Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#21

Post by zorr »

cjk wrote: post #16

> Everyone in the world will be at least John Carmack-level software capable. lol I'm sure that for simple tasks, AI-based pair programming will offer some level of acceleration, but until it can understand the semantics of the code it's generating, and how it fits into the broader _system_, it will not be able to be trusted. I do not look forward to a world where I have to spend my time debugging AI-generated code.

I'm not saying it will reach Carmack levels of proficiency any time soon but have you tried pasting a non-trivial method into ChatGPT and ask the AI what the method does and how the code can be improved? I was very impressed about the way it was able to explain the code and suggest improvements.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#22

Post by zorr »

I was skeptic about AI's writing code but after playing with ChatGPT for a bit I have to adjust my views.

I think tools like this can be great for generating skeletons and draft implementations for simple CRUD-like things. For example I asked it "write an Android layout XML for a login screen with username, password and a login spinner using components from the material library" and it did exactly that. I followed up with "write the corresponding activity in Kotlin" and it did. It generated a correct implementation, including a few paragraphs explaining how it worked and that it mocked the login method with an artificial delay for demo purposes.

Another thread that convinced me was when I gave it a Kotlin interface for a CRUD Taskrepository and asked it to write the implementation. It wrote a correct implementation backed by a Map. With some followup prompts it was able to write save/load methods to store state in a JSON file, and generate events to a Flow whenever a task was created, updated or deleted.

Another one: I asked it how I could debug why a gstreamer pipeline had a refcount of 2 after the pipeline stopped running and it pointed me to a number of debug tools and environment variables I could set to trace refs in the pipeline.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#23

Post by karmakaze »

acuozzo wrote: post #8
im3w1l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if the AI can provide both a program and a machine-verifiable proof of correctness though. Then all you have to manually verify is that the proof proves the right thing.

How will the AI overcome the halting problem?

You can't in general determine if an arbitrary program will halt. I believe it is however, possible to construct a program that does provably halt. I have no idea if you can write most useful programs that way though.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#24

Post by coldtea »

eimrine wrote: post #6
coldtea wrote: post #4

> The last major productivity boost in software was OSS. Each of those steps was 10-100x boost but then it stopped... I don't think this author understand what is a productivity boost. OSS is a development model, it didn't turn into any "productivity boost", any more than the general technology level (including mainly proprietary technology) offered. > Programmers will command armies of software agents to build incre…

OSS allows really hard pieces of software to be built, most of FOSS is unable to be built if not FOSS. What is the biggest and/or hardest proprietary project? Windows7+? Modern chipset including CPU? Apple jail? And what will happen with this technology if all the source code leaks somehow, don't you believe it will become 10x-100x better by some measures?

>OSS allows really hard pieces of software to be built

Like what that one couldn't build with proprietary software? The main benefit is with OSS you're doing it with free (as in beer) software (whereas before you might not afford a proprietary solution). But that is not a productivity increase, it's budget decrease.

>And what will happen with this technology if all the source code leaks somehow, don't you believe it will become 10x-100x better by some measures?

No.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#26

Post by cjk »

zorr wrote: post #21
cjk wrote: post #16

> Everyone in the world will be at least John Carmack-level software capable. lol I'm sure that for simple tasks, AI-based pair programming will offer some level of acceleration, but until it can understand the semantics of the code it's generating, and how it fits into the broader _system_, it will not be able to be trusted. I do not look forward to a world where I have to spend my time debugging AI-generated code.

I'm not saying it will reach Carmack levels of proficiency any time soon but have you tried pasting a non-trivial method into ChatGPT and ask the AI what the method does and how the code can be improved? I was very impressed about the way it was able to explain the code and suggest improvements.

Not myself, but I've seen a bunch of examples folks have posted on Twitter, and to be fair, they were all surprisingly accurate.

As far as I understand it, though, these explanations are based on similar code contained in the training dataset, rather than any kind of ability to reason about what's actually going on, no?

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#27

Post by im3w1l »

karmakaze wrote: post #23
acuozzo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will the AI overcome the halting problem?

You can't in general determine if an arbitrary program will halt. I believe it is however, possible to construct a program that does provably halt. I have no idea if you can write most useful programs that way though.

Almost all programs that people write are written so that they provably halt (or provably don't halt - as continuing forever is sometimes the desired behavior).

How do we do that? By using known-halting parts, and composing them in known-halting ways. How did we find those parts in the first place, well computer science.. But boiling that down to a codified process, that's where it gets murkier. I think we don't really know exactly how human ingenuity discovers new useful halting parts in the face of the halting problem.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#28

Post by eimrine »

coldtea wrote: post #24
eimrine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSS allows really hard pieces of software to be built, most of FOSS is unable to be built if not FOSS. What is the biggest and/or hardest proprietary project? Windows7+? Modern chipset including CPU? Apple jail? And what will happen with this technology if all the source code leaks somehow, don't you believe it will become 10x-100x better by some measures?

> OSS allows really hard pieces of software to be built Like what that one couldn't build with proprietary software? The main benefit is with OSS you're doing it with free (as in beer) software (whereas before you might not afford a proprietary solution). But that is not a productivity increase, it's budget decrease. > And what will happen with this technology if all the source code leaks somehow, don't you believe i…

  The main benefit is with OSS you're doing it with free (as in beer)
This is benefit for user, but we were talking about benefits for someone who codes.

  Like what that one couldn't build with proprietary software?
An OS which deserves to be trusted. Cryptocurrency. A web-browser which is not IE6. Lisp interpreter.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#29

Post by eimrine »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #13
eimrine wrote: post #3

> AI is the next 100x productivity boost. I do not agree with this statement. There is totally no progress in AI since cryptowinter. Just there are too much people with always-online smartphones, so governments considered this field as too big to be out of their control. And it leads to 100x increase of no-brain programming job where everything what is needed from that kind of programmers - to fight against users. Th…

AI will definitely eventually allow one person to perform the work that would take 100 today, and more. It's pretty easy to see the path there by extrapolating from what's happening in image/video diffusion models right now, and the language models have shown that they can task generalize well into basic problem solving, to the extent that a problem is similar to something that has been solved many times before. Simp…

Stable diffusion is not work, it can not develop logo of my grocery shop without a designer and it cannot even give me a PSD or SVG file.

> Simple tools built using the models of today could easily double the productivity of an artist or writer,

This message might be more useful if you give any other searchable names of such a pieces of AI software.

Re: I don't think people understand the monumental changes coming to software

#30

Post by euroderf »

goto11 wrote: post #9
im3w1l wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if the AI can provide both a program and a machine-verifiable proof of correctness though. Then all you have to manually verify is that the proof proves the right thing.

So the only thing a developer have to deliver is an unambiguous specification of what the program is supposed to do!

A premium on the ability to express requirements clearly and logically, on the fly rather than as part of a cycle of paper-pushing.
Post reply on HN