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Nobody knows how the whole system works

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Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#161

Post by wrs »

agumonkey wrote: post #108
sgarland wrote: post #107

> “What happens when you type a URL into your browser’s address bar and hit enter?” You can talk about what happens at all sorts of different levels (e.g., HTTP, DNS, TCP, IP, …). But does anybody really understand all of the levels? [Paraphrasing]: interrupts, 802.11ax modulation scheme, QAM, memory models, garbage collection, field effect transistors... To a reasonable degree, yes, I can. I am also probably an outl…

There's various degrees of understanding, for instance as a web dev, you know the browser, the osi network stack.. (in theory, there are a lot of tweaks) then maybe the electronics.. but the radio / wireless part is another world in itself with a totally different mindset (analog waves) which make the rabbithole way too long (and wide.. radio is a big world on its own)

Well, pixels on a screen are a totally different mindset from network protocols or program control flow, but nobody’s surprised when one person can work within all of those. Brains are big. So yeah, it’s just a matter of degree. (It’s the T-shaped vs I-shaped career thing.)

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#162

Post by internet2000 »

rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

You should absolutely try your hardest to learn the layer above you. If your organization won't volunteer the info easily that's unfortunate, but you definitely have to try.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#163

Post by wrs »

mojuba wrote: post #42

> AI will make this situation worse. Being an AI skeptic more than not, I don't think the article's conclusion is true. What LLM's can potentially do for us is exactly the opposite: because they are trained on pretty much everything there is , if you ask the AI how the telephone works, or what happens when you enter a URL in the browser, they can actually answer and break it down for you nicely (and that would be a d…

Very important distinction here you’re missing: they don’t know things, they generate plausible things. The better the training, the more those are similar, but they never converge to identity. It’s like if you asked me to explain the S3 API, and I’m not allowed to say “I don’t know”, I’m going to get pretty close, but you won’t know what I got wrong until you read the docs.

The ability for LLMs to search out the real docs on something and digest them is the fix for this, but don’t start thinking you (and the LLM) don’t need the real docs anymore.

That said, it’s always been a human engineer superpower to know just enough about everything to know what you need to look up, and LLMs are already pretty darn good at that, which I think is your real point.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#164

Post by ragall »

planb wrote: post #90

This article is about people using abstractions without knowing how they work. This is fine. This is how progress is made. But someone designed the abstraction (e.g. the Wifi driver, the processor, the transistor), and they made sure it works and provides an interface to the layers above. Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction, but the article does not r…

> Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction

You're almost there. The current code-generating LLMs will be a dead end because it takes more time to thoroughly review a piece of code than to generate it, especially because LLM code is needlessly verbose.

The solution is to abandon general-purpose languages and start encapsulating the abstraction behind a DSL, which is orders of magnitude more restricted and thus simpler than a general-purpose language, making it much more amenable to be controlled through an LLM. SaaS companies should go from API-first to DSL-first, in many cases more than one DSL: e.g. a blog-hosting company would have one DSL for the page layouts, one for controlling edits and publishing, one for asset manipulation pipelines, one for controlling the CDN, etc... Sort of IaC, you define a desired outcome, and the engine behind takes care of actuating it.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#165

Post by konschubert »

Insanity wrote: post #144
cortesoft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strangely, I feel that using Claude helps me stay MORE focused on what I am actually trying to accomplish. In the prior 30 years of my programming life, so much time was spent "yak shaving"... setting up all the boilerplate, adding basic functionality you always have to do, setting up support systems, etc. With Claude, all of those things are so quick to complete that I can stay focused on what I am actually trying t…

But apart from side projects these true new setups happen rarely. When working at a company you probably work on an already established codebase with known patterns. So what you say is true about boilerplate reduction, but that’s not a huge ROI for enterprise software. (Some exceptions apply, there’s always some setup work for a new microservice etc. But even those don’t happen weekly or even monthly)

I don't know. Today I had something break because of a uv update on a very legacy piece of code.

(Not complaining - it was a good update that revealed a bug in our code.)

I really don't care to much any more to learn about the histories of python packaging. Claude fixed it for me and that was it.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#166

Post by [deleted] »

zen4ttitude wrote: post #157
rorylaitila wrote: post #71

There are many layers to this. But there is one style of programming that concerns me. Where you neither understand the layer above you (why the product exists and what the goal of the system is) nor the layer below (how to actually implement the behavior). In the past, many developers barely understood the business case, but at least they understood how to translate into code, and could put backpressure on the busin…

You sit on the arbitrating layer. It sounds like you have some programming experience as you miss looking at the code. I did check a lot of code and got tired of how perfect it were, generated by AI. Latest Claude is insane, does not even make errors. You still have to guide it and it will occasionally go astray and make rookie mistakes. If you extrapolate to 6 months down the road, one Claude API = a team of 10 prog…

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#167

Post by chasd00 »

you're perfectly free to read, understand, even edit code created by these coding agents. I must have made that point in a dozen threads just like this one. Do people think because an agent was used then the code is unaccessible to them? When I use these tools i'm constantly reviewing and updating what they output and I feel like I completely understand every line they create. Just like I understand any other code i read.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#168

Post by Quothling »

planb wrote: post #90

This article is about people using abstractions without knowing how they work. This is fine. This is how progress is made. But someone designed the abstraction (e.g. the Wifi driver, the processor, the transistor), and they made sure it works and provides an interface to the layers above. Now you could say a piece of software completely written by a coding agent is just another abstraction, but the article does not r…

To be fair to AI, it's not like Clean Code and it's OOP cult weren't already causing L1-3 cache misses by every abstraction and how they spread their functions out over multiple files. I'm not sure AI can really make it worse than that, and it's been a golden standard in a lot of places for 25 years. For the most part it doesn't matter, in most software it'll cost you a little extra on compute but rarely noticible. If you're writing software for something important though, like one of those astractions you talk about, then it's going to travel through everything. Making it even more important to actually know what you're building upon.

Still, I'm not convinced AI is necessarily worse at reading the documentation and using the abstractions correctly than the programmers using the AI. If you don't know what you're doing, then does it matter if you utilise an AI instead of google programming?

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#169

Post by overgard »

Leaky abstractions have always been a problem. Sometimes people like to use them as an example of "see, you didn't understand the assembly, so why do you care about... X". The logic seems to be "see, almost all your abstractions are leaky, why do you care that you don't understand what's happening?"

A few comments on that. First off, the best programmers I've worked with recognized when their abstractions were leaky, and made efforts to understand the thing that was being abstracted. That's a huge part of what made them good! I have worked with programmers that looked at the disassembly, and cared about it. Not everyone needs to do that, but acting like it's a completely pointless exercise does not track with reality.

The other thing I've noticed personally for myself is my biggest growth as a programmer has almost aways come from moving down the stack and understanding things at a lower level, not moving up the stack. Even though I rarely use it, learning assembler was VERY important for my development as a programmer, it helped me understand decisions made in the design of C for instance. I also learned VHDL to program FPGAs and took an embedded systems course that talked about building logic out of NAND gates. I had to write a game for an FPGA in C that had to use a wonky VGA driver that had to treat an 800x600 screen as a series of tiles because there wasn't nearly enough RAM to store that framebuffer. None of this is something I use daily, some of it I may never use again, but it shaped how I think and work with computers. In my experience, the guys that only focus on the highest levels of abstractions because the rest of the stuff "doesn't matter" easily get themselves stuck in corners they can't get out of.

Re: Nobody knows how the whole system works

#170

Post by themafia »

> But does anybody really understand all of the levels?

Of the top of my head? Most of them. Did you need me to understand some level in particular? I can dedicate time to that if you like. My experience and education will make that a very simple task.

The better question is.. is there any _advantage_ to understanding "all the levels?" If not, then what outcome did you actually expect? A lot of this work is done in exchange for money and not out personal pride or desirous craftsmanship.

You can try to be the "Wizard of Oz" if you want. The problem is anyone can do that job. It's not particularly interesting is it?

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