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Automatic Programming

antirez.com

31–40 of 257 posts

Re: Automatic Programming

#31
post #24
post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

> I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

Yes but you can also ask the developer (wheter in libera.irc, or say if its a foss project on any foss talk, about which books and blogs they followed for code patterns & inspirations & just talk to them)

I do feel like some aspects of this are gonna get eaten away by the black box if we do spec-development imo.

Re: Automatic Programming

#33
post #24
post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

Exactly that. And all the books about, for instance, operating systems, totally based on the work of others: their ideas where collected and documented, the exact algorithms, and so forth. All the human culture worked this way. Moreover there is a strong pattern of the most prolific / known open source developers being NOT against the fact that their code was used for training: they can't talk for everybody but it is a signal that for many this use is within the scope of making source code available.

Re: Automatic Programming

#34

I have 30+ years of industry experience and I've been leaning heavily into spec driven development at work and it is a game changer. I love programming and now I get to program at one level higher: the spec. I spend hours on a spec, working with Claude Code to first generate and iterate on all the requirements, going over the requirements using self-reviews in Claude first using Opus 4.5 and then CoPilot using GPT-5.…

Waterfall can work great when: 1/ the focus is long-term both in terms of knowing that she company can take a few years to get the thing live but also that it will be around for many more years, 2/ the people writing the spec and the code are largely the same people.

Agile was really pushing to make sure companies could get software live before they died (number 1) and to remedy the anti-pattern that appeared with number 2 where non-technical business people would write the (half-assed) spec and then technical people would be expected do the monkey work of implementing it.

Re: Automatic Programming

#35
post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

when you inplement a quick sort, do you credit Hoare in the comments?

Now many will downvote you because this is an algorithm and not some code. But the reality is that programming is in large part built looking at somebody else code / techniques, internalizing them, and reproducing them again with changes. So actually it works like that for code as well.

Re: Automatic Programming

#36
post #20

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift that allows many individuals to do things they could otherwise never do, like if we are now linked in a collective mind, in a certain way. Is not a gift if it was stolen. Anyway, in my opinion the code that was generated by the LLM is yours as long as you're responsible for it. When I look at a PR I'm reading the output of a person, independently of the tools that pers…

It is knowledge, it can't be stolen. It is stolen only in the sense of someone gatekeeping knowledge. Which is as a practice, the least we can say, dubious. because is math stolen ? if you stole math to build your knowledge on top of it, you own nothing and can claim to have been stolen yourself

Re: Automatic Programming

#37
post #24
post #18

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them. > I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate i…

I don't think it's possible to separate any open source contribution from the ones that came before it, as we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. Every developer learns from their predecessors and adapts patterns and code from existing projects.

You can say that about literally everything, yet we have robust systems for protecting intellectual property, anyway.

Re: Automatic Programming

#38
May be a language issue but "Automatic" would imply something happening without any intervention. Also, I dont like that everyone is trying to coin a term for this but there is already a term called lite coding for this sort of a setup, I just coined it.

Re: Automatic Programming

#39
post #30

@antirez if you reading this, it would be insigthful I think if you could share what is your current AI workflow , the tools you use, etc. Thanks!

Thanks, sharing a lot on X / BlueSky + YouTube but once the C course on YouTube will be finished, I'll start a new course on programming in this way. I need a couple more lessons to declare the C course closed (later I'll restart it likely, the advanced part). So I can start with the AP course.

Re: Automatic Programming

#40
post #20

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift that allows many individuals to do things they could otherwise never do, like if we are now linked in a collective mind, in a certain way. Is not a gift if it was stolen. Anyway, in my opinion the code that was generated by the LLM is yours as long as you're responsible for it. When I look at a PR I'm reading the output of a person, independently of the tools that pers…

>Is not a gift if it was stolen.

Yeah, I had a visceral reaction to that statement.

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