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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

#251

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

> You can prod AI systems to think critically

There is no critical thought, you can't prod an LLM to do such a thing. Even CoT is just the LLM producing text that looks like it could be a likely response based on what it generated before.

Sometimes that text looks like critical thought, but it does not at all reflect the logical method or means the AI used to generate it. It's just riffing.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#253

Post by TheTaytay »

isaachinman wrote: post #204
evanmoran wrote: post #203

I’m writing a new type of CRDT that supports move/reorder/remove ops within a tree structure without tombstones. Claude Code is great at writing some of the code but it keeps adding tombstones back to my remove ops because “research requires tombstones for correctness”. This is true for a usual approach, but the whole reason I’m writing the CRDT is to avoid these tombstones! Anyway, a long story short, I did eventual…

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

Please do elaborate. I’ve only tried switching to codex once or twice, and it’s been probably 3 months since I last tried it, but I was underwhelmed each time. Is it better on novel things in your experience?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#254

Post by morgoths_bane »

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…

I mean this genuinely; that was a very well written piece. Well said!

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#255

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

heavyset_go wrote: post #251
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…

> You can prod AI systems to think critically There is no critical thought, you can't prod an LLM to do such a thing. Even CoT is just the LLM producing text that looks like it could be a likely response based on what it generated before. Sometimes that text looks like critical thought, but it does not at all reflect the logical method or means the AI used to generate it. It's just riffing.

Sure but there's somebody somewhere who had a relevant critical thought and the LLM can find it and adapt it to your case. That's good enough much of the time.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#256

Post by bluegatty »

agentultra wrote: post #248
bluegatty wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 crea…

The LLM didn’t make a compiler. It generated code that could plausibly implement one. Humans made the compilers it was trained on. It took many such examples and examples of other compilers and thousands of books and articles and blog posts to train the model. It took years of tweaking, fitting, aligning and other tricks to make the model respond to queries with better, more plausible output. It never made, invented,…

Humans learned from prior art, and most of their inventions are modifications of prior art. You a are after all, mostly a biological machine.

The point is - there are so many combinations and permutations of reality, that AI can easily create synthetically novel outcomes by exploring those options.

It's just wrong to suggest that 'it was all in some textbook'.

"here’s just no reason to believe that it is anything more than it is "

It's almost ridiculous at face value, given that millions of people are using it for more than 'helping to write react apps every day'.

It's far more likely that you've come to this conclusion because you're simply not using the tools creatively, or trying to elicit 'synthetic creativity' out of the AI, because it's frankly not that hard, and the kinds of work that it does goes well beyond 'automation'.

This is not an argument, it's the lived experience of large swaths of individuals.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#257

Post by davidanekstein »

TheTaytay wrote: post #253
isaachinman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

Please do elaborate. I’ve only tried switching to codex once or twice, and it’s been probably 3 months since I last tried it, but I was underwhelmed each time. Is it better on novel things in your experience?

My experience is that it is much more terse and realistic with its feedback, and more thoughtful generally. I trust its positive acknowledgements of my work more than claude, whose praise I have been trained to be extremely skeptical of.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#259

Post by JSR_FDED »

yabutlivnWoods wrote: post #225
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 innovation isn't the output but the provenance. We don't necessarily need a Chris Lattner to make a compiler now. End of the day Chris Lattner is a single individual, not a magic being. A single individual posting submarine ads for his cleverness in the knowledge work subfield of language compilers. Of course he is going to drag the competition. Languages are abstraction over memory addresses to provide something…

So someone who is a proven expert in his field, who writes a detailed, well-reasoned, balanced assessment of the state of compiler development and the role LLMs play in this, is according to you, “A single individual posting submarine ads for his cleverness in the knowledge work subfield of language compilers. Of course he is going to drag the competition.”?

Chris Lattner has forgotten more about language and compiler design than most of us will know in a lifetime. If you’re going to mis-characterize him you need to bring more to the table than some reductionist pseudo intelligent babbling.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#260

Post by protocolture »

j_bum wrote: post #87
ffsm8 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For others like me who know “NIH” to be “National Institutes of Health”… “NIH” here refers to “Not Invented Here” Syndrome, or a bias against things developed externally.

See I thought they were the same thing, considering the Queensland Health payroll database issues, I assumed someone coined the term assuming it would clobber Health acronyms.
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