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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

#231

Post by sarchertech »

i_love_retros wrote: post #223
Waterluvian wrote: post #210

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 .

Star trek is the polar opposite of what we are close to in every single way.

Nah. Remember the episode where Geordi asked the computer to create an opponent worthy of Data instead of Sherlock Holmes, and the computer creates sentient Moriarty with the ability to control the ship.

That sounds exactly like something an LLM based system would do.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#232

Post by bluegatty »

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…

"The AI made a compiler, but it wasn't that novel, so AI is not novel" is a very poor rhetorical foundation

Man - just think about what you said

Two years ago that would have been beyond shocking.

If 'AI is making compilers' - then that's 'beyond disruptive'.

It's very true that AI has 'reversion to the mean' characteristics - kind of like everything in life ..

... but it's just unfair to imply that 'AI can't be creative'.

The AI is already very 'creative' (call it 'synthetic creativity' or whatever you want) - but sufficiently 'creative' to do new things, and, it's getting better at that.

It's more than plausible that for a given project 'creativity' was not the goal.

AI will help new language designers try and iterate over new ideas, very quickly, and that alone will be disruptive.

"The AI made a compiler" is an argument for the disruptive power of AI, not against it.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#233

Post by rmunn »

_pdp_ wrote: post #129

Remember Deep Thought, the greatest computer ever built that spent 7.5 million years computing the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? The answer was 42, perfectly correct, utterly useless because nobody understood the question they were asking. That's what happens when you hand everything to a machine without understanding the problem yourself. AI can give you correct answers all d…

The question to which 42 was the answer was, of course, "How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?"

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#234

Post by Calazon »

chongli wrote: post #139
lateforwork wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't have a shred of intelligence. ... They don't understand, only synthesize from the data they were trained on. Couldn't you say that about 99% of humans too?

99% of humans in a particular specialization, sure. It's the 1% who become experts in that specialization who are able to advance the state of the art. But it's a different 1% for every area of expertise! Add it all up and you get a lot more than 1% of humans contributing to the sum of knowledge. And of course, if you don't limit yourself to "advancing the state of the art at the far frontiers of human knowledge" but…

If 1% of the people in each specialization are advancers, and you add up all the specializations together, then 1% of the total number of people are advancers.

Even this assumes that everyone has a specialization in which 1% of people contribute to the sum of human knowledge. I would probably challenge that. There are a lot of people in the world who do not do knowledge-oriented work at all.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#235

Post by clayhacks »

ffsm8 wrote: post #60
sd9 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are very much NIH machines

i'd go one step further, they're going to turbo charge the NIH syndrome and treat every code file as a seperate "here"

Yeah it’s gonna make the bar for good enough here super easy to meet and people will have less reasons to look around outside

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#237

Post by bluGill »

patrickmay wrote: post #228
bluGill wrote: post #103

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wo…

I'd bet if you read the Dragon book (yes, I'm dating myself) you'd have something working in less than three months. More importantly, you would understand every bit of it.

Probably. I know what book you mean and never tried to read it. As I noted elsewhere I could probably brute force something in a week without reading the book. However the ai tried to be better than just a basic translator and that takes more time and exberience than I have.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#238

Post by akomtu »

mlboss wrote: post #226
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…

Humans have the advantange of millions of year of training baked in their genes. There is nothing magical about being a human. Once algorithms have ability to collect data from real world(robotics), ability to do experiments in real world and ability to mimic nature all these advantages will fall away. The rate of change is accelerating. I worry we don't have much time left unless we get serious about merging with ma…

Would you seriously consider merging with cockroaches if a swarm of smart cockroaches invaded Earth?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#239

Post by rkomorn »

akomtu wrote: post #238
mlboss wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans have the advantange of millions of year of training baked in their genes. There is nothing magical about being a human. Once algorithms have ability to collect data from real world(robotics), ability to do experiments in real world and ability to mimic nature all these advantages will fall away. The rate of change is accelerating. I worry we don't have much time left unless we get serious about merging with ma…

Would you seriously consider merging with cockroaches if a swarm of smart cockroaches invaded Earth?

Depends. Do they use vim or emacs?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#240

Post by justonceokay »

realusername wrote: post #35
justonceokay wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most art forms do not have a wildly changing landscape of materials and mediums. In software we are seeing things slow down in terms of tooling changes because the value provided by computers is becoming more clear and less reliant on specific technologies. I figure that all this AI coding might free us from NIH syndrome and reinventing relational databases for the 10th time, etc.

The bar to create the new X framework has just been lowered so I expect the opposite, even more churn.

Yes but no AI will know how to use your new framework so it will not get adopted
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