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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#241

Post by josefrichter »

nirui wrote: post #230

I'm feeling people are using AI in the wrong way. Current LLM is best used to generate a string of text that's most statically likely to form a sentence together, so from user's perspective, it's most useful as an alternative to manual search engine to allow user to find quick answers to a simple question, such as "how much soda is needed for baking X unit of Y bread", or "how to print 'Hello World' in a 10 times in…

Come on, this shows fundamental lack of understanding and experience on your side.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#242

Post by josefrichter »

Eliezer wrote: post #232

Every time somebody writes an article like this without any dates and without saying which model they used, my guess is that they've simply failed to internalize the idea that "AI" is a moving target; nor understood that they saw a capability level from a fleeting moment of time, rather than an Eternal Verity about the Forever Limits of AI.

Exactly. Basically their thought are invalidated often quicker than they hit the publish button.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#243

Post by _zagj »

_zagj wrote: post #177
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal Note that even MIT requires attribution.

I'm not sure why this was downvoted. The MIT license, which many devs (and every LLM) treat as if it were public domain, still requires inclusion of the license and its copyright notice verbatim in derivative works.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#244

Post by Kon5ole »

nirui wrote: post #230

I'm feeling people are using AI in the wrong way. Current LLM is best used to generate a string of text that's most statically likely to form a sentence together, so from user's perspective, it's most useful as an alternative to manual search engine to allow user to find quick answers to a simple question, such as "how much soda is needed for baking X unit of Y bread", or "how to print 'Hello World' in a 10 times in…

>I'm feeling people are using AI in the wrong way.

I think people struggle to comprehend the mechanisms that lets them talk to computers as if they were human. So far in computing, we have always been able to trace the red string back to the origin, deterministically.

LLM's break that, and we, especially us programmers, have a hard time with it. We want to say "it's just statistics", but there is no intuitive way to jump from "it's statistics" to what we are doing with LLM's in coding now.

>That's why "the easy part" is easy because the easy problem you try to solve is likely already been solved by someone else on GitHub, so the template is already there.

I think the idea that LLM's "just copy" is a misunderstanding. The training data is atomized, and the combination of the atoms can be as unique from a LLM as from a human.

In 2026 there is no doubt LLM's can generate new unique code by any definition that matters. Saying LLM's "just copy" is as true as saying any human writer just copies words already written by others. Strictly speaking true, but also irrelevant.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#245

Post by iLoveOncall »

Eliezer wrote: post #232

Every time somebody writes an article like this without any dates and without saying which model they used, my guess is that they've simply failed to internalize the idea that "AI" is a moving target; nor understood that they saw a capability level from a fleeting moment of time, rather than an Eternal Verity about the Forever Limits of AI.

Funnily enough we have had those comments with every single model release saying "Oh yeah I agree Claude 3 was not good but now with Claude 3.5 I can vibe-code anything".

Rinse and repeat with every model since.

There also ARE intrinsic limits to LLMs, I'm not sure why you deny them?

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#246

Post by latexr »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #229
vohk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...

Assuming that even works from a researcher's perspective, it's working back from a specific goal. There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. It's a convenient criticism of LLMs, but a wrong one. We need to do better.

> There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out.

That’s not true. I’ve seen it happen and remember reports where it was obvious it happened (and trivial to verify) because the LLM reproduced the comments with source information.

Either way, plagiarism doesn’t require one to copy 100% verbatim (otherwise every plagiarist would easily be off the hook). It still counts as plagiarism if you move a space or rename a variable.

https://xcancel.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554

https://xcancel.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

> We need to do better.

I agree. We have to start by not dismissing valid criticisms by appealing to irrelevant technicalities which don’t excuse anything.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#247

Post by pjc50 »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

Regardless of how the copyright suits work out, AI absolutely does not help you evade patent law. However, it does make it possible to spit out sufficiently large amounts of code that it will only be enforced against high-profile cases.

Could someone who has access to a range of models please try prompting them for (a) libdvdcss, the content scrambling keys and (b) some working HDMI HDCP keys?

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#248

Post by IsTom »

aembleton wrote: post #240
nirui wrote: post #230

I'm feeling people are using AI in the wrong way. Current LLM is best used to generate a string of text that's most statically likely to form a sentence together, so from user's perspective, it's most useful as an alternative to manual search engine to allow user to find quick answers to a simple question, such as "how much soda is needed for baking X unit of Y bread", or "how to print 'Hello World' in a 10 times in…

Which is great because then I can use my domain expertise to add value, rather than writing REST boilerplate code.

Having to write boilerplate code is a sign that libraries are just not up to the level they should be. That can be solved the regular old way.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#249

Post by casey2 »

crazygringo wrote: post #141

> Reading and understanding other people's code is much harder than writing code. I keep seeing this sentiment repeated in discussions around LLM coding, and I'm baffled by it. For the kind of function that takes me a morning to research and write, it takes me probably 10 or 15 minutes to read and review. It's obviously easier to verify something is correct than come up with the correct thing in the first place. And…

Reading and thinking you understand other people's code is trivially easy Reading and actually understanding other peoples' code is an unsolved problem

You draw an analogy from the function you wrote to a similar one. Maybe by someone who shared a social role similar to one you had in the past.

It just so happens that most times you think you understand something you aren't bit. Because bugs still exist we know that reading and understanding code can't be easier than writing. Also, in the past it would have take you less than a morning since the compiler was nicer. Anyway it sounds like most of your "writing" process was spent reading and understanding code.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#250

Post by [deleted] »

bayindirh wrote: post #217
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?

While this is from 2022, here you go: https://x.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 I'm sure if someone prompts correctly, they can do the same thing today. LLMs can't generate something they don't know.

[deleted]
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