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The Tower Keeps Rising

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Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#251

Post by gart12one »

theshrike79 wrote: post #247
zahlman wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, of course it does. It's strange to me that this can be asked.

Why? How far do you take this, do you inspect the inside of every single thing and program you use? Your microwave promises to heat your food at 800W for 1 minute, do you open it up and measure the magnetometer strength? Do you double-check the timer that it's accurate? You want a program that takes in A and returns B within X milliseconds, I deliver it to you. Do you spend the time going through the whole program li…

I think the difference here is that 'passing all the tests' isn't the same as satisfying the contract that the consumer is paying for. Even the best test suites won't cover all of the workflows a user might take.

Being pedantic here, but the two scenarios mentioned have regulations as well with repercussions for those products not satisfying their base requirements, whereas a lot of software is the wild-west (I won't be prosecuted for my software not actually working, in most cases).

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#252

Post by FuckButtons »

conartist6 wrote: post #20
Animats wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…

Why would it? It has optimized what it was built to optimize: this is the token-selling industry. Take note that the people hawking the dream of a gold rush are not actually mining but selling shovels

While you’re not wrong, this is also simply mechanical, the context window is the root problem here, if the llm doesn’t happen to have read implementation n of a thing that it needs that session, well now you have n+1 implementations.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#253

Post by theshrike79 »

gart12one wrote: post #251
theshrike79 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? How far do you take this, do you inspect the inside of every single thing and program you use? Your microwave promises to heat your food at 800W for 1 minute, do you open it up and measure the magnetometer strength? Do you double-check the timer that it's accurate? You want a program that takes in A and returns B within X milliseconds, I deliver it to you. Do you spend the time going through the whole program li…

I think the difference here is that 'passing all the tests' isn't the same as satisfying the contract that the consumer is paying for. Even the best test suites won't cover all of the workflows a user might take. Being pedantic here, but the two scenarios mentioned have regulations as well with repercussions for those products not satisfying their base requirements, whereas a lot of software is the wild-west (I won't…

But what the customer is paying for is defined somewhere, right? Preferably in writing.

You can give that to an agent and have it confirm the application fulfills the spec. Just like a human would have to.

And if the specific test can’t be automated, why? Is it impossible to automate or just inconvenient?

Granted there are immaterial things that we can’t automatically test yet like how the application feels to use. “Snappy” or “smooth” can’t really be quantified with code.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#254

Post by mpweiher »

Animats wrote: post #13
tekacs wrote: post #6

I've said for a long time that composability in software is a bit like playing Tetris: the lines have to clear. I feel like that gives an even more literal tower-rising metaphor, and that's what it feels like people using agents naively (and software engineers of lower skill or earlier-career), end up violating. Agents are getting better at folding things into themselves, especially if you direct them to... but unfor…

The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely…

We need programming languages that can express the problems at densities similar to the English language prompts.

So: better modularity.

https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/02/why-architecture-oriente...

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#255

Post by jambalaya8 »

permalac wrote: post #212
jambalaya8 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemme guess, you were in favour of monolithic systemd too?

All have its space. Small team, do monolith or you'll stop moving. Big teams, be wary of Conway's law, and don't fight it, probably some services will emerge.

My laptops used to be lean, mean fighting machines until that happened.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#256

Post by mpweiher »

zeafoamrun wrote: post #216
marcus_holmes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a vaguely-relevant war story. 1998 - Huge business, re-writing some vital piece of the platform in the middle of Y2K. Contract coders are expensive but also the only available people to throw at this. The architect had mapped out the entire system down to class/method level. They'd produced a huge list of classes and methods that needed to be built. So the company hired a bunch of contract coders to build said…

Crazy to think that if it was specced out so well, a modern LLM would make short work of the whole thing. The things we used to get paid for!

Poe's law continues to be a bitch...

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#257

Post by mynameisbilly »

zawaideh wrote: post #85

This is exactly what Marx meant by labourers being alienated from their work because none of them understood anymore how the repetitive task they did factored into the product sold. We are going through a transition from a guild based software production with primitive division of labour to a machinery based one where AI is the steam engine and the job of the engineer is to build the production line, be the mechanic…

This is an interesting comparison, but the resulting product of an LLM aren't deterministic in the same way machinery in an assembly line is. You typically expect to get the exact same thing every time as an assembly line worker, and it's usually fairly obvious when something is wrong or off.

So while I agree with your invocation of Marx and the alienation of labor, but I don't know if we really can compare it to the automation of manual labor.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#258

Post by [deleted] »

zephen wrote: post #240
kazinator wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even many people who programmed enough lisp to have their minds blown and expanded still prefer not to program in lisp. I can guarantee you that most of these simply didn't go far enough; they had their "minds blown" with too little. They latched onto a highlight or two, found a way of sort doing that in C++ or Javascript and moved on. There are people who have had their "minds blown" by time/mass dilation of speci…

> I can guarantee you that most of these simply didn't go far enough; And I can guarantee that I knew, when I wrote my comment, that I was summoning this very "No true Scotsman" argument. > they couldn't work out how far a canon ball will land fired at a 45 degree angle with a certain velocity, though they can crack jokes about Schrödinger's cat. It always superciliously starts with how true lisp people are the most…

[deleted]

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#259

Post by kazinator »

zephen wrote: post #240
kazinator wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even many people who programmed enough lisp to have their minds blown and expanded still prefer not to program in lisp. I can guarantee you that most of these simply didn't go far enough; they had their "minds blown" with too little. They latched onto a highlight or two, found a way of sort doing that in C++ or Javascript and moved on. There are people who have had their "minds blown" by time/mass dilation of speci…

> I can guarantee you that most of these simply didn't go far enough; And I can guarantee that I knew, when I wrote my comment, that I was summoning this very "No true Scotsman" argument. > they couldn't work out how far a canon ball will land fired at a 45 degree angle with a certain velocity, though they can crack jokes about Schrödinger's cat. It always superciliously starts with how true lisp people are the most…

Ha! For a second it looked like there was a debate here.

Re: The Tower Keeps Rising

#260

Post by slopinthebag »

jdw64 wrote: post #214
slopinthebag wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a lot of people, LLM's are actually doing a better job than what they are capable of. I do worry that they are the people first up for replacement, since they don't really provide much value that the LLM itself can't provide. There isn't much point in paying a human to prompt an LLM if you could do it yourself, the value is in someone with the skill and judgement to both prompt it correctly and validate the outpu…

I see that point differently. Typing code and using AI well are distinctly different things. I've dealt with Chinese subcontracting managers before. But managing people is different from doing code reviews and writing code. I think these two are fundamentally similar but different. Of course, it's undeniable that you need a certain level of skill to verify the output, which is why I practice typing for an hour every…

You sound like you’re young and you don’t have a ton of experience programming yet. Id be cautious about outsourcing your knowledge and skill development to LLMs at this time. There is a massive gap between what a beginner and expert can achieve with LLMs - in fact I’ve seen plenty of people who’s use of AI results in a net negative! You need to develop your skills and knowledge in order to best make use of LLMs. You can even use the LLMs to learn and grow, but I think it’s dangerous for your career to have the mentality that AI is and will always be a better programmer.

Anyways just my opinion, I don’t mean it in an offensive way at all, I just think that people need to be careful about how they approach their usage of LLMs. Even experienced people need to be careful and ensure they don’t lose their own skills.

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