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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#141

Post by layer8 »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

I think you mean software engineering, not computer science. And no, I don’t think there is reason for software engineering (and certainly not for computer science) to be plateauing. Unless we let it plateau, which I don’t think we will. Also, writing code isn’t a solved problem, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Furthermore, since the patterns we use often aren’t orthogonal, it’s certainly not a linear combination.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#142

Post by pseudosavant »

Havoc wrote: post #131

The amount of "It's not X it's Y" type commentary suggests to me that A) nobody knows and B) there is solid chance this ends up being either all true or all false Or put differently we've managed to hype this to the moon but somehow complete failure (see studies about zero impact on productivity) seem plausible. And similarly kills all jobs seems plausible. That's an insane amount of conflicting opinions being help i…

This reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Lots of hype around something that was clearly globally transformation, but most people weren't benefiting hugely from it in the first few years.

It might have replaced sending a letter with an email. But now people get their groceries from it, hail rides, an even track their dogs or luggage with it.

Too many companies have been to focused on acting like AI 'features' have made their products better, when most of them haven't yet. I'm looking at Microsoft and Office especially. But tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Github Copilot CLI have shown that LLMs can do incredible things in the right applications.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#143

Post by timacles »

e40 wrote: post #113
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem That's just so dumb to say. I don't think we can trust anything that comes out of the mouths of the authors of these tools. They are conflicted. Conflict of interest, in society today, is such a huge problem.

Its all basically: Sensationalist take to shock you and get attention

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#144

Post by hintymad »

yourapostasy wrote: post #135
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

Even as the field evolves, the phoning home telemetry of closed models creates a centralized intelligence monopoly. If open source atrophies, we lose the public square of architectural and design reasoning, the decision graph that is often just as important as the code. The labs won't just pick up new patterns; they will define them, effectively becoming the high priests of a new closed-loop ecosystem. However, the r…

> It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale.

My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the patterns for the future. For instance, implementation of low-level networking code can be the combination of patterns of zeromq. The underlying assumption is that most people don't know how to write high-performance concurrent code anyway, so why not just ask them to command the AI instead.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#145

Post by pseudosavant »

fhub wrote: post #79
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents. Even with full context, wr…

It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context and verifiability.

The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the easier it is for an LLM generally.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#146

Post by cheema33 »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

> is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?

Computer science is different from writing business software to solve business problems. I think Boris was talking about the second and not the first. And I personally think he is mostly correct. At least for my organization. It is very rare for us to write any code by hand anymore. Once you have a solid testing harness and a peer review system run by multiple and different LLMs, you are in pretty good shape for agentic software development. Not everybody's got these bits figured out. They stumble around and them blame the tools for their failures.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#147

Post by gip »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

My prediction: soon (e.g. a few years) the agents will be the one doing the exploration and building better ways to write code, build frameworks,... replacing open source. That being said software engineers will still be in the loop. But there will be far less of them.

Just to add: this is only the prediction of someone who has a decent amount of information, not an expert or insider

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#149

Post by hintymad »

layer8 wrote: post #141
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

I think you mean software engineering, not computer science. And no, I don’t think there is reason for software engineering (and certainly not for computer science) to be plateauing. Unless we let it plateau, which I don’t think we will. Also, writing code isn’t a solved problem, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Furthermore, since the patterns we use often aren’t orthogonal, it’s certainly not a linear combination.

I assume that new business scenarios will drive new workflows, which requires new work of software engineering. In the meantime, I assume that computer science will drive paradigm shift, which will drive truly different software engineering practice. If we don't have advances in algorithms, systems, and etc, I'd assume that people can slowly abstract away all the hard parts, enabling AI to do most of our jobs.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#150

Post by random3 »

qudat wrote: post #102
random3 wrote: post #97

I'll guess we'll se a lot of analogies and have to get used to it, although most will be off. AI can be an exoskeleton. It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your whole team. The "Office Space"-question is what are you particularly within an organization and concretely when you'll become the bottleneck, preventing your "exoskeleton" for efficiently doing its job independently. There's no other questio…

> It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your whole team. You drank the koolaide m8. It fundamentally cannot replace a single SWE and never will without fundamental changes to the model construction. If there is displacement, it’ll be short lived when the hype doesn’t match reality. Go take a gander at openclaws codebase and feel at-ease with your job security. I have seen zero evidence that the fronti…

Isn’t it delusional to argue about now, while ignoring the trajectory?
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