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Is it a bubble?

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Re: Is it a bubble?

#181

Post by DevDesmond »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #139
f154hfds wrote: post #38

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll. It's true that the technology currently works as an e…

Don't worry that much about 'AI' specifically. LLMs are an impressive piece of technology, but at the end of the day they're just language predictors - and bad ones a lot of the time. They can reassemble and remix what's already been written but with no understanding of it. It can be an accelerator - it gets extremely common boiler-plate text work out of the way. But it can't replace any job that requires a functioni…

Text is an LLMs input and output, but, under the hood, the transformer network is capable of far more than mere re-assembly and remix of text. Transformers can approximate turing completeness as their size scales, and they can encode entire algorithms in their weights. Therefore, I'd argue they can do far more than reassemble and remix. These aren't just Markov models anymore.

(I'd also argue that "understanding" and "functional brain" are unfalsifiable comparisons. What exactly distinguishes a functional brain from a turing machine? Chess once required a functional brain to play, but has now been surpassed by computation. Saying "jobs that require a human brain" is tautological without any further distinction).

Of course, LLMs are definitely missing plenty of brain skills like working in continuous time, with persistent state, with agency, in physical space, etc. But to say that an LLM "never will" is either semantic, (you might call it something other than an LLM when next generation capabilities are integrated), tautological (once it can do a human job, it's no longer a job that requires a human), or anthropocentric hubris.

That said, who knows what the time scale looks like for realizing such improvements – (decades, centuries, millennia).

Re: Is it a bubble?

#182

Post by 9rx »

IceDane wrote: post #176
9rx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that compilers work just like originally described. I type out what I want. I feed that into a compiler. It takes that input of what I want and generates code. Is that not your understanding of how compilers work? If a compiler does not work like that, what do you think a complier does instead?

A compiler does so deterministically and there is no AI involved.

A compiler can be deterministic in some cases, but not necessarily so. A compiler for natural language cannot be deterministic, for example. It seems you're confusing what a compiler is with implementation details.

Let's get this topic back on track. What is it that you think a compiler does if not take in what you typed out for what you want and use that to generate code?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#183

Post by marbletiles »

9rx wrote: post #182
IceDane wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A compiler does so deterministically and there is no AI involved.

A compiler can be deterministic in some cases, but not necessarily so. A compiler for natural language cannot be deterministic, for example. It seems you're confusing what a compiler is with implementation details. Let's get this topic back on track. What is it that you think a compiler does if not take in what you typed out for what you want and use that to generate code?

This doesn't feel like good-faith. There are leagues of difference between "what you typed out" when that's in a highly structured compiler-specific codified syntax *expressly designed* as the input to a compiler that produces computer programs, and "what you typed out" when that's an English-language prompt, sometimes vague and extremely high-level

That difference - and the assumed delta in difficulty, training and therefore cost involved - is why the latter case is newsworthy.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#184

Post by layer8 »

DevDesmond wrote: post #156
zparky wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been blowing my mind reading HN the past year or so and seeing so many comments from programmers that are excited to not have to write code. It's depressing.

Perhaps consider that I still think coding by prompting is just another layer of abstraction on top of coding. I'm my mind, writing the prompt that generates the code is somewhat analogous to writing the code that generates the assembly. (Albeit, more stochastically, the way psychology research might be analogous to biochemistry research). Different experts are still required at different layers of abstraction, thoug…

One important reason people like to write code is that it has well-defined semantics, allowing to reason about it and predict its outcome with high precision. Likewise for changes that one makes to code. LLM prompting is the diametrical opposite of that.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#185

Post by sbuttgereit »

sethammons wrote: post #27
sp4cec0wb0y wrote: post #7

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it fa…

I think your experience matches well with mine. There are certain workloads and use cases where these tools really do well and legitimately save time; these tend to be more concise tasks and well defined with good context from which to draw from. The wrong tasking and the results can be pretty bad and a time sink.

I think the difficulty is exercising the judgement to know where that productive boundary sits. That's more difficult than it sounds because we're not use to adjudicating machine reasoning which can appear human-like ... So we tend to treat it like a human which is, of course, an error.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#186

Post by AmericanOP »

malfist wrote: post #85
mcv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea. I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code, but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the time. It's very useful if you have the knowledge and exp…

Is this why AI is telling us our every idea is brilliant and great? Because their code doesn't stand up to what we can do?

Whichever PM sold glazing as a core feature should be ejected into space.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#187

Post by [deleted] »

gspr wrote: post #123
georgeecollins wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also love to code, though it's not what people pay to do anymore. You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does. The question is, does it happen in two years or a hundred years? My motto: don't predict, prepare.

> You should never hope for a technology to not deliver on its promise. Sooner or later it usually does. Really? Are you sure there isn't a lot of confirmation bias in this? Do you really have a good handle on 100-year-old tech hypes that didn't deliver? All I can think of is "flying everything".

[deleted]

Re: Is it a bubble?

#188

Post by IceDane »

9rx wrote: post #182
IceDane wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A compiler does so deterministically and there is no AI involved.

A compiler can be deterministic in some cases, but not necessarily so. A compiler for natural language cannot be deterministic, for example. It seems you're confusing what a compiler is with implementation details. Let's get this topic back on track. What is it that you think a compiler does if not take in what you typed out for what you want and use that to generate code?

I've written more than one compiler, so I definitely understand how compilers work.

It seems you're trying to call anything that transforms one thing into another a compiler. We all know what a compiler is and what it does (except maybe you? It's not clear to me) so I genuinely don't understand why you're trying to overload this terminology further so that you can call LLMs compilers. They are obviously and fundamentally different things even if an LLM can do its best to pretend to be one. Is a natural language translation program a compiler?

Re: Is it a bubble?

#189

Post by skydhash »

mcv wrote: post #56
kscarlet wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.

World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea. I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code, but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the time. It's very useful if you have the knowledge and exp…

> I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea

This sentence and the rest of the post reads like an horoscope advice. Like "It can be good if you use it well, it may be bad if you don't". It's pretty much the same as saying a coin may land on head or on tail.

Re: Is it a bubble?

#190

Post by johnfn »

IceDane wrote: post #173
johnfn wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I save an incredible amount of time. I suspect I’m likely 5-10x more productive, though it depends exactly what I’m working on. Most of the issues that you cite can be solved, though it requires you to rewire the programming part of your brain to work with this new paradigm. To be honest, I don’t really have a problem with chunking my tasks. The reason I don’t is because I don’t really think about it that way. I…

Your site has waterfalls and flashes of unstyled content. It loads slowly and the whole design is basically exactly what every AI-designed site looks like. All of the work you described is essentially manual labor. It's not difficult work - just boring, sometimes error prone work that mostly requires you to do obvious things and then tackle errors as they pop up in very obvious ways. Great use case for AI, for sure.…

> This and the fact that the end result is so poor isn't really selling your argument very well

If you ever find yourself at the point where you are insulting a guy's passion project in order to prove a point, perhaps have a deep breath, and take a step back from the computer for a moment. And maybe you should look deep inside yourself, because you might have crossed the threshold to being a jerk.

Yes, my site has issues. You know what else it has? Users. Your comments about FOUC and waterfalls are correct, but they don't rank particularly high on what are important to people who used the site. I didn't instruct the AI to fix them, because I was busy fixing a bunch of real problems that my actual users cared about.

As for loading slowly -- it loads in 400ms on my machine.

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