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

The Coming Loop

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 322 posts

Re: The Coming Loop

#201

Post by AndrewKemendo »

weego wrote: post #160

What does any of that mean in practice? it's just rambling about abstract concepts that seem to be designed to hint at a bigger picture, when it's just getting AI to write code for you. Is this where it's going? Having to mystify our roles so it seems like we're still the thought leaders when actually we're just becoming pseudo-teachers that try and herd our group of AI idiots to the right conclusion for us so we don…

I’m sorry but this response is just absolutely ridiculous and is not giving anything near the respect to the author that you should have.

You’re just rambling and ranting about philosophical things and have basically nothing to say about the technical or engineering points that the author wrote.

This is a entirely emotional appeal and doesn’t actually engage the author where the author is engaging in the audience.

If you look further down thread there’s dozens of comments that are engaging with the content and not being hyperbolic about all this cyber shamanism or whatever you wanna call it

Re: The Coming Loop

#202

Post by zahlman »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #88

Part of the problem is that models don't have a strong sense of taste, part of the problem is that the context in which projects exist is incompletely represented in the LLM context, and part of the problem is that LLMs tend to be myopic. The lack of taste can be mitigated to some degree by improved training, though taste is not a stationary distribution in humans (see trends/fads/etc), we can at least better track t…

> The lack of taste can be mitigated to some degree by improved training, though taste is not a stationary distribution in humans (see trends/fads/etc), we can at least better track the cutting edge.

The point of "taste" is not to copy from others, even if you can somehow filter out the trends and fads. And really, that filtering comes from personal experience anyway.

Re: The Coming Loop

#204

Post by zahlman »

meowface wrote: post #16
ramon156 wrote: post #4

Quoting the creator of CC holds little value in my opinion. I too call my product good. > opting out of this fully machine-driven future may not be an option. I am contemplating whether I want to stay inside this rat race. I completely agree with the conclusion of this blog post, by the way. I feel uneasy, and I do not enjoy the work I deliver using LLMs. I think OP did a really good job on capturing at least my curr…

I and my friends go back and forth, every day, on whether coding with LLMs is a net plus or a net negative. I'm at the point where I think it's dumb to not do it but also dumb to do it. I have no real answer. I have settled on using LLMs for everything but to spend more time honing the quality and cleanliness with LLM passes afterwards than I generally would have taken to write it well myself in the first place. This…

> but it somehow lets me bypass akrasia… I get more done in three months even if I get less done in a day.

I think this is going to be a big deal for many programmers in the long run. "Flow" comes from feeling faster as much as it does from actually being faster in the moment. Perhaps more. And yesterday's good experience leads to today's motivation.

Re: The Coming Loop

#205

Post by whazor »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #195

I think what is going to happen is revival of "Methodology". "Methodology" was a big thing in the past just before we got into "Agile Extreme Coding", instead of trying to model the big picture of SW development projects just jump into coding agilly. Implement it feature-by-feature Granted the methdologies proposed ( See: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/rational-soft-arch/9.7.0?topic=m... ) may have been too heavy and no…

Yes, I believe in reinventing methodologies for the rise of agents.

Before even discussing with my team whether something is a good idea, I can have a full prototype in a new branch within one morning. But then use it as a proof of concept and delete the code.

Another example: agents can generate full test coverage. Including mocking external dependencies and user behavior. Also all in one morning.

Why reinvent methodologies? The cost functions have changed. And agents add new problems, such as hallucinations and tech debt. I think reinventing is a good word since these processes already exist. But the emphasis would shift toward particular parts, making some of them much more mandatory.

Re: The Coming Loop

#206

Post by raidicy »

Hilarious that Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thompson have been saying you need a human in the loop from the beginning.

And now finally we discovered that we need to put a human in the loop.

Re: The Coming Loop

#207

Post by kixiQu »

weego wrote: post #160

What does any of that mean in practice? it's just rambling about abstract concepts that seem to be designed to hint at a bigger picture, when it's just getting AI to write code for you. Is this where it's going? Having to mystify our roles so it seems like we're still the thought leaders when actually we're just becoming pseudo-teachers that try and herd our group of AI idiots to the right conclusion for us so we don…

This is not rambling and it is not abstract. The content here is about the second-order effects of "getting AI to write code for you" in less supervised ways. I'll cede the author could have polished this to more concise effect, but at the level it's at, a reader's failure to understand the substance doesn't imply there's mystification going on.

Re: The Coming Loop

#208

Post by zahlman »

johnwheeler wrote: post #168

What is a loop in simple terms?

Pretty much the same with LLMs as in other contexts. You set up a system where LLM output is used as input (a new prompt) as well. Or you have an external system that repeatedly prompts an LLM to "continue" with what it was doing before, perhaps examining some test results to massage the context window first, etc.

Re: The Coming Loop

#209

Post by zahlman »

Schiendelman wrote: post #146
wavemode wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've also had some management pressures where they think people are wasting time looking at code. I feel like this is the actual problem, but it's not being talked about enough. Logically, it shouldn't matter how a piece of code was written. It either meets our engineering standards or it doesn't. That's what code review is for. But what has actually happened is that, because we have AI now, many organizations hav…

Management can't "push back on such things". However, they can institute better quality assurance practices.

Pardon? Management can't tell employees "stop letting your agent submit 10,000 line PRs unattended or you're fired"?

Re: The Coming Loop

#210

Post by mikepurvis »

kixiQu wrote: post #207
weego wrote: post #160

What does any of that mean in practice? it's just rambling about abstract concepts that seem to be designed to hint at a bigger picture, when it's just getting AI to write code for you. Is this where it's going? Having to mystify our roles so it seems like we're still the thought leaders when actually we're just becoming pseudo-teachers that try and herd our group of AI idiots to the right conclusion for us so we don…

This is not rambling and it is not abstract. The content here is about the second-order effects of "getting AI to write code for you" in less supervised ways. I'll cede the author could have polished this to more concise effect, but at the level it's at, a reader's failure to understand the substance doesn't imply there's mystification going on.

I agree. I think the comparison made elsewhere in the thread to Yegge's recent AI delusions/projects is especially unfair.

Armin is actively grappling with the implications of AI-produced code on the software engineering craft, and trying to reflect on how to responsibly adopt the best parts of the new world. He's recognizing that the AI skeptical/cautious are still massively impacted by everyone else using tools that run or are built this way.

I really appreciated the piece, and I'm glad we can still publish work in progress thoughts that don't have a clear thesis and call to action.

Post reply on HN