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Automatic Programming

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Re: Automatic Programming

#231

Post by kevmo314 »

rellfy wrote: post #109

I arrived at a very similar conclusion since trying Claude Code with Opus 4.5 (a huge paradigm shift in terms of tech and tools). I've been calling it "zen coding", where you treat the codebase like a zen garden. You maintain a mental map of the codebase, spec everything before prompting for the implementation, and review every diff line by line. The AI is a tool to implement the system design, not the system designe…

> review every diff line by line

If you're this meticulous is it really any faster than writing code manually? I have found that in cases where I do care about the line-by-line it's actually slower to run it through Claude. It's only where I want to shovel it out that it's faster.

Re: Automatic Programming

#233

Post by its_ubuntu »

heavyset_go wrote: post #209
amelius wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet nobody is changing their licenses to exclude AI use. So I assume they are OK with it.

Licenses mean nothing if AI training on your data is fair use, which courts have yet to determine. You can have a license that says "NO AI TRAINING EVER" in no uncertain terms and it would mean absolutely nothing because fair use isn't dictated by licenses.

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Re: Automatic Programming

#234

Post by its_ubuntu »

lenkite wrote: post #220
slim wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about the expression of knowledge. What is used in AI models is the knowledge from that expression. That code is not copied as is, instead knowledge is extracted from it and used to produce similar code. Copy right does not apply, IMHO

So you can train AI on Disney Movies to generate and sell your own disney movies because "knowledge is extracted" from it ? Betcha that won't fly in the courts. Here is "Slim Cinderella" - trained and extracted from all Disney Cinderella movies!

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Re: Automatic Programming

#235

Post by its_ubuntu »

lou1306 wrote: post #225
logicprog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with GP, and so, yes, I release everything I do — code and the hundreds of thousands of painstakingly researched, drafted, deeply thought through words of writing that I do — using a public domain equivalent license (to ensure it's as free as possible), the zero clause BSD.

That's commendable, but unfortunately I asked GP.

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Re: Automatic Programming

#236

Post by its_ubuntu »

zahlman wrote: post #123
jll29 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. There are subtle legal differences between "free open source" licensing and putting things in the public domain. If you use an open source license, you could forbi…

> If you use an open source license, you could forbid LLM training Established OSS licenses are all from before anyone imagined that LLMs would come into existence, let alone train on and then generate code. Discrimination on purpose is counter to OSI principles ( https://opensource.org/osd ): > 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a…

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Re: Automatic Programming

#237

Post by its_ubuntu »

zahlman wrote: post #127
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard truth is that if you're big enough (and the original creator is small enough) you can just do whatever you want and to hell with what any license says about it.

To my understanding, the expensive lawyers hired by the biggest people around, filtered through layers of bureaucracy and translated to software teams, still result in companies mostly avoiding GPL code.

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Re: Automatic Programming

#238

Post by paodealho »

keyle wrote: post #112
laserlight wrote: post #32

Have we ever had autocomplete programming? Then why have a new term for LLM-assisted programming?

Everyone wants to take credit for a naming convention, become part of history I suppose! I'll do my own, narcissistically: Typeless programming!

Only if you exclude those long pages of markdown spec you had to type!

Re: Automatic Programming

#239

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

janstice wrote: post #222
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air Only if you have no idea what the results will be. Professional engineering takes parts with specific tolerances, tested for a specific application, using a tried-and-true design, combines them into the solution that other people have already made, and watches it work, exactly as predicted. That's how we can build a skyscraper "the first time" and have…

But when you build a skyscraper you don’t one shot a completed building that stays static its entire life - you build a set of empty floors that someone else designs & fits out, sometimes years after the building as a whole is commissioned, usually several times in the lifespan of the superstructure. And in the fitting out there often are things that exist only to get customer feedback (of sales), such as model apart…

Are you running a mattress factory? Or are you trying to run a hotel, and need mattresses, so you build a mattress factory? The "software industry" is that - dysfunctional with perverse incentives.

We should not be building the same software over and over and over and over. I've built the same goddamn app 10 times in my career. And I watch other people build it, making the same old mistakes over and over, like a thousand other people haven't already gone through this and could easily tell you how not to do it. In other engineering professions, they write that stuff down, and say "follow this plan" because it avoids all the big problems. Thank god we have a building code and not "agile buildings".

Agile sucks because it incentivizes those obvious mistakes and reinventing of wheels. Planning allows someone to stop and look up the correct way of building the skyscraper before it's 100 feet in the air with a cracked foundation.

Re: Automatic Programming

#240

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

aglavine wrote: post #52
AdamN wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterfall can work great when: 1/ the focus is long-term both in terms of knowing that she company can take a few years to get the thing live but also that it will be around for many more years, 2/ the people writing the spec and the code are largely the same people. Agile was really pushing to make sure companies could get software live before they died (number 1) and to remedy the anti-pattern that appeared with nu…

No. Agile core is the feedback loop. I can't believe people still don't get it. Feedback from reality is always faster than guessing on the air. Waterfall is never great. The only time when you need something else than Agile is when lives are at stake, you need there formal specifications and rigorous testing. SDD allows better output than traditional programming. It is similar to waterfall in the sense that the mode…

Royce's Waterfall paper that coined the term is all about a series of short feedback loops, like water bouncing off of rocks on the way down.
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