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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

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Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#221

Post by Wobbles42 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #177
tbrownaw wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim isn't that the LLMs are democratized. The claim is that LLMs are causing software development to be democratized. As in, people who want software are more able to make it themselves rather than having to go ask the elites for some. As in, the elites in IT now have less power to govern what software other people can have. (Or alternatively, it's getting harder to stamp out "shadow IT" and all the risks and h…

Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services. The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the…

This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility.

Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#222

Post by NBJack »

entrustai wrote: post #211

[dead]

It has been a while, but I remember a project of mine trying to port a FTP client to a 'secure compiler' (this was long before Rust and probably a distant ancestor of Checked C). In theory, if I could successfully port it, it would be much more resilient to particular kinds of issues (and maybe even attacks). This was in the era where formal proof coding was trying to take off as well in the industry.

After wading through an impressive number of compiler errors (again, it was technically compatible) and attempts to fix them, I eventually surrendered and acknowledged that at the very least, this was beyond my abilities.

I probably would had gotten much further just rewriting it from scratch.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#223

Post by nextaccountic »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #221
nextaccountic wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to state that LLMs "democratize" software development when LLM companies can ban you from software development for any reason or no reason at all, and without recourse of any kind. The HN frontpage currently showcases an Antigravity ban that applied across Gemini, and there's few companies that provide affordable LLM services. The actual elites greatly extended their control over software development, that's the…

This only remains true so long as open weight models lack significant utility. Access to compilers was almost as controlled as access to LLMs to prior to the GNU toolchain and Linux putting a C compiler and unix (ish) machine in the hands of anyone who cared for one.

The problem is compute and memory. I think OpenAI bought RAM supply mainly to choke the ability of consumer hardware to run open weight models (that hit the memory bottleneck before other constraints). Now there's a shortage in other components as well. I don't see how local AI can compete in usefulness.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#224

Post by Wobbles42 »

coppsilgold wrote: post #185

At the moment LLM's tend to work well when you constrain them, and you can craft the constraints with the help of the same LLM in a different session. Then you can verify if the outputted code obeys the constraints in yet another session, and make it adjust the code to obey the constraints. If one of the constraints was to yield highly functional code, you can start refining function by function as well. There is a p…

I keep hearing "this is the worst it's going to be" as if we can expect a monotonic increase in quality and value generation.

Meanwhile, search was better in the past and is at this point the best it's going to be.

Enshittification comes for all things.

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#225

Post by 0xcafefood »

coppsilgold wrote: post #185

At the moment LLM's tend to work well when you constrain them, and you can craft the constraints with the help of the same LLM in a different session. Then you can verify if the outputted code obeys the constraints in yet another session, and make it adjust the code to obey the constraints. If one of the constraints was to yield highly functional code, you can start refining function by function as well. There is a p…

Windows in 1998: this is the worst it's ever going to be.

Uber is 2010: this is the worst it's ever going to be.

There's some triumphalism here. What happens when training data becomes scarcer because open source as a paradigm was killed? What happens when investor cash flows elsewhere and training and inference need to become profitable on their own?

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#226

Post by entrustai »

NBJack wrote: post #222
entrustai wrote: post #211

[dead]

It has been a while, but I remember a project of mine trying to port a FTP client to a 'secure compiler' (this was long before Rust and probably a distant ancestor of Checked C). In theory, if I could successfully port it, it would be much more resilient to particular kinds of issues (and maybe even attacks). This was in the era where formal proof coding was trying to take off as well in the industry. After wading th…

[dead]

Re: The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers

#228

Post by t_mahmood »

edgyquant wrote: post #217
rsynnott wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler: they're basically snake oil. Or at least they are grossly insufficient.

For now they are insufficient, I wouldn’t call them snake oil they solve a real problem with real solutions and will only become more accurate

Who's going to verify it's accurate?
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