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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#161

Post by apsurd »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #139
socketcluster wrote: post #27

I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…

I agree completely. I just did my first “AI native coding project”. Both because for now I haven’t run into any quotas using Codex CLI with my $20/month ChatGPT subscription and the company just gave everyone an $800/month Claude allowance. Before I even started the implementation I: 1. Put the initial sales contract with the business requirements. 2. Notes I got from talking to sales 3. The transcript of the initial…

That sounds really powerful, but also like burden shifts to the people that will maintain all this stuff after you're done having your fun.

Tbh, I'm not exactly knocking it, it makes sense that leads are responsible for the architecture. I just worry that those leads having 100x influence is not default a good thing.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#162

Post by rukuu001 »

> The hard part is investigation, understanding context, validating assumptions, and knowing why a particular approach is the right one for this situation

Yes. Another way to describe it is the valuable part.

AI tools are great at delineating high and low value work.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#163

Post by ibeckermayer »

creato wrote: post #153
ibeckermayer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

> Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. No one goes to prison for this. They might get sued, but even that is doubtful.

Just flat out false, and embarrassingly so, but spoken with the unearned authority of an LLM. See: The Pirate Bay.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#164

Post by Guvante »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license.

Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing.

So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license.

Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if you directly use my code you need a license" this doesn't have any of the downsides of copyright in other fields which is mostly problematic for content that is generations old but still protected.

GitHub code tends to be relatively young still since the product has only existed for less than twenty years and most things you find are going to be way less than that in age on average.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#165

Post by Guvante »

phpnode wrote: post #133
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

The other day I had an agent write a parser for a niche query language which I will not name. There are a few open source implementations of this language on github, but none of them are in my target language and none of them are PEGs. The agent wrote a near perfect implementation of this query language in a PEG. I know that it looked at the implementations that were on github, because I told it to, yet the result is…

No one knows until a law about it is written.

You could postulate based on judicial rulings but unless those are binding you are effectively hypothesizing.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#166

Post by Guvante »

userbinator wrote: post #112
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

Do you give attribution to all the books, articles, etc. you've read? Everything is a derivative work.

Actually you might need to depending on how similar your implementation is.

Copyright law here is quite nuanced.

See the Google vs Oracle case about Java.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#167

Post by Guvante »

BobbyJo wrote: post #102
Nition wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know if AI is coming up with anything really novel (yet) but it's certainly a nice database of solved problems. I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves. [1]…

> In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I just don't think there was a great way to make solved problems accessible before LLMs. I mean, these things were on github already, and still got reimplemented over and over again. Even high traffic libraries that solve some super common proble…

Ah yes people were making emulators because emulators weren't a solved problem...

That isn't why people made emulators. It is because it is an easy to solve problem that is tricky to get right and provides as much testable space as you are willing to spend on working on it.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#168

Post by ozozozd »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #72
redox99 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGENTS.md is for that global view.

Am I stupid or do these agents regularly not read what’s in the agents.md file?

You’re not stupid. But the agents.md file is just an md file at the end of the day.

We’ve been acting as if it’s assembly code that the agents execute without question or confusion, but it’s just some more text.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#169

Post by derf_ »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far...

Vibe coding does not solve this problem. If anything, it makes it worse, since you no longer have any idea if an implementation might read on someone else's patent, since you did not write it.

If your agent could go read all of the patents and then avoid them in its implementations and/or tell you where you might be infringing them (without hallucinating), that would be valuable. It still would not solve the inherent problems of vagueness in the boundaries of the property rights that patents confer (which may require expensive litigation to clarify definitively) or people playing games with continuations to rewrite claim language and explicitly move those boundaries years later, among other dubious but routine practices, but it would be something.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#170

Post by zjp »

albert_e wrote: post #160
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

I tried writing a plain text wordle loop as a python exercise in loops and lists along with my kid. I saved the blank file as wordle.py to start the coding while explaining ideas. That was enough context for github copilot to suggest the entire `for` loop body after I just typed "for" Not much learning by doing happened in that instance. Before this `for` loop there were just two lines of code hardcoding some words .…

I hate aggressive autocomplete like that. One thing to try would be using claude code in your directory but telling it that you want it to answer questions about design and direction when you get stuck, but otherwise never to touch the code itself, then in an editor that doesn't do that you can hack at the problem.
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