated by this quirk of language, although it's not bad enough to prevent me from leveraging the LLM to its fullest.

The key when acknowledging fault is to show your sincerity through actual effort. For technical problems, that means demonstrating that you have worked to analyze the issue, take corrective action, and verify the solution.

But of course current LLMs are weak at understanding, so they can't pull that off. I wish that the LLM could say, "I don't know", but apparently the current tech can't know that that it doesn't know.

And so, as the LLM flails over and over, it shamelessly kisses ass and bullshits you about the work its doing.

I figure that this quirk of LLMs will be minimized in the near future by tweaking the language to be slightly less obsequious. Improved modeling and acknowledging uncertainty will be a heavier lift.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#138

Post by Retr0id »

candiddevmike wrote: post #80
dawnerd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I love about LLMs. You can spot it doesn't know the answer, tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" It scares me how much code is being produced by people without enough experience to spot issues or people that just gave up caring. We're going to be in for wild ride when all the exploits start flowing.

> tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" ...and then it still doesn't actually fix it

I was trying out Copilot recently for something trivial. It made the change as requested, but also added a comment that stated something obvious.

I asked it to remove the comment, which it enthusiastically agreed to, and then... didn't. I couldn't tell if it was the LLM being dense or just a bug in Copilot's implementation.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#139

Post by daxfohl »

dawnerd wrote: post #69
antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

That's what I love about LLMs. You can spot it doesn't know the answer, tell it that it's wrong and it'll go, "You're absolutely right. Let me actually fix it" It scares me how much code is being produced by people without enough experience to spot issues or people that just gave up caring. We're going to be in for wild ride when all the exploits start flowing.

It'd be nice if github had a feature that updated the issue with this context automatically too, so that if this agent gives up and closes the PR, the next agent doesn't go and do the exact same thing.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#140

Post by bko »

almatabata wrote: post #118
bko wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have written every line of code in the code base I mostly work in and I still find it incredibly valuable. Millions use these tools and a large percentage of them find them useful in their familiar code base. Again, overwhelming anecdote and millions of users > "study"

> Interestingly the developers predict that AI will make them faster, and continue to believe that it did make them faster, even after completing the task slower than they otherwise would! In this case clearly anecdotes are not enough. If that quote from the article is accurate, it shows that you cannot trust the developers time perception. I agree, its only one study and we should not take it as the final answer. It…

Or I cannot trust a contrived laboratory setting with it's garden of forking paths.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/garden-of-forking-paths-...

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