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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

#301

Post by holoduke »

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…

Sure. When we come to the point of AI able to make independent innovations we have reached AGI right?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#302

Post by jiawei-sze »

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?

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#303

Post by quikoa »

thesz wrote: post #91
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…

> ...generate answers near the center of existing thought. This is right in the Wikipedia's article on universal approximation theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore... "n the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of ac…

> approximate any continuous function

It wouldn't surprise me if many interesting functions we'd like to approximate aren't continuous at all.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#304

Post by vaginaphobic »

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…

[dead]

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#305

Post by closewith »

scorpioxy wrote: post #222
foxglacier wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're one of the bulk of 1x programmers who aren't doing anything novel. I think it will be like most industries that got very helpful technology - the survivors have to do more sophisticated work and the less capable people are excluded. Then we need more education to supply those sophisticated workers but the existing education burden on professionals is already huge and costly. Will they be spending 10 yea…

To add, just keeping up in this industry was already a problem. I don't know of many professions[1] with such demands on time outside of a work day to keep your skills updated. It was perhaps an acceptable compromise when the market was hot and the salaries high. But I am hearing from more and more people who are just leaving the field entirely labeling it as "not worth it anymore". [1] Medicine may be one example of…

> I don't know of many professions[1] with such demands on time outside of a work day to keep your skills updated.

This is an extremely miopic view (or maybe trolling).

The vast majority of software developers never study, learn, or write any code outside of their work hours.

In contrast, almost all professional have enormous, _legally-required_ upskilling, retraining, and professional competence maintenance.

If you honestly believe that developers have anywhere near the demands (both in terms of time and cost) in staying up to date that other professions have, you are - as politely as I can - completely out-of-touch.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#306

Post by thesz »

quikoa wrote: post #303
thesz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...generate answers near the center of existing thought. This is right in the Wikipedia's article on universal approximation theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore... "n the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of ac…

> approximate any continuous function It wouldn't surprise me if many interesting functions we'd like to approximate aren't continuous at all.

This is what softmax [1] is for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmax_function

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#307

Post by ossopite »

est wrote: post #214
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 tends to accept conventional wisdom I wrote an article on that: Hard Things in Computer Science https://blog.est.im/2026/stderr-04 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669591

Did you write it or did an LLM?

I find some irony in seeing the telltale tropes of conventional LLM writing there

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#308

Post by wiseowise »

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.

I’ve recently taken a look at our codebase, written entirely by humans and found nothing innovative there, on the opposite, I see such brainrot that it makes me curious what kind of biology needed to produce this outcome.

So maybe Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language is safe, majority of so called “software engineers” are sure as hell not. Just like majority of people are NOT splitting atoms.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#309

Post by ath3nd »

wiseowise wrote: post #42
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though, not by just making something up to leap to the conclusion considered most probable, so not sure if the comparison makes sense.

> most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though Citation needed.

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#310

Post by internet_points »

coffeefirst wrote: post #138
bluGill wrote: post #103

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wo…

So I would like to know how it found the proof. Because it’s much more likely to have been plucked from an obscure record where the author didn’t realize this was special than to have been estimated on the fly. This makes LLMs incredibly powerful research tools, which can create the illusion of emergent capabilities.

If you read https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc... it was more of a guided effort to write a program to find examples that helped with moving the proof along
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