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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#151

Post by bitwize »

_pdp_ wrote: post #129

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 d…

Well, yes, but AI can also give you wildly incorrect answers with alarming frequency.

I know, I know, "skill issue"/"you're holding it wrong". And maybe that's vacuously true, in that it's so hard to guess what will produce correct output, because LLMs are not an abstraction layer in the way that we're used to. Prior abstraction layers related input to output via a transparent homomorphism: the output produced for an input was knowable and relatively straightforward (even with exotic optimization flags). LLMs are not like that. Your input disappears into a maze of twisty little matmuls, all alike (a different maze per run, for the same input!) and you can't relate what comes out the other end in terms of the input except in terms of "vibes". So to get a particular output, you just have to guess how to prompt it, and it is not very helpful if you guess wrong except in providing a wrong (often very subtly so) response!

Back in the day, I had a very primitive, rinky-dink computer—a VIC-20. The VIC-20 came with one of the best "intro to programming" guides a kid could ask for. Regarding error messages it said something like this: "If your VIC-20 tells you something like ?SYNTAX ERROR, don't worry. You haven't broken it. Your VIC-20 is trying to help you correct your mistakes." 8-bit 6502 at 1 MHz. 5 KiB of RAM. And still more helpful than a frontier model when it comes to getting your shit right.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#152

Post by coldtea »

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]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art.

"Needed to advance the state of the art" and actually deployed to do so are two different things. More likely either AI will learn to advance the state of the art itself, or the state of the art wont be advancing much anymore...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#153

Post by jcranmer »

noelsusman wrote: post #135
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.

Well you're trying to convince them to reject their actual experience. Better tooling and better models have indeed solved a lot of the limitations models faced a couple years ago. I also believe coding isn't going to disappear, but AI skeptics have been mostly doing a combination of moving the goalposts and straight up denial over the last few years.

I've been trying out AI over the past month (mostly because of management trying to force it down my throat), and have not found it to be terribly conducive to actually helping me on most tasks. It still evidences a lot of the failure modes I was talking about 3 years ago. And yet the entire time, it's the AI boosters who keep trying to say that any skepticism is invalid because it's totally different than how it was three months ago.

I haven't seen a lot of goalpost moving on either side; the closest I've seen is from the most hyperbolic of AI supporters, who are keeping the timeline to supposed AGI or AI superintelligence or whatnot a fairly consistent X months from now (which isn't really goalpost-moving).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#154

Post by my-next-account »

coffeefirst wrote: post #138
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…

So I would like to know how it found the proof. Because it’s much more likely to have been plucked from an obscure record where the author didn’t realize this was special than to have been estimated on the fly. This makes LLMs incredibly powerful research tools, which can create the illusion of emergent capabilities.

Here's the PDF: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

It wasn't Knuth who used Claude, but his friend. Nevertheless, Knuth was quite impressed.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#155

Post by coldtea »

peehole wrote: post #102
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…

LLMs still do forEach, it’s like wearing Tommy Hilfiger

That's one of the benefits of LLMs: they don't care for bullshit fashion

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#156

Post by thi2 »

lionkor wrote: post #136

To all the vibe coders: When you let an LLM author code, it takes ownership of that code (in the engineering sense). When you're done spending millions on tokens, years of development, prompt fine tuning, model fine tuning, and made the AI vendor the fattest wad of cash ever seen, you know what the vendor will do? You have to migration path. Your Codex prompts don't work the same in Claude. All the prompts you develo…

It is the same as adding dependencies or hosting on Azure/Aws, choosing a nosql db isn't it?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#157

Post by g9yuayon »

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…

> Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI

I don't think the replacement is binary. Instead, it’s a spectrum. The real concern for many software engineers is whether AI reduces demand enough to leave the field oversupplied. And that should be a question of economy: are we going to have enough new business problems to solve? If we do, AI will help us but will not replace us. If not, well, we are going to do a lot of bike-shedding work anyway, which means many of us will lose our jobs, with or without AI.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#158

Post by coldtea »

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.

>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

People also "synthesize from the data they were trained on". Intelligence is a result of that. So this dead-end argument then turns into begging the question: LLMs don't have intelligence because LLMs can't have intelligence.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#159

Post by conception »

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…

So the problem with Chris’ take is “This one for fun project didn’t produce anything particularly interesting.”

So outside of the fact that we have magic now that can just produce “conventional “ compilers. Take it to a Moore’s Law situation. Start 1000 create a compiler projects- have each have a temperature to try new things, experiment, mutate. Collate - find new findings - reiterate- another 1000 runs with some of the novel findings. Assume this is effectively free to do.

The stance that this - which can be done (albeit badly) today and will get better and/or cheaper - won’t produce new directions for software engineering seems entirely naive.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#160

Post by coldtea »

chongli wrote: post #139
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?

99% of humans in a particular specialization, sure. It's the 1% who become experts in that specialization who are able to advance the state of the art. But it's a different 1% for every area of expertise! Add it all up and you get a lot more than 1% of humans contributing to the sum of knowledge. And of course, if you don't limit yourself to "advancing the state of the art at the far frontiers of human knowledge" but…

>99% of humans in a particular specialization, sure. It's the 1% who become experts in that specialization who are able to advance the state of the art

How? By also "synthesizing the data they were trained on" (their experience, education, memories, etc.).

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