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I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

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Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#21

Post by supern0va »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #16
atleastoptimal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still 100% willing to concede that Opus 4.8 or even how good Mythos is supposed to be is not yet at the general reasoning ability of top 5% coders or any smart human with a few years of domain experience. However the rate of improvement is so consistent and unrelenting that it seems silly to assume that it will just stop short of human level. Even if algorithmic, research and data quality improvements suddenly s…

Programming requires thinking and LLMs can't think. Therefore LLMs cannot be better than humans at programming.

Your statement seems to be implying (correctly) that LLMs can program, but just not as well as humans. If they're able to program presumably without "thinking" as you seem to be (implicitly) narrowly defining it, then why do you think that limits them to always being sub-par?

It seems like if they can do it, that there's no reason they can't eventually be trained to do it better up to and beyond human performance. It seems strange to suggest that thinking unlocks some nominal margin of "better" specifically that can't be overcome.

All of that aside, even if they can't outperform the top human programmers...what if they get to within a margin where they're still better than most? Isn't a 95th percentile programmer that can run 24/7 and continuously refine its work still going to ultimately come out on top?

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#22

Post by supern0va »

I'm not sure an article that gives one paragraph summaries of the common anti-LLM talking points is really a substantial contribution to the conversation. This is essentially a snarked up version of a "Criticisms" section one would expect to find in a Wikipedia article on modern generative AI. It's fairly hollow unless you've had your head in the sand and are just getting up to speed on the current conversation.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#23

Post by abigail95 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #16
atleastoptimal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still 100% willing to concede that Opus 4.8 or even how good Mythos is supposed to be is not yet at the general reasoning ability of top 5% coders or any smart human with a few years of domain experience. However the rate of improvement is so consistent and unrelenting that it seems silly to assume that it will just stop short of human level. Even if algorithmic, research and data quality improvements suddenly s…

Programming requires thinking and LLMs can't think. Therefore LLMs cannot be better than humans at programming.

Well I guess that settles it. Losing to LLMs in CTF challenges must be in my head.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#24

Post by supern0va »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #2

> I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured crap code in every codebase they touch, that by then they are unable to get any work done without consulting their LLM. And if that heap of collected technical debt becomes so large that even the LLM fails In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than ev…

>If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding.

In my organization, this is already happening. We've been using LLMs to boost our test coverage without touching our human code, then use that as a scaffold to let it go through and refactor, clean up, and optimize, and then validating against both our tests and gold standard test datasets.

In our case, it's made a legacy codebase far more readable to our junior engineers, and the performance improvements (from using an autoresearch-style approach) has resulted in a six figure decrease in our compute spend for the production service we trialed this on.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#25

Post by skydhash »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #14

The thing I don't like about AI doomerism posts is the intellectual dishonesty. We're going to cure cancers we haven't cured before, using AI. We're going to make better diagnoses faster. Adults will be able to accomplish more tasks due to the reduction in the barrier of specialized knowledge and skill. Kids that grow up today will be able to solve their own problems 100x faster and easier than we do today. Companies…

Unless that is done, it’s merely fiction. While the negative impact of LLM is already here. Slop, aggressive scraping, workflow disruption at scale,…

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#26

Post by fzeroracer »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #2

> I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured crap code in every codebase they touch, that by then they are unable to get any work done without consulting their LLM. And if that heap of collected technical debt becomes so large that even the LLM fails In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than ev…

> If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding.

What funny nonsense. This is like saying AI will replace artists because it's better than your average artist.

Software engineering is as much an artform as it is infrastructure. AI cannot approximate even a poor engineer because it cannot capture the full context of a problem to be solved.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#27

Post by atleastoptimal »

fzeroracer wrote: post #26
atleastoptimal wrote: post #2

> I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured crap code in every codebase they touch, that by then they are unable to get any work done without consulting their LLM. And if that heap of collected technical debt becomes so large that even the LLM fails In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than ev…

> If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. What funny nonsense. This is like saying AI will replace artists because it's better than your average artist. Software engineering is as much an artform as it is infrastructure. AI cannot approximate even a poor engineer because it can…

There is an artistic element to coding but claiming it is some sort of unquantifiable abstract mystical thing is silly. There are many metrics, objective and easily measured, that AI can match humans on in code generation.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#28

Post by atleastoptimal »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #16
atleastoptimal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still 100% willing to concede that Opus 4.8 or even how good Mythos is supposed to be is not yet at the general reasoning ability of top 5% coders or any smart human with a few years of domain experience. However the rate of improvement is so consistent and unrelenting that it seems silly to assume that it will just stop short of human level. Even if algorithmic, research and data quality improvements suddenly s…

Programming requires thinking and LLMs can't think. Therefore LLMs cannot be better than humans at programming.

What LLM’s can do now, 99.999% of people 3 years ago would say would only be possible with “thinking”. To claim that LLM’s aren’t thinking is sensible if your definition of thinking is inextricably linked to the chemical processes that occur in human brains, but then it ceases to be a useful definition with respect to evaluating a system’s ability to process information, form connections, and reason via abstraction. It is objectively true that LLM’s can do the latter things.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#29

Post by fzeroracer »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #27
fzeroracer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. What funny nonsense. This is like saying AI will replace artists because it's better than your average artist. Software engineering is as much an artform as it is infrastructure. AI cannot approximate even a poor engineer because it can…

There is an artistic element to coding but claiming it is some sort of unquantifiable abstract mystical thing is silly. There are many metrics, objective and easily measured, that AI can match humans on in code generation.

None of those 'objective' metrics matter as long as the outcomes is incredibly visible and damaging. You say that AI is matching humans, but what people see is apps getting worse with more bugs than ever, an inability to reach anyone that actually gives a shit and second order effects on things like general computing.

It doesn't help that most of these 'metrics' are literally invented by and ran by the companies that benefit the most from said metrics. I've seen this shit at major companies before, because the c-suite loves to invent metrics that make their product look good even if it ignores reality.

Re: I am against GenAI and everything it stands for

#30

Post by jabwd »

daishi55 wrote: post #7
jabwd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try reading the article next time.

It’s kind of a pointless article. Also framed wrong. Generative AI doesn’t “stand for” anything. It’s just a cool technology. Author’s time would be better spent criticizing big tech perhaps.

Actively detaching yourself from the problems of a technology doesn't suddenly make it a pointless exercise. It just puts into question whether you have any moral compass whatsoever.
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