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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#311

Post by danaris »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116
AuthAuth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

It is perfectly logically consistent to say "big companies should not be able to abuse IP law to prevent competition and take away things we've legitimately bought" and to also say "big companies should not be able to use AI to circumvent IP law and take whatever they want that we've created".

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#312

Post by thedevilslawyer »

latexr wrote: post #246
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that even works from a researcher's perspective, it's working back from a specific goal. There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. It's a convenient criticism of LLMs, but a wrong one. We need to do better.

> There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. That’s not true. I’ve seen it happen and remember reports where it was obvious it happened (and trivial to verify) because the LLM reproduced the comments with source information. Either way, plagiarism doesn’t require one to copy 100% verbatim (otherwise every plagiarist would easily be off the hook). It still counts as plagi…

Ok you win.

You should take your findings to the large media organizations including NYT who've been trying to prove this for years now. Your discovery is probably going to win them their case.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#313

Post by Majromax »

anoncow wrote: post #31
le-mark wrote: post #9

I vibe coded a retro emulator and assembler with tests. Prompts were minimal and I got really great results (Gemini 3). I tried vibe coding the tricky proprietary part of an app I worked on a few years ago; highly technical domain (yes vague don’t care to dox myself). Lots of prompting and didn’t get close. There are literally thousands of retro emulators on github. What I was trying to do had zero examples on GitHub…

I tried to vibe code a technical not so popular niche and failed. Then I broke down the problem as much as I could and presented the problem in clearer terms and Gemini provided working code in just a few attempts. I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms and it may work. Niche industry specific frameworks are a little difficult to work with in vibe code mode. But if you…

> I know this is an anecdote, but try to break down the problem you have in simpler terms and it may work.

This is an expected outcome of how LLMs handle large problems. One of the "scaling" results is that the probability of success depends inversely on the problem size / length / duration (leading to headlines like "AI can now automate tasks that take humans [1 hour/etc]").

If the problem is broken down, however, then it's no longer a single problem but a series of sub-problems. If:

* The acceptance criteria are robust, so that success or failure can be reliably and automatically determined by the model itself, * The specification is correct, in that the full system will work as-designed if the sub-parts are individually correct, and * The parts are reasonably independent, so that complete components can be treated as a 'black box', without implementation detail polluting the model's context,

... then one can observe a much higher overall success rate by taking repeated high-probability shots (on small problems) rather than long-odds one-shots.

To be fair, this same basic intuition is also true for humans, but the boundaries are a lot fuzzier because we have genuine long-term memory and a lifetime of experience with conceptual chunking. Nobody is keeping a million-line codebase in their working memory.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#314

Post by pixl97 »

esafak wrote: post #74

> On a personal project, I asked an AI agent to add a test to a specific file. The file was 500 lines before the request and 100 lines after. I asked why it deleted all the other content. It said it didn't. Then it said the file didn't exist before. I showed it the git history and it apologised, said it should have checked whether the file existed first. Ha! Yesterday an agent deleted the plan file after I told it to…

> I told it to "forget about it" (as in, leave it alone).

I mean in a 'tistic kind of way that makes perfect sense.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#315

Post by mexicocitinluez »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #309
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No projects, unless it's only you working on it, only yourself as the client, and is so rigid in it's scope, it's frankly useless, will have this mythical base. This is naive. I've been building an EMR in the healthcare space for 5 years now as part of an actual provider. We've incrementally released small chunks when they're ready. The codebase I've built is the most consistent codebase I've ever been a part of. I…

Lesson learned. Yes you are right. I am indeed a junior, I made that comment when I was tired honestly with a rushed project. There's no delete button, otherwise I'd have deleted it when I cooled off. Thank you for giving me hope that good code is still being made.

> Thank you for giving me hope that good code is still being made.

So I've been on both sides, and it's why I responded. While you are absolutely correct that those situations do exist, I just wanted to point out it's not always that way. And I felt exactly as you did about software in general until I finally found a place or two that wasn't just a cash printing machine.

And it's pretty awesome. I've come to realize burnout is less about the amount of hours you put in and more about what you're doing during those hours.

It's tough, especially in the beginning. Push through it. Get some experience that allows you to be a bit more selective in what you choose, and fingers-crossed you'll find yourself in the same spot. One common denominator in all of the good jobs I've had was that the leadership in those companies (3 of them) were all tech-focused. Could be a coincidence, but it's a pattern I've seen.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#316

Post by player1234 »

crazygringo wrote: post #141

> Reading and understanding other people's code is much harder than writing code. I keep seeing this sentiment repeated in discussions around LLM coding, and I'm baffled by it. For the kind of function that takes me a morning to research and write, it takes me probably 10 or 15 minutes to read and review. It's obviously easier to verify something is correct than come up with the correct thing in the first place. And…

[dead]

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#317

Post by Aerroon »

AngryData wrote: post #208
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too. The big problem I think comes in when AI is allowed to do things that humans can't. Right now if I publish a book that is 70% somebody else's book but slightly rehashed with certain key phrases and sentences or more as perfect copies, I would get sued and I would lose. Right now though if a…

>I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too.

But the system is never going to get changed if something doesn't give. I thought big companies using copyrighted content in such a way was finally something that might enact change, but apparently the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnight.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#318

Post by LtWorf »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #52

I don't think it makes any part harder. What it does do is expose what people have ignored their whole career: the hard part. The last 15 years of software development has been 'human vibe coding'; copy+pasting snippets from SO without understanding them, no planning, constant rearchitecting, shipping code to prod as long as it runs on your laptop. Now that the AI is doing it, suddenly people want to plan their work…

The people who were doing like that are completely happy with LLMs, it's the others who aren't.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#319

Post by Aerroon »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #195
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

> I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). The main arguments against the current patent system are these: 1) The patent office issues obvious or excessively broad patents when it shouldn't and then you can end up being sued fo…

>The copyright terms are too long.

I posted a video to YouTube the other week. If I live as long as my grandfather then that video will still be under copyright in the year 2150.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#320

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #78
kfarr wrote: post #18

I think it makes the annoying part less annoying? Also re: "I spent longer arguing with the agent and recovering the file than I would have spent writing the test myself." In my humble experience arguing with an LLM is a waste of time, and no-one should be spending time recovering files. Just do small changes one at a time, commit when you get something working, and discard your changes and try again if it doesn't. I…

I don’t think it’s “just” that easy. AI can be great at generating unit tests but it can and will also frequently silently hack said tests to make them pass rather than using them as good indicators of what the program is supposed to be doing.

> AI can be great at generating unit tests but it can and will also frequently silently hack said tests to make them pass rather than using them as good indicators of what the program is supposed to be doing.

Unit testing is my number one use case for gen AI in SWE. I just find the style / concept often slightly different than I would personally do, so I end up editing the whole thing.

But, it’s great at getting me past the unpleasant “activation energy threshold” of having a test written in the first place.

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