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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#141

Post by [deleted] »

20k wrote: post #95
satvikpendem wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a greenfield project at our company, yes proprietary, now taking us months where previously it'd have taken weeks for even a single feature. We definitely see the (whatever)x performance boost with our own eyes.

Its always been possible to trade long term productivity for short term gains with technical debt. This is why the bar I'm interested in is long term projects, which have proven to have long term success, instead of a small disposable project where the code quality doesn't matter

[deleted]

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#142

Post by acdha »

Lerc wrote: post #134
20k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

Why does it seem odd when people who do attempt to contribute back are attacked? AI lowers the bar to making submissions which permits flawed subissions to be thoughtlessly submitted by people who don't really understand what they are doing, technically or culturally. It does, however, enable people who put in the effort to work on something significant. Those people are fewer in number, but exist. They do get to see…

People are attacked for low quality. There are counter examples but it is definitely striking how infrequently you see a PR which doesn’t stand out for being turgid or flawed, and whose author clearly expects a cookie for their “contribution” of a couple minutes of prompting.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#143

Post by 20k »

Lerc wrote: post #134
20k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

Why does it seem odd when people who do attempt to contribute back are attacked? AI lowers the bar to making submissions which permits flawed subissions to be thoughtlessly submitted by people who don't really understand what they are doing, technically or culturally. It does, however, enable people who put in the effort to work on something significant. Those people are fewer in number, but exist. They do get to see…

You'd think one 10x engineer or one core developer already part of the project would have completely eclipsed all the other engineers, and worked around the difficulties there

Or, failing that, you'd think any of these engineers - given the truly vast amount of programming power now available at their fingertips with their 10x productivity - would have simply replaced these projects. It'd only take a few 10xers who wanted to show that everyone else was wrong. That's how open source often works, someone just gets a been in their bonnet and then we get linux

Instead: I can't find any of it. There's no evidence of this productivity boost in the wild. There aren't new high quality 10x open source projects springing up that are replacing everything. There aren't high quality LLM contributions, feature development isn't going faster. There's almost no evidence of high quality AI code generation at all in the open source space, existing projects or otherwise

Where's all the code? I want the receipts if people are claiming a 10x productivity. Because at the moment, the much more likely explanation seems to be that its simply not true

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#144

Post by gmueckl »

pixelesque wrote: post #132
gmueckl wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this is just not a complex or hard task in image processing. Image resizing is a staple algorithm as common as bread and butter.

You could convert ~800 lines of scalar float processing templated C++ code that used mixins for wrapping logic and float/double to well-optimised SIMD code for two different ISAs (without using wrapper class helpers, it wrote the full intrinsics) in under 5 minutes and write tests for them at the same time? It's the time compression I'm impressed with.

This is a sifferent point than what the thread started with (speed vs. correct output for hard problems). Yours stands, but it changed the direction of the discussion as I understand it. Hence the pushback.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#145

Post by 20k »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #124
20k wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the PR format be bad for LLMs? Its just code review + merging in branches, which is what every company should be doing anyway Nothing's stopping core developers from adopting LLM generated code for themselves, while banning it for external contributors

> Nothing's stopping core developers from adopting LLM generated code for themselves, while banning it for external contributors And if they're doing that, why would they tell you, or anyone? And if they're doing that responsibly - collaborating with AI, and reviewing the code - they don't even have an ethical reason to tell about AI involvement, any more than telling about the StackOverflow answers or blog posts the…

If they were sneaking LLM generated code into these projects, we'd expect to see their feature development 10x even if they covertly aren't telling anyone. Which open source codebases have seen a truly massive 10x increase in delivered feature velocity since AI turned up? Where are all the new contributors who contribute features at 10x the rate of the existing meatcoding developers?

Then all it'd take is one of these engineers blowing the lid on their whole secret LLM contribution strategy to absolutely break the industry wide open to the benefits of these massive productivity increases, and finally prove all the doubters wrong. They sure are good at keeping secrets that would directly benefit them to expose

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#146

Post by aogaili »

I'm honestly not sure if the people writing those articles are in a different field or something. I have been coding for 20 years and there goes no day that doesn't leave me impressed.

It's nothing short of magic. And in terms of productivity, features that took months are now being done in days. I'm not even sure what the author is talking about frankly.

Am I missing something?

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#147

Post by ethin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #133
ethin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. Please generate using an AI model code for a safety-critical system which is able to be incorporated into an aircraft and that passes the coding standards and requirements in that domain and come back and tell us all about it. Surely, if AI was so good across the entire domain of software engineering, this would be trivial to do. Edit: although you might be subject to an NDA... But this is pretty much my test f…

Okay. Please write such a system yourself. Most programmers are not experienced enough to write such code themselves off-hand, but more importantly, the safety-critical systems are made safe by following a strict process, not by skills of individuals, which makes it orthogonal to involvement of LLMs. Also, weird choice of example. 99.9% of coding is not safety-critical, so whatever reservations this would imply (even…

> Okay. Please write such a system yourself.

Why? This has already done via existing processes. My point was to illustrate that if the future is LLMs then surely these processes wouldn't be needed anymore? After all, the LLM would just... Do it itself.

> ... the safety-critical systems are made safe by following a strict process, not by skills of individuals, which makes it orthogonal to involvement of LLMs.

And an LLM that is going to take all the jobs wouldn't be able to execute that process independently and with little oversight?

If my example is, to you, not a good one, what would you rather I use? Most of the common ones can be overly trivialized/minimized (particularly by someone who is uninterested in admitting that LLMs can't do something). That is not to imply that the gp is this kind of individual, but far too many people who I ask to do this (or something similar) are exactly that kind of person: believing that LLMs are insanely great and can't admit (or see) the cons.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#148

Post by eddythompson80 »

daveguy wrote: post #138
eddythompson80 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to have a team of agents with different roles reviewing that for you. An Advocate, a Skeptic, an Architect, a Security Engineer, a Disgruntled User, a Single Mom, a Clueless CTO, etc. each provides their unique prospective on the change. Then you have a Remediator and a Consolidator to address the feedback. Finally a Liquidator in case of a catastrophic failure.

I prefer to have a Clippy agent that identifies code that should be copied and pasted into random locations for no good reason. You may think it's not necessary given how LLMs operate, but I have found it's critical for 10x gains.

I can see how that agent can be useful in certain scenarios. We just introduced a Cheering agent to help with moral.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#149

Post by sublinear »

Lerc wrote: post #134
20k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it just seems a little odd that no LLMgineer ever contributes their incredible more performant scheduler back though right? After all if you can do it with claude, anyone can, all it'd take is to ask claude to rewrite it. Linux accepts LLM generated PRs, all the code has to do is meet the review bar and one of the most critical pieces of software engineering on the planet gets better for everyone

Why does it seem odd when people who do attempt to contribute back are attacked? AI lowers the bar to making submissions which permits flawed subissions to be thoughtlessly submitted by people who don't really understand what they are doing, technically or culturally. It does, however, enable people who put in the effort to work on something significant. Those people are fewer in number, but exist. They do get to see…

Non-falsifiable statements aren't going to work here anymore.

What's the point of writing great software if nobody else is going to use it, and how do we even confirm there are these alleged secret geniuses hiding away somewhere? Surely their work would leak out by some nth-order effect.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#150

Post by IsTom »

zbentley wrote: post #99
vatsachak wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah this take is wrong. I used Claude code with my custom skill and I wrote a more performant scheduler than the default Linux one in Rust. It's not just productivity, it's life changing.

I'm choosing to interpret this as very dry sarcasm.

With the "It's not X, it's Y" at the end I sure hope that it's the case.
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