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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#311

Post by weego »

Tade0 wrote: post #250
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

And not this or any existing generation of people. We're bad a determining want vs need, being specific, genericizing our goals into a conceptual framework of existing patterns and documenting & explaining things in a way that gets to a solid goal.

The idea that the entire top down processes of a business can be typed into an AI model and out comes a result is again, a specific type of tech person ideology that sees the idea of humanity as an unfortunate annoyance in the process of delivering a business. The rest of the world see's it the other way round.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#312

Post by lpapez »

Tade0 wrote: post #250
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

If you only realized how ridiculous your statement is, you never would have stated it.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#313

Post by bschwarz »

benreesman wrote: post #215
benreesman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rounding the corner on a ground's up reimplementation of `nix` in what is now about 34 hours of wall clock time, I have almost all of it on `wf-record`, I'll post a stream, but you can see the commit logs here: https://github.com/straylight-software/nix/tree/b7r6/correct... Everyone has the same ability to use OpenRouter, I have a new event loop based on `io_uring` with deterministic playbook modeled on the Trini…

And it's teachable. Here's a colleague who is nearly done with a correct reimplementation of the OpenCode client/server API: https://github.com/straylight-software/weapon-server-hs Here's another colleague with a Git forge that will always work and handle 100x what GitHub does per infrastructure dollar while including stacked diffs and Jujitsu support as native in about 4 days: https://github.com/straylight-software/…

Please check your links, 3/7 don't work and it's the most interesting ones.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#314

Post by zombot »

alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.

A human might have taste, but AI certainly doesn't.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#315

Post by Tade0 »

p-e-w wrote: post #260
Tade0 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

You’re committing the classic fallacy of confusing mechanics with capabilities. Brains are just electrons and chemicals moving through neural circuits. You can’t infer constraints on high-level abilities from that.

This goes both ways. You can't assume capabilities based on impressions. Especially with LLMs, which are purpose built to give an impression of producing language.

Also, designers of these systems appear to agree: when it was shown that LLMs can't actually do calculations, tool calls were introduced.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#316

Post by LoganDark »

michaelscott wrote: post #303
LoganDark wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's summarizing, which current models are known to be relatively good at. It is true that models can happen to produce a sound reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso than humans, anyway). There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a deterministic result without significantly quashing the output space (excluding most correct solutions).…

Nothing you've said about reasoning here is exclusive to LLMs. Human reasoning is also never guaranteed to be deterministic, excluding most correct solutions. As OP says, they may not be reasoning under the hood but if the effect is the same as a tool, does it matter? I'm not sure if I'm up to date on the latest diffusion work, but I'm genuinely curious how you see them potentially making LLMs more deterministic? The…

The way I imagine greedy sampling for autoregressive language models is guaranteeing a deterministic result at each position individually. The way I'd imagine it for diffusion language models is guaranteeing a deterministic result for the entire response as a whole. I see diffusion models potentially being more promising because the unit of determinism would be larger, preserving expressivity within that unit. Additionally, diffusion language models iterate multiple times over their full response, whereas autoregressive language models get one shot at each token, and before there's even any picture of the full response. We'll have to see what impact this has in practice; I'm only cautiously optimistic.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#317

Post by recroad »

guelo wrote: post #242
eeixlk wrote: post #240

Tech workers were pretty anti union for a long time, because we were all so excellent we were irreplaceable. I wonder if that will change.

Too late. Actors' unions shut Hollywood down 3 years ago over AI. SWEs would have had to make their move 10 years ago to be able to live up to this moment.

Yup, it’s the classic. “First they came for the…”

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#318

Post by sensanaty »

hintymad wrote: post #65

In the latest interview with Claude Code's author: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lennys-podcast-product... , Boris said that writing code is a solved problem. This brings me to a hypothetical question: what if engineers stop contributing to open source, in which case would AI still be powerful enough to learn the knowledge of software development in the future? Or is the field of computer science plateaued to…

> Boris said that writing code is a solved problem.

No way, the person selling a tool that writes code says said tool can now write code? Color me shocked at this revelation.

Let's check in on Claude Code's open issues for a sec here, and see how "solved" all of its issues are? Or my favorite, how their shitty React TUI that pegs modern CPUs and consumes all the memory on the system is apparently harder to get right than Video Games! Truly the masters of software engineering, these Anthropic folks.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#319

Post by LoganDark »

MrOrelliOReilly wrote: post #306
LoganDark wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is not finding flaws in code. It's summarizing, which current models are known to be relatively good at. It is true that models can happen to produce a sound reasoning process. This is probabilistic however (moreso than humans, anyway). There is no known sampling method that can guarantee a deterministic result without significantly quashing the output space (excluding most correct solutions).…

This all sounds like the stochastic parrot fallacy. Total determinism is not the goal, and it not a prerequisite for general intelligence. As you allude to above, humans are also not fully deterministic. I don't see what hard theoretical barriers you've presented toward AGI or future ASI.

I haven't heard the stochastic parrot fallacy (though I have heard the phrase before). I also don't believe there are hard theoretical barriers. All I believe is that what we have right now is not enough yet. (I also believe autoregressive models may not be capable of AGI.)

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#320

Post by jychang »

lpapez wrote: post #312
Tade0 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

If you only realized how ridiculous your statement is, you never would have stated it.

It's also literally factually incorrect. Pretty much the entire field of mechanistic interpretability would obviously point out that models have an internal definition of what a bug is.

Here's the most approachable paper that shows a real model (Claude 3 Sonnet) clearly having an internal representation of bugs in code: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit...

Read the entire section around this quote:

> Thus, we concluded that 1M/1013764 represents a broad variety of errors in code.

(Also the section after "We find three different safety-relevant code features: an unsafe code feature 1M/570621 which activates on security vulnerabilities, a code error feature 1M/1013764 which activates on bugs and exceptions")

This feature fires on actual bugs; it's not just a model pattern matching saying "what a bug hunter may say next".

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