Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 486 posts

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#261

Post by spyder »

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?

District 9 vibes :-)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#262

Post by heavyset_go »

deadbabe wrote: post #4

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

Show them this[1], and if it doesn't sober them up with its absurdity, at least they'll be occupied with something other than treating LinkedIn fluffers as prophets and trying to gaslight you into tanking production

[1] https://github.com/garrytan/gstack

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#263

Post by nurettin »

pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

I still research efficient algorithms. You can describe these to LLMs and they do it without any prior art. They just took away the stomach churners.

In fact, we probably started a communist revolution in software with anthropic/openai streaming your solutions to lesser coders.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#264

Post by eru »

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…

> And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art.

That might be valid, if LLMs stopped improving today.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#265

Post by blackqueeriroh »

komali2 wrote: post #224
ehsanu1 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business problems are essentially neverending. And humans have a broader type of intelligence that LLMs lack but are needed to solve many novel problems. I wouldn't worry.

> Business problems are essentially neverending That feels overly optimistic. LLMs seems on track to automate out basically any "email job" or "spreadsheet job," in which case we'll be looking at higher unemployment numbers than the great depression for at least some period of time. Combine with increased automation... There are a LOT of people in the world and already a not insignificant portion can't find work desp…

Do you really think the billionaires are willing to have consumers so impoverished that they can’t continue to spend large sums of discretionary income buying the things that make the billionaires themselves richer?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#266

Post by Tallain »

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?

In my experience, Codex / ChatGPT are better at telling you where you're wrong, where your assumptions are incomplete, etc., and better at following the system prompts.

But more importantly, as a coding agent, it follows instructions much better. I've frequently had Claude go off and do things I've explicitly told it not to do, or write too much code that did wrong things, and it's more work to corral it than I want to spend.

Codex will follow instructions better. Currently, it writes code that I find a few notches above Claude, though I'm working with C# and SQL so YMMV; Claude is terrible at coming up with decent schema. When your instructions do leave some leeway, I find the "judgment" of Codex to be better than Claude. And one little thing I like a lot is that it can look at adjacent code in your project so it can try to write idiomatically for your project/team. I haven't seen Claude exhibit this behavior and it writes very middle-of-the-road in terms of style and behavior.

But when I use them I use them in a very targeted fashion. If I ask them to find and fix a bug, it's going to have as much or more detail as a full bug report in my own ticketing system. If it's new code, it comes with a very detailed and long spec for what is needed, what is explicitly not needed, the scope, the constraints, what output is expected, etc., like it's a wiki page or epic for another real developer to work from. I don't do vague prompts or "agentic" workflow stuff.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#267

Post by Philpax »

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…

> 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.

This feels like an unfair comparison to me; the objective of the compiler was not to be innovative, it was to prove it can be done at all. That doesn't demonstrate anything with regards to present or future capabilities in innovation.

As others have mentioned, it's not entirely clear to me what the limit of the agentic paradigm is, let alone what future training and evolution can accomplish. AlphaDev and AlphaEvolve ddemonstrate that it is possible to combine the retained knowledge of LLMs with exploratory abilities to innovate in both programming and mathematics; there's no reason to believe that it'll stop there.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#268

Post by stephenr »

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…

With the way modern development often goes this essentially means using spicy autocomplete for code is a just a fast track to the cargo culted solutions of whatever day the model was trained.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#269

Post by ehsanu1 »

js8 wrote: post #197
ehsanu1 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shows it knew this bit of satire more than anything. Also, the problem as stated isn't actually constrained enough to be unsolvable: https://youtu.be/B7MIJP90biM

Feel free to ask Claude about any other contradictory request. I use Claude Code and it often asks clarifying questions when it is unsure how to implement something, or or autocorrects my request if something I am asking for is wrong (like a typo in a filename). Of course sometimes it misunderstands; then you have to be more specific and/or divide the work into smaller pieces. Try it if you haven't.

I have. In fact, I've been building my own coding agent for 2 years at this point (i.e. before claude code existed). So it's fair to say I get the point you're making and have said all the same stuff to others. But this experience has taught me that LLMs, in their current form, will always have gaps: it's in the nature of the tech. Every time a new model comes out, even the latest opus versions, while they are always better, I always eventually find their limits when pushing them hard enough and enough times to see these failure modes. Anything sufficiently out of distribution will lead to more or less nonsensical results.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#270

Post by Capricorn2481 »

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #265
komali2 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business problems are essentially neverending That feels overly optimistic. LLMs seems on track to automate out basically any "email job" or "spreadsheet job," in which case we'll be looking at higher unemployment numbers than the great depression for at least some period of time. Combine with increased automation... There are a LOT of people in the world and already a not insignificant portion can't find work desp…

Do you really think the billionaires are willing to have consumers so impoverished that they can’t continue to spend large sums of discretionary income buying the things that make the billionaires themselves richer?

The billionaires are already billionaires. People like Sam Altman are not building a doomsday bunker because they believe in the longevity of established society. They are doing it because they've already won and are taking their ball.
Post reply on HN