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

AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 608 posts

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

#201

Post by jimbokun »

falcor84 wrote: post #195
thwarted wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-yeg…

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

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

#202

Post by jimbokun »

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…

Which is why we should always just write and train our own LLMs.

I mean it’s just software right? What value is there in reusing it if we can just write it ourselves?

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

#203

Post by benreesman »

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…

I'm rounding the corner on a ground's up reimplementation of `nix` in what is now about 34 hours of wall clock time, I have almost all of it on `wf-record`, I'll post a stream, but you can see the commit logs here: https://github.com/straylight-software/nix/tree/b7r6/correct...

Everyone has the same ability to use OpenRouter, I have a new event loop based on `io_uring` with deterministic playbook modeled on the Trinity engine, a new WASM compiler, AVX-512 implementations of all the cryptography primitives that approach theoretical maximums, a new store that will hit theoretical maximums, the first formal specification of the `nix` daemon protocol outside of an APT, and I'm upgrading those specifications to `lean4` proof-bearing codegen: https://github.com/straylight-software/cornell.

34 hours.

Why can I do this and no one else can get `ca-derivations` to work with `ssh-ng`?

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

#205

Post by danielbln »

jimbokun wrote: post #201
falcor84 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-yeg…

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

Claude Code released just over a year ago, agentic coding came into its own maybe in May or June of last year. Maybe give it a minute?

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

#206

Post by jimbokun »

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…

All those people who thought clean well architected code wasn’t important…now with LLMs modifying code it’s even more important.

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

#207

Post by jimbokun »

pseudosavant wrote: post #145
fhub wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context and verifiability. The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the easier it is for an LLM generally.

It’s really interesting. It suggests that intelligence is intelligence, and the electronic kind also needs the same kinds of organization that humans do to quickly make sense of code and modify it without breaking something else.

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

#208

Post by johnfn »

jimbokun wrote: post #201
falcor84 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-yeg…

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

Didn't we have a post the other day saying that the number of "Show HN" posts is skyrocketing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045804

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

#209

Post by danielbln »

stuaxo wrote: post #156
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…

"Writing code is a solved problem" disagree. Yes, there are common parts to everything we do, at the same time - I've been doing this for 25 years and most of the projects have some new part to them.

Novel problems are usually a composite of simpler and/or older problems that have been solved before. Decomposition means you can rip most novel problems apart and solve the chunks. LLMs do just fine with that.

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

#210

Post by ok_dad »

danielbln wrote: post #205
jimbokun wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

Claude Code released just over a year ago, agentic coding came into its own maybe in May or June of last year. Maybe give it a minute?

It’s been a minute and a half and I don’t see the evidence you can task an agent swarm to produce useful software without your input or review. I’ve seen a few experiments that failed, and I’ve seen manic garbage, but not yet anything useful outside of the agent operators imagination.
Post reply on HN