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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#201

Post by 01100011 »

I don't expect AI to replace me anytime soon, but...

AI is already letting me care less about the languages I use and focus more on the algorithms. AI helps me write tests. AI suggests improvements and catches bugs before compiling. AI writes helper scripts/tools for me. All of these things are good enough for me to accept paying a few hundred dollars every month, although I don't have to because my employer already does do that for me.

6 months ago I was arguing that AI wasn't very good and code was more precise than english for specifying solutions. The first part is not true anymore for many things I care about. The second is still true but for many things I care about it doesn't matter.

I'm getting tired of articles that try to tell me what to think about AI. "AI is great and will replace all programmers!"... "AI sucks and will ruin your brain and codebase!"... both of these are tired and meaningless arguments.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#202

Post by hparadiz »

js8 wrote: post #200
sally_glance wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me at "fuzzy", but lost me at "clean up" - because that's what I usually have to do after it went on another wild refactoring spree. It's a stochastic thing, maybe you're lucky and it fuzzy-matches exactly what you want, maybe the distributions lead it astray. On the line test, I guess it's highly probable that the joke and a few hundred discussions or blog pieces about it were in it's training data.

I only have experience with Claude Code. If it goes on a spree, the task you are giving it is too big IMHO. It's not a SAT solver (yet) and will have trouble to precisely handle arbitrarily large problems. So you have to lead it a bit, sometimes.

Was recently optimizing an old code base. If I tell it to optimize it does stupid stuff but if I tell it to write profiler first and then slowly attack each piece one at a time then it does really well. Only a matter of time before it does it automatically.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#203

Post by evanmoran »

I’m writing a new type of CRDT that supports move/reorder/remove ops within a tree structure without tombstones. Claude Code is great at writing some of the code but it keeps adding tombstones back to my remove ops because “research requires tombstones for correctness”.

This is true for a usual approach, but the whole reason I’m writing the CRDT is to avoid these tombstones! Anyway, a long story short, I did eventually convince Claude I was right, but to do it I basically had to write a structural proof to show clear ordering and forward progression in all cases. And even then compaction tends to reset it. There are a lot of subtleties these systems don’t quite have yet.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#204

Post by isaachinman »

evanmoran wrote: post #203

I’m writing a new type of CRDT that supports move/reorder/remove ops within a tree structure without tombstones. Claude Code is great at writing some of the code but it keeps adding tombstones back to my remove ops because “research requires tombstones for correctness”. This is true for a usual approach, but the whole reason I’m writing the CRDT is to avoid these tombstones! Anyway, a long story short, I did eventual…

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#205

Post by stevekrouse »

ihodes wrote: post #185
stevekrouse wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're in agreement. My Dijkstra quote is the perfect rejoinder to your Wittgenstein: The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra

That's good—you guys should come out to visit sometime!

Isaac!!!!! I had no idea that was you! Too funny! Emily and I are dying

Yes, we'd love to visit!

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#206

Post by cgh »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #55
rustystump wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While i dont disagree with the larger point here i do disagree that all the code we ever need has been written. There are still soooooo many new things to uncover in that domain.

Like what?

New cryptography algorithms, particularly post-quantum cryptography

New zero-knowledge proofs

Video compression

And so forth.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#207

Post by kstrauser »

coldtea wrote: post #165
kstrauser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s factually untrue. I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on, doing things no one’s ever done with them, and I know this because I ecosystem around these young frameworks. Models can RTFM (and code) and do novel things, demonstrably so.

> I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on Zero preexisting examples of your particular frameworks . Huge number of examples of similar existing frameworks and code patterns in their training set though. Still not a novel thing in any meaningful way, not any more than someone who has coded in dozens of established web frameworks, can write against an unfamiliar to them…

I'm not talking about web frameworks. I'm talking about other frontiers with darn near zero preexisting examples, and no code samples to borrow from in any language or in any similar framework (because there is no such thing).

"LLMs can only emit things they've been trained on" is wholly obsolete.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#208

Post by nextaccountic »

lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

All of this is true of AI systems in 2026

However AI systems in 2026-ε were utterly inadequate at coding

And AI systems in 2026+ε might not have the present limitations

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#209

Post by CrazyStat »

js8 wrote: post #145
lateforwork wrote: post #71

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

> AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. Of course! But that's what makes them so powerful. In 99% of cases that's what you want - something that is conventional. The AI can come up with novel things if it has an agency, and can learn on its own (using e.g. RL). But we don't want that in most use cases…

> This is, of course, a nod to the classic comedy sketch by Vihart

As a big fan of Vi Hart I was surprised to read that she wrote or was involved in that "classic comedy sketch".

As far as I can tell, after a few minutes searching, she was not.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#210

Post by Waterluvian »

I feel pretty strongly about a set of somewhat at-odds thoughts:

- in a non-hobby setting, code is a liability

- I want to solve problems, not write code

- I love writing code as a hobby.

- being paid to do my hobby professionally is amazing.

- I love the idea of the Star Trek Ship’s Computer. To just ask for things and for it to do the work. It sometimes feels like we’re very close.

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