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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#191

Post by jacquesm »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

Prediction: open source will stop.

Sure, people did it for the fun and the credits, but the fun quickly goes out of it when the credits go to the IP laundromat and the fun is had by the people ripping off your code. Why would anybody contribute their works for free in an environment like that?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#192

Post by skydhash »

alphazard wrote: post #174
paulryanrogers wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. And that there is little value in reusing software initiated by others.

> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or frie…

> I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse[...]The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols.

The whole idea of an OS is code reuse (and resources management). No need to setup the hardware to run your application. Then we have a lot of foundational subsystems like graphics, sound, input,... Crafting such subsystems and the associated libraries are hard and requires a lot of design thinking.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#193

Post by thwarted »

alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people.

Something Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, and the industry has never fully acknowledged. Throw more bodies at it, be they human bodies or bot agent bodies.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#194

Post by falcor84 »

alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> AI will leverage me

I think I know what you mean, and I do recall once seeing "this experience will leverage me" as indicating that something will be good for a person, but my first thought when seeing "x will leverage y" is that x will step on top of y to get to their goal, which does seem apt here.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#195

Post by falcor84 »

thwarted wrote: post #193
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people. Something Brooks wrote about 50 years ago, and the industry has never fully acknowledged. Throw more bodies at it, be they human bodies or bot agent bodies.

But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game.

[0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#196

Post by famouswaffles »

deadbabe wrote: post #139
rodiger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a proxy for generalized reasoning. The point isn't that LLMs are the best AI architecture for chess.

Why? Beating chess is more about searching a probability space, not reasoning. Reasoning would be more like the car wash question.

It's not entirely clear how LLMs that can play chess do so, but it is clearly very different from the way other machines do so. The construct a board, they can estimate a players skill and adjust accordingly, and unlike other machines and similarly to humans, they are sensitive to how a certain position came to be when predicting the next move.

Regardless, there's plenty of reasoning in chess.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#197

Post by orangecoffee »

jacquesm wrote: post #191
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

Prediction: open source will stop. Sure, people did it for the fun and the credits, but the fun quickly goes out of it when the credits go to the IP laundromat and the fun is had by the people ripping off your code. Why would anybody contribute their works for free in an environment like that?

Many did it for liberty - a philosophical position on freedom in software. They're supercharged with AI.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#198

Post by cesarvarela »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #167
cesarvarela wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but 1800 FIDE players don't make illegal moves, and Gemini does.

1800 FIDE players do make illegal moves. I believe they make about one to two orders of magnitude less illegal moves than Gemini 3 does here. IIRC the usual statistic for expert chess play is about 0.02% of expert chess games have an illegal move (I can look that up later if there's interest to be sure), but that is only the ones that made it into the final game notation (and weren't e.g. corrected at the board by an…

A player at that level making an illegal move is either tired, distracted, drunk, etc. An LLM makes it because it does not really "understand" the rules of chess.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#199

Post by joquarky »

skydhash wrote: post #192
alphazard wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This assumes every individual is capable of succinctly communicating to the AI what they want. And the AI is capable of maintaining it as underlying platforms and libraries shift. I think there are people who want to use software to accomplish a goal, and there are people who are forced to use software. The people who only use software because the world around them has forced it on them, either through work or frie…

> I think engineers greatly over-estimate the value of code reuse[...]The only time reuse really matters is in network protocols. The whole idea of an OS is code reuse (and resources management). No need to setup the hardware to run your application. Then we have a lot of foundational subsystems like graphics, sound, input,... Crafting such subsystems and the associated libraries are hard and requires a lot of design…

There is a balance. Some teams take DRY too far.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#200

Post by michaelbuckbee »

fhub wrote: post #79
hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents. Even with full context, wr…

Having picked up a few long neglected projects in the past year, AI has been tremendous in rapidly shipping quality of dev life stuff like much improved test suites, documenting the existing behavior, handling upgrades to newer framework versions, etc.

I've really found it's a flywheel once you get going.

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