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The Eternal Sloptember

geohot.github.io

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Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#21

Post by tra3 »

farhanhubble wrote: post #14

I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…

When every prompt produces a thousand line PR, you’re not very far from another million line monolith.

I’m a little more hopeful than the author though. I feel like it’s possible to manage the process so that does not happen.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#23

Post by rebuilder »

simianwords wrote: post #19

Nah this person is dead wrong. Lets come back in 2 years and check on it. I'm willing to make a reasonable bet on these terms: companies will go even more AI native, will use even more tokens and spend even more money. EDIT: To people downvoting me, please come up with a reasonable bet and lets try to work it out. EDIT 2: $500 bet paid to your account on whether LLM's are going to still be used productively or not. N…

You could both be right.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#24

Post by simianwords »

rebuilder wrote: post #23
simianwords wrote: post #19

Nah this person is dead wrong. Lets come back in 2 years and check on it. I'm willing to make a reasonable bet on these terms: companies will go even more AI native, will use even more tokens and spend even more money. EDIT: To people downvoting me, please come up with a reasonable bet and lets try to work it out. EDIT 2: $500 bet paid to your account on whether LLM's are going to still be used productively or not. N…

You could both be right.

No, I don't think people will be spending even more money on AI if it is not becoming productive. 2 years is a long time to get used to it.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#25

Post by altcognito »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #11

Coders underestimate the utility of AI in so many boring day to day tasks. If you freelance, that’s where the money is at, not in creating a startup that fills holes in AI offerings or in creating generic slop while hoping for ad money.

The amount of domain specific apps that will be created will likely make excel look like yesterday’s news.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#26

Post by zarzavat »

It really feels like a mass psychosis. I'm not an AI sceptic insofar as I fully expect to get replaced by some future AI system. But what we have now isn't it.

To use a Geohot-inspired analogy, what we have now is like the Google self-driving car of 2010. It works most of the time, yet sometimes fails in unpredictable ways. So you need a safety driver behind the wheel to constantly watch what it's doing (the code review).

A real AI agent would not need a safety driver. We don't have that but many people are basically saying "fuck it, I'm just going to set this car off on its own and see what happens". And sure if you're prototyping it's not dangerous. But for production systems that is dangerous.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#27

Post by Madmallard »

Nition wrote: post #17

With the level of ability that AI is at right now, I've found it useful personally to think of it something like a very good search over existing knowledge. Another step up in searchability in the lineage of reference books, stack overflow, GitHub etc. Programmers are rewriting and reinventing the same techniques more often than any other vocation I can think of, and so we were primed for a really good search over pr…

"The fact that AI can also adapt that prior art to your particular use case makes it even more powerful."

Well that's what everyone is claiming anyway

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#28

Post by Madmallard »

farhanhubble wrote: post #14

I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…

Seems like AI isn't really solving complex bugs and issues (that it itself created) in my MAUI project over the last 18 months.

Seems like it is completely hopeless at doing anything netcode consistency and performance related in game dev. Seems like unique game mechanics it doesn't do well either.

Seems like asking it specific UI stylistic changes is basically like throwing darts at a board and hoping it sticks.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#29

Post by bluegatty »

" Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming"

In other words - they can program, and probably better than you.

I don't like being too critical but this is a really superficial post - as if either 'AI is a Software Engineer - or - It must be Fraud'

It's an extremely powerful tool that is very 'pattern oriented' and with guidance can absolutely write great code - and even across modules given the right basis.

It's also great at so many other tasks - finding bugs in big code bases, doing migrations etc.

It's not going to make very goo architectural decisions for you, and if you're doing anything novel you have to read most of the code ... but that's too be expected.

Re: The Eternal Sloptember

#30

Post by blobbers »

I don't think LeCun is saying they won't be able to program. I think he says we won't hit AGI. Programming does not require AGI; it's a pretty specific skill!

-- I think this article is COPE, if I'm being quite honest. I thought of putting cute analogies, like the C programmers saying the Python and Javascript programmers are not "hardcore" enough... but the truth should be obvious to anyone using LLMs effectively.

-- Current AI is a much better programmer than 100% of people and when directed by someone in that top 10%, it's a force majeur.

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