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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#181

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #132
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A car saves you time in getting to and from the store. But if you don't learn to drive, and just hop in the car and press things, you're going to crash, and that definitely won't save you time. Cars are also more expensive than walking or a bike, yet people still buy them.

I already know how to drive stick (trad coding), I don’t feel like I’m gaining much by switching to automatic transmission.

Yeah that's not the difference, lol. With AI coding you can get the same work done in an order of magnitude less time, without even knowing how to program.

The only comparison I can come up with is 3D printers, but even that's not as ridiculously fast and easy as AI coding. An average person can ask an agent to write a program, in any popular language, and it'll do it, and it'll work. We still need people intelligent enough to steer the agent, but you do not need to edit a single line of code anymore.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#182

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

airstrike wrote: post #139
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these are not really the right way to use AI to code with. There are two basic ways to code with AI that work: 1. Autocomplete. Pretty simple; you only accept auto-completes you actually want, as you manually write code. 2. Software engineering design and implementation workflow. The AI makes a plan, with tasks. It commits those plans to files. It starts sub-agents to tackle the tasks. The subagents create te…

#2 does not negate my steering suggestion, so I'm not sure how you can conclude nobody thinks it's a real thing that works also Claude Code is notoriously poorly built, so I wouldn't tout it as SOTA

I have worked at companies from startups to fortune 500. They all have garbage code. Who cares? It works anyway. The world is held together with duct tape, and it's unreasonably effective. I don't believe "code quality" can be measured by how it looks. The only meaningful measure of its quality is whether it runs and solves a user's problem.

Get the best programmer in the world. Have them write the most perfect source code in the world. In 10 years, it has to be completely rewritten. Why? The designer chose some advanced design that is conceptually superior, but did not survive the normal and constant churn of advancing technology. Compare that to some junior sysadmin writing a solution in Perl 5.x. It works 30 years later. Everyone would say the Perl solution was of inferior quality, yet it provides 3x more value.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#183

Post by 2ccg »

lowsong wrote: post #175
csallen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has literally never happened in the history of humanity. Name one technology where development permanently stopped due to lack of funding, despite there being... 1. lots of room for progress, i.e. the theoretical ceiling dwarfed the current capabilities 2. strong incentives to continue development, i.e. monetary or military success 3. no obviously better competitors/alternatives 4. social/cultural tolerance from…

AI has none of these things. 1. As I said before, we've long since reached diminishing returns on models. We simply don't have enough compute or training data left to make them dramatically better. 2. This is only true if it actually pans out, which is still an unknown question. 3. Just... not using it? It has to justify its existence. If it's not of benefit vs. the cost then why bother. 4. The public hates AI. The p…

Thanks for jumping in fella. Agree on all points.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#184

Post by 2ccg »

csallen wrote: post #170
2ccg wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont waste your time on him. He reminds me of people who are so concentrated on one part of the picture, they can't see the whole damn thing and how all the pieces fit and interact with each other.

You're describing yourself imo. Your point ignores hundreds of years of history and says zero about the forces that shape technological development and progress, which have been studied fairly exhaustively.

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Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#185

Post by csallen »

vlovich123 wrote: post #179
csallen wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then sure, we can agree there, it's just a matter of phrasing then.

Then you may want to clarify what your phrasing meant because I couldn’t find a more charitable interpretation

More and more software will be built by non-experts, software that has smaller user bases and simpler use cases and doesn't need to be maintained as much if at all. "Poor AI code quality" matters much less for these than for say, software written by developers at FAANG companies, since literally nobody will ever even look at the code.

Where we're headed is toward a world where a ton of software is ephemeral, apps literally created by AI out of thin air for a single use, and then gone.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#186

Post by 2ccg »

sunaurus wrote: post #159
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s just a matter of “does this actually save me time at all?” If it generates the slop version in a week but it takes me 3 more weeks to clean it up, could I have I just done it right the first time myself in 4 weeks instead? How much money have I wasted in tokens?

I've been arguing that it's POSSIBLE to get a small (but meaningful) uplift in productivity on average if you are careful with how you use LLMs, but at the same time, it's also extremely easy to actually negatively impact your productivity. In both cases, you feel super productive all the time, because you are constantly putting in instructions and getting massive amounts of output, and this feels like constant & fas…

[dead]

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#187

Post by lowsong »

csallen wrote: post #176
lowsong wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is what everyone says when technology democratizes something that was previously reserved for a small number of experts. What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. Over the past 20 years software engineering has become something that just about anyone can do with li…

> What part of renting your ability to do your job is "democratizing"? The current state of AI is the literal opposite. Same for local models that require thousands of dollars of GPUs to run. "Renting your ability to do your job"? I think you're misunderstanding the definition of democratization. This has nothing to do with programmers. It has nothing to do with people's jobs. Democratizing is defined as "the process…

> Democratizing is defined as "the process of making technology, information, or power accessible, available, or appealing to everyone, rather than just experts or elites."

Your definition only supports my point. The transfer of skill from something you learn to something you pay to do is the exact and complete opposite of your stated definition. It turns the activity from something that requires you to learn it to one that only those that can afford to pay can do.

It is quite literally making this technology, information, and power available to only the elite.

> Uhhh. Maybe you don't know any AI investors, but the payout is coming NOW.

What payout? Zero AI companies are profitable. If you're invested in one of these companies you could be a billionaire on paper, but until it's liquid it's meaningless. There's plenty of investors who stand to make a lot of money if these big companies exit, but there's no guarantee that will happen.

The only people making money at the moment are either taking cash salaries from AI labs or speculating on Nvidia stock. Neither of which have much do with the tech itself and everything to do with the hype.

Re: Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI

#189

Post by pessimizer »

csallen wrote: post #165
camdenreslink wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps are getting bigger and more ambitious in scope as developers try to take advantage of any boost in production LLMs provide them.

Every metric I've seen points to there being an explosion in (a) the number of apps that exist and (b) the number of people making applications.

What relevance do either of those claims have to the claim of the comment you are responding to?

Are you trying to imply that having more things means that each of them will be smaller? There are more people than there were 500 years ago - are they smaller, or larger?

Also, the printing press did lead to much longer works. There are many continuous book series that have run for decades, with dozens of volumes and millions of words. This is a direct result of the printing press. Just as there are television shows that have run with continuous plots for thousands of hours. This is a consequence of video recording and production technologies; you couldn't do that with stage plays.

You seem to be trying to slip "smaller in scope" into your statement without backing, even though I'd insist that applications individuals wrote being "smaller in scope" was a obvious consequence of the tooling available. I can't know everything, so I have to keep the languages and techniques limited to the ones that I do know, and I can't write fast enough to make things huge. The problems I choose to tackle are based on those restrictions.

Those are the exact things that LLMs are meant to change.

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