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Automatic Programming

antirez.com

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Re: Automatic Programming

#151

Post by AnimalMuppet »

yobbo wrote: post #74
dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

Agile solves the problem of discovering a workable set of requirements while the environment is changing. If you already know the requirements, it doesn't need to come into play.

While the environment is changing. That's the key.

If you already know the requirements, and they aren't going to change for the duration of the project, then you don't need agile.

And if you have the time. I recently was on a project with a compressed timeline. The general requirements were known, but not in perfect detail. We began implementation anyway, because the schedule did not permit a fully phased waterfall. We had to adjust somewhat to things not being as we expected, but only a little - say, 10%. We got our last change of requirements 3 or 4 weeks before the completion of implementation. The key to making this work was regular, detailed, technical conversations between the customer's engineers, the requirements writers, and our implementers.

Re: Automatic Programming

#152

Post by chrisweekly »

dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

> "using a new file is the requirements doc is so large is fills the context window"

using a new file IF the requirements doc is so large IT fills the context window

Re: Automatic Programming

#153

Post by AnimalMuppet »

vbezhenar wrote: post #69
jakkos wrote: post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

Intellectual property is not absolute and can be expropriated, just like any other property.

"Expropriated" usually means a government order, though. Do LLMs have one?

Re: Automatic Programming

#154

Post by bitwize »

bko wrote: post #63
jakkos wrote: post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

I don't understand this perspective. Programmers often scoff at most other examples of intellectual property, some throwing it out all together. I remember reading Google vs Oracle where Oracle sued Google for stealing code to perform a range check, about about 9 lines long, used to check array index bounds. I guess the difference is AI companies bad? This is transformative technology creating trillions in value and…

Hot take: The Supreme Court should have sided with Oracle. APIs are a clear example of unique expression, and there is no statute exempting them specifically from copyright protection. If they are not protected by copyright, is anything really? What meaning has copyright law then?

Re: Automatic Programming

#155

Post by agentultra »

jll29 wrote: post #94
aglavine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Agile core is the feedback loop. I can't believe people still don't get it. Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air. Waterfall is never great. The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing. SDD allows better output than traditional programming. It is similar to waterfall in the sense that the mode…

> The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing. Lives are always at stake, given that we use software everywhere, and often in unintended ways, even outside its spec (isn't that a definition of a "hack"?). People think of medical appliance software, space/air traffic software, defense systems or real-time embedded systems a…

That's a very narrow definition of engineering. What about property? Sensitive information?

It's a fine "whoopsie-doodle," when your software erases the life savings of a few thousand people. "We'll fix that in the next release," is already too little, too late.

Re: Automatic Programming

#156

Post by bitwize »

norir wrote: post #61

> I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud. I disagree. The code you wrote is a collaboration with the model you used. To frame it this way, you are taking credit for the work the model did on your behalf. There is a difference between I wrote this code entirely by myself and I wrote the code with a partner.…

The way I put it is: AI assistance in programming is a service, not a tool. It's like you're commissioning the code to be written by an outside shop. A lot of companies do this with human programmers, but when you commission OpenAI or Anthropic, the code they provide was written by machine.

Re: Automatic Programming

#157

Post by helloplanets »

fact_check_bot wrote: post #150
helloplanets wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big of a Carmack fan are you really, if you don't know one of his most well known takes on programming? (And you definitely don't need to be a fan.) Carmack has been heavily in favor of leveraging power tools since way back. Direct quote from the man himself: > I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. > My first games involved ha…

[flagged]

An influencer, who could more than likely blow 99% of us out of the water when it comes to programming by hand with absolutely no tooling, at whatever level of abstraction. Same probably applies to Antirez.

Re: Automatic Programming

#158

Post by thedevilslawyer »

jakkos wrote: post #51
slim wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is knowledge, it can't be stolen. It is stolen only in the sense of someone gatekeeping knowledge. Which is as a practice, the least we can say, dubious. because is math stolen ? if you stole math to build your knowledge on top of it, you own nothing and can claim to have been stolen yourself

Are you against copyright, patents, and IP in all forms then?

Absolutely. As any logical person should be.

Re: Automatic Programming

#159

Post by 9rx »

dugmartin wrote: post #21

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

Agile is really about removing managers. The twelve principles does encourage short development cycles, but that's to prevent someone from going off into the weeds — having no manager to tell them to stop.

Re: Automatic Programming

#160

Post by AdamN »

keyle wrote: post #107
aglavine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Agile core is the feedback loop. I can't believe people still don't get it. Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air. Waterfall is never great. The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing. SDD allows better output than traditional programming. It is similar to waterfall in the sense that the mode…

I've live through both eras... Agile, hardly any planning, write 3 times. Waterfall, weeks of planning, write 3 times anyway. The point is, people don't know what they want or are asking for, until it's in front of them. No system is perfect, but waterfall leads to bigger disasters.

Any real software (that delivers value over time) is constantly rewritten and that's a good thing. The question is whether the same people are rewriting it that wrote it and what percentage of that rewriting is based off of a spec or based off of feedback from elsewhere in the system.
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