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AI coding

geohot.github.io

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161–170 of 299 posts

Re: AI coding

#161

Post by roflcopter69 »

> Or we could, you know, do the hard work and build better programming languages, compilers, and libraries. But that can’t be hyped up for billions.

100% this. I fear that AI will cause us to be stuck in a local optimum for the next decades where most of the code will be Python or JS because these are the languages best supported by LLMs. Don't get me wrong, Python and JS and mature and productive languages. That's fine. But we could have it so much better if there was more effort put into a next generation of tools that take all the harsh lessons learnt from the tools before and "just" do it better. I acknowledge that we get incremental improvements here and there but some things are just unfixable without breaking existing ecosystems.

Re: AI coding

#162

Post by kaffekaka »

st-keller wrote: post #147
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

That‘s exactly why i like AI too. I even let them play roles like „junior dev“, „product owner“ or „devops engineer“ and orchestrate them, to play together as a team - with guidance from me (usually the „solution architect“ or „investor“)! This „team“ achieves in weeks what we usually needed months for - for 2.40€/h*role!

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic but this sounds absurd. Why let the AI be junior, why not an expert?

This persona driven workflow is so weird to me. Feels like stuck in old ways.

Re: AI coding

#163

Post by CuriouslyC »

This post is such a cold take, and is going to age horribly.

Self driving cars fail because of regulatory requirements for five nines reliability, and they're doing inference over a dynamic noisy domain.

Autonomous engineering does not have these issues. Code doesn't need to be five nines correct, and the domain of inference is logical and basically static.

If the AI agent/coding companies didn't have their heads up their collective asses we could have fully spec driven autonomous coding within ~3 years, 100%.

Re: AI coding

#164

Post by [deleted] »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #163

This post is such a cold take, and is going to age horribly. Self driving cars fail because of regulatory requirements for five nines reliability, and they're doing inference over a dynamic noisy domain. Autonomous engineering does not have these issues. Code doesn't need to be five nines correct, and the domain of inference is logical and basically static. If the AI agent/coding companies didn't have their heads up…

[deleted]

Re: AI coding

#165

Post by jb3689 »

bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

100% agree. I am interested in seeing how this will change how I work. I'm finding that I'm now more concerned with how I can keep the AI busy and how I can keep the quality of outputs high. I believe it has a lot to do with how my projects are structured and documented. There are also some menial issues (e.g. structuring projects to avoid merge conflicts becoming bottlenecks)

I expect that in a year my relationship with AI will be more like a TL working mostly at the requirements and task definition layer managing the work of several agents across parallel workstreams. I expect new development toolchains to start reflecting this too with less emphasis on IDEs and more emphasis on efficient task and project management.

I think the "missed growth" of junior devs is overblown though. Did the widespread adoption of higher-level really hurt the careers of developers missing out on the days when we had to do explicit memory management? We're just shifting the skillset and removing the unnecessary overhead. We could argue endlessly about technical depth being important, but in my experience this hasn't ever been truly necessary to succeed in your career. We'll mitigate these issues the same way we do with higher-level languages - by first focusing on the properties and invariants of the solutions outside-in.

Re: AI coding

#166

Post by mihaic »

Sammi wrote: post #133
mihaic wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You've seen plenty of people who hacked the ps3 and iphone as teenagers and created a low level system analysis tool for doing such system hacks? You've seen plenty of people writing self driving car software a decade ago? Why did you write this when you know nothing?

I actually have seen plenty of people that could have done something like this, but did not because they simply never tried. Being daring by itself is a skill, but we're talking raw technical ability here.

I've actually seen another developer that was probably in the same category write his own self-driving software. It kind of worked, but couldn't have ever been production ready, so it was just an exercise in flexing without any practical application.

So, what product that George built do you actually use?

Re: AI coding

#167

Post by mihaic »

mritchie712 wrote: post #135
mihaic wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

For the comment above, the more relevant denominator is all humans vs. all developers. If you use all humans as the denominator, he's easily in the top 1% or 0.001% (I haven't followed his work closely, but you'd only have to be a good dev to be in top 1% of the global population).

Thank you, perhaps I worded it harshly, but that was my general feeling. Being a good developer already is a high level. Being able to start impressive-sounding projects that never materialize into anything is a luxury for which most competent developers simply don't have the extra energy.

Re: AI coding

#168

Post by CuriouslyC »

onion2k wrote: post #48
bdcravens wrote: post #25

I'm almost 50, and have been writing code professionally since the late 90s. I can pretty much see projects in my head, and know exactly what to build. I also get paid pretty well for what I do. You'd think I'd be the prototype for anti-AI. I'm not. I can build anything, but often struggle with getting bogged down with all the basic work. I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the goo…

I love AI for speed running through all the boring stuff and getting to the good parts. In some cases, especially with the more senior devs in my org, fear of the good parts is why they're against AI. Devs often want the inherent safety of the boring, easy stuff for a while. AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems. That isn't necessarily a good thing. If you're actually senior by virtue of tim…

That's crazy to me. I solve problems. I'm not a janitor or tradesman, you bring me in to envision and orchestrate solutions that bring bottom line value. I live to crack hard nuts, if I never have to bother with rigging again I'll be so happy.

Re: AI coding

#169

Post by bdcravens »

Yoric wrote: post #143
brabel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense. Yes, having time to think about the hard part is good, but just because you’re not doing the boilerplate anymore doesn’t mean you can’t do the thinking part anymore! See how absurd it sounds when you actually describe it this way?

Let me rephrase. I know brilliant people who took up knitting to keep their hands busy while they think over their difficult problems. But that only works if you can knit in your work hours. Sadly, despite clearly improving the productivity of these people, this is a fireable offense in many jobs. I'm not saying that the only way to think through a hard problem is to work on boilerplate. If you are in a workplace whe…

I don't disagree, but I find a better use of my time is writing. Not code, but essentially a work journal. It's not big thoughts, it's bullet points. It's not documentation, but more of a open mind map: what's been done, what needs to be done, questions that inevitably pop up, etc. I use Obsidian for this, but if I write much more than what would go on a few post-it notes, it's too much.

Re: AI coding

#170

Post by CuriouslyC »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #71
pydry wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI changes the job to be a constant struggle with hard problems I find this hilarious. From what I've seen watching people do it, it changes the job from deep thought and figuring out a good design to pulling a lever on a slot machine and hoping something good pops out. The studies that show diminished critical thinking have matched what i saw anecdotally pairing with people who vibe coded. It replaced deep critical…

I think there are two kinds of uses for these tools: 1) you try to explain what you want to get done 2) you try to explain what you want to get done and how to get it done The first one is gambling, the second one has very small failure rate, at worst, the plan it presents shows it's not getting the solution you want it to do.

The thing is to understand that a model has "priors" which steer how it generates code. If what you're trying to build matches the priors of the model you can basically surf the gradients to working software with no steering using declarative language. If what you want to build isn't well encoded by the models priors it'll constantly drift, and you need to use shorter prompts and specify the how more (imperative).
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