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

271–280 of 486 posts

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#271

Post by kristiandupont »

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?

They may not be, but even so they might find themselves in a prisoner's dilemma. I wouldn't rely in this logic for peace of mind.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#272

Post by Capricorn2481 »

esafak wrote: post #146
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong. People are just drinking the AI kool-aid too hard to realize that the emperor has no clothes.

How come it works with humans? Give seasoned engineers a spec and they'll create a working product. Many software companies are created and guided on the verbal directions of people who don't code.

Because humans are fundamentally different from LLMs regardless of how much people draw the comparison.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#273

Post by operatingthetan »

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?

What evidence is there otherwise? That seems to be exactly what they want.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#274

Post by bitwize »

gedy wrote: post #18

When I started my professional life in the 90s, we used Visual J++ (Java) and remember all this damn code it generated to do UIs... I remember being aghast at all the incomprehensible code and "do not modify" comments - and also at some of the devs who were like "isn't this great?". I remember bailing out asap to another company where we wrote Java Swing and was so happy we could write UIs directly and a lot less cod…

I remember the first time trying to work with MFC. I was aghast at all the generated garbage the IDE produced. But I guess if you're a drone working in an insurance company somewhere, you don't want to have to deal with message loops, window classes, WinMain, and all that, so you would welcome all that stuff just being handled for you while you just filled in the application-specific code. To me, that was the fun part of programming against the Windows API. And it was gonna come bite you anyway, so in for a penny...

Extrapolate to the present day with LLM-generated code. I'm sure you're not far off the actual mark.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#276

Post by eichin »

Got flashbacks to 1999 from some of those charts - I had a pair of design charts (partly for arguments, partly for onboarding) that were 17 nodes each and a lot of lines. (A coworker snuck in some extra nodes and an arrow labeled "troops move through Austria" and it was a while before anyone other than me noticed - yeah, that kind of chart.) This is not a lesson in design complexity - the design was pretty tight for what it did, even if you go back and read the patents - it's a lesson in the use of abstraction for explanation complexity and that you can break up the presentation more sanely than the code-on-disk actually is, you just have to stop and think about it (and have a bit more empathy for the people you're presenting to than, well, anyone in 1999 actually had :-)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#279

Post by DeathArrow »

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…

>AI systems are trained on vast bodies of human work and generate answers near the center of existing thought. A human might occasionally step back and question conventional wisdom, but AI systems do not do this on their own. They align with consensus rather than challenge it. As a result, they cannot independently push knowledge forward.

But AI companies keep telling us AGI is 6 months into the future.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#280

Post by komali2 »

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?

I've read a theory that as the ultra rich divide their wealth among their descendants, eventually they capture so much of it among their families that trying to extract more from the working class is hardly worth the effort. The only option then, for the descendants of the ultra wealthy, is to start turning on each other. The theory states that the last time this happened was WWI.
Post reply on HN