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I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

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Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#171

Post by Dylan16807 »

keybored wrote: post #163
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very different from the usual or traditional https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/radical Deciding that AI is going nowhere to suddenly deciding that coding agents are how they will work going forward is a radical change. That is what they meant.

Did you miss my second paragraph? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paragraph

Can you explain exactly what you meant by your second paragraph? The ambiguity is why you got that reply.

If your second paragraph makes that reply irrelevant, are you saying the meaning was "Your use of 'radicalized' is technically correct but I still think you shouldn't have used it here"?

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#172

Post by Ataraxic »

dcre wrote: post #60
tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people don't give more credence to the argument that the exact opposite thing will happen.

Right. I don’t understand why everyone thinks this will make it impossible for junior devs to learn. The people I had around to answer my questions when I was learning knew a whole lot less than Claude and also had full time jobs doing something other than answering my questions.

Junior devs using AI can get a lot better at using AI and learn those existing patterns it generates, but I notice, for myself, that if I let AI write a lot of the code I remember and thereby understand it later on less well. This applies in school and when trying to learn new things but the act of writing down the solution and working out the details yourself trains our own brain. I'd say that this has been a practice for over a thousand years and I'm skeptical that this will make junior devs grow their own skills faster.

I think asking questions to the AI for your own understanding totally makes sense, but there is a benefit when you actually create the code versus asking the AI to do it.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#173

Post by sitkack »

rxtexit wrote: post #102
sitkack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is copium that it will suddenly stop and the world they knew before will return. ChatGPT came out in Nov 2022. Attention Was All There Was in 2017, we were already 5 years in the past. Or 5 years of research to catch up to, and then from 2022 to now ... papers and research have been increasing exponentially. Even in if SOTA models were frozen, we still have years of research to apply and optimize in various ways.

The copium is I think many people got comfortable post financial crisis with nothing much changing or happening. I think many people really liked a decade stretch with not much more than web framework updates and smart phone versioning. We are just back on track. I just read Oracular Programming: A Modular Foundation for Building LLM-Enabled Software the other day. We don't even have a new paradigm yet. I would be sh…

Reading the Oracular paper now, https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=44211588

It feels a bit like Halide, where the goal and the strategy are separated so that each can be optimized independently.

Those new paradigms are being discovered by hordes of vibecoders, myself included. I am having wonderful results with TDD and AI assisted design.

IDEs are now mostly browsers for code, and I no longer copy and paste with a chatbot.

Curious what you think about the Oracular paper. One area that I have been working on for the last couple weeks is extracting ToT for the domain and then using the LLM to generate an ensemble of exploration strategies over that tree.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#174

Post by solarwindy »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #149
SupremumLimit wrote: post #4

It's an interesting review but I really dislike this type of techno-utopian determinism: "When models inevitably improve..." Says who? How is it inevitable? What if they've actually reached their limits by now?

What is ironic, if we buy in to the theory that AI will write majority of the code in the next 5-10 years, what is it going to train on after? ITSELF? Seems this theoretic trajectory of "will inevitably get better" is is only true if humans are producing quality training data. The quality of code LLMs create is very well proportionate on how mature and ubiquitous the langues/projects are.

I think you neatly summarise why the current pre-trained LLM paradigm is a dead end. If these models were really capable of artificial reasoning and learning, they wouldn’t need more training data at all. If they could learn like a human junior does, and actually progress to being a senior, then I really could believe that we’ll all be out of a job—but they just do not.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#175

Post by saagarjha »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #160
lelanthran wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel like using a compiler is in a sense a code generator where you don't commit the actual output Compilers are deterministic. Given the same input you always get the same output so there's no reason to store the output. If you don't get the same output we call it a compiler bug! LLMs do not work this way. (Aside: Am I the only one who feels that the entire AI industry is predicated on replacing only development…

LLMs CAN be deterministic. You can control the temperature to get the same output repeatedly. Although I don’t really understand why you’d only want to store prompts… What if that model is no longer available?

They’re typically not, since they typically rely on operators that aren’t (e.g. atomics).

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#176

Post by tptacek »

Ataraxic wrote: post #172
dcre wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I don’t understand why everyone thinks this will make it impossible for junior devs to learn. The people I had around to answer my questions when I was learning knew a whole lot less than Claude and also had full time jobs doing something other than answering my questions.

Junior devs using AI can get a lot better at using AI and learn those existing patterns it generates, but I notice, for myself, that if I let AI write a lot of the code I remember and thereby understand it later on less well. This applies in school and when trying to learn new things but the act of writing down the solution and working out the details yourself trains our own brain. I'd say that this has been a practi…

I'm sure there is when you're just getting your sea legs in some environment, but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote. Rote code is both depleting and mutagenic --- if you're fluent and also interested in programming, you'll start convincing yourself to do stupid stuff to make the code less rote ("DRY it up", "make a DSL", &c) that makes your code less readable and maintainable. It's a trap I fall into constantly.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#177

Post by kiitos »

simonw wrote: post #124
kiitos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the LLM hallucinates, then the code it produces is wrong. That wrong code isn't obviously or programmatically determinable as wrong, the agent has no way to figure out that it's wrong, it's not as if the LLM produces at the same time tests that identify that hallucinated code as being wrong. The only way that this wrong code can be identified as wrong is by the human user "looking closely" and figuring out that…

You seem to be using "hallucinate" to mean "makes mistakes". That's not how I use it. I see hallucination as a very specific kind of mistake: one where the LLM outputs something that is entirely fabricated, like a class method that doesn't exist. The agent compiler/linter loop can entirely eradicate those. That doesn't mean the LLM won't make plenty of other mistakes that don't qualify as hallucinations by the defini…

I'm not using "hallucinate" to mean "makes mistakes". I'm using it to mean "code that is syntactically correct and passes tests but is semantically incoherent". Which is the same thing that "hallucination" normally means in the context of a typical user LLM chat session.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#178

Post by Lerc »

>Treat prompts as version-controlled assets. Including prompts in commit messages creates valuable context for future maintenance and debugging.

I think this is valuable data, but it is also out of distribution data. Prior to AI models writing code, this won't be present in the training set. Additional training will probably be needed to correlate better results with the new input stream, and also to learn that some of the records would be of its own unreliability and to develop a healthy scepticism of what it has said in the past.

There's a lot of talk about model collapse with models training purely on their own output, or AI slop infecting training data sets, but ultimately it is all data. Combined with a signal to say which bits were ultimately beneficial, it can all be put to use. Even the failures can provide a good counterfactual signal for constrastive learning.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#179

Post by kentonv »

kiitos wrote: post #158
kentonv wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "one degree removed from 100% pure vibe coding", then? The definition of vibe coding is letting the AI code without review...

> one degree removed You're letting Claude do your programming for you, and then sweeping up whatever it does afterwards. Bluntly, you're off-loading your cognition to the machine. If that's fine by you then that's fine enough, it just means that the quality of your work becomes a function of your tooling rather than your capabilities.

I don't agree. The AI largely does the boring and obvious parts. I'm still deciding what gets built and how it is designed, which is the interesting part.

Re: I read all of Cloudflare's Claude-generated commits

#180

Post by kiitos »

tptacek wrote: post #176
Ataraxic wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junior devs using AI can get a lot better at using AI and learn those existing patterns it generates, but I notice, for myself, that if I let AI write a lot of the code I remember and thereby understand it later on less well. This applies in school and when trying to learn new things but the act of writing down the solution and working out the details yourself trains our own brain. I'd say that this has been a practi…

I'm sure there is when you're just getting your sea legs in some environment, but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote. Rote code is both depleting and mutagenic --- if you're fluent and also interested in programming, you'll start convincing yourself to do stupid stuff to make the code less rote ("DRY it up", "make a DSL", &c) that makes your code less readable and maintainable. It…

> but at some point most of the code you write in a given environment is rote

"Most of the code one writes in a given environment is rote" is true in the same sense that most of the words one writes in any given bit of text are rote e.g. conjunctions, articles, prepositions, etc.

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