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I am happier writing code by hand

abhinavomprakash.com

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Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#321

Post by blks »

igravious wrote: post #215
tux1968 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. But your same objection was made against compilers. That they are opaque, have differences from one to another, and can introduce bugs, they're not actually deterministic if you upgrade the compiler, etc. They separate the programmer from the code the computer eventually executes. In any case, clinging to the fact that this technology is different in some ways, continues to ignore the many ways it's…

They may not be wrong per se but that argument is essentially a strawman argument. If these tools are non-deterministic then how did someone at Anthropic spend the equivalent of $20,000 of Anthropic compute and end up with a C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel (one of the largest bodies of C code out there). There is clearly something that completely missies the point about the but-muh-non-determinism argume…

To be frank, the C compilers source code were probably multiply times in its learning material, it just had to translate to Rust.

This aside, one success story doesn’t mean much, doesn’t even touch determinism question. Anthropic with every ad like this should have posted all the prompts they used.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#322

Post by blks »

igravious wrote: post #211
blks wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s correct to claim that AI generated code is just next level of abstraction. All previously mentioned levels produce deterministic results. Same input, same output. AI-generation is not deterministic. It’s not even predictable. And example of big software companies clearly show what mass adoption of AI tools will look like in terms of software quality. I dread if using AI will ever be an expectation,…

People on here keep trotting out this "AI-generation is not deterministic." (more properly speaking, non-deterministic) argument on here … And my retort to you (and them) is, "Oh yeah, and so?" What about me asking Claude Code to generate a factorial function in C or Python or Rust or insert-your-language-of-choice-here is non-deterministic ? If you're referring to the fact that for a given input LLMs (or whatever) b…

Non-determinism means here that with same inputs, same prompts we are not guaranteed the same results.

This turns writing code this way into a tedious procedure that may not even work exactly the same way every time.

You should ask yourself, too: if you already have to spend so much time to prepare various tests (can’t trust LLM to make them, or have to describe it so many details), so much time describing what you need, then hand holding the model, all to get mediocre code that you may not be able to reproduce with the same model tomorrow - what’s the point?

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#323

Post by blks »

igravious wrote: post #318
swid wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally have jested many times I picked my career because the logical soundness of programming is comforting to me. A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value. I’ve also said code is prose for me. I am not some autistic programmer either, even if these statements out of context make me sound like one. The non-determinism…

> A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value. Linus Torvalds famously only uses ECC memory in his dev machines. Why? Because every now and again either a cosmic ray or some electronic glitch will flip a bit from a zero to a one or from a one to a zero in his RAM. So no, a one is not always a one. A zero is not always a zero.…

You’re making quite long and angry sounding comments.

If you’re making code in language you don’t know, then this code is as good as a magical black box. It will never be properly supported, it’s a dead code in the project that may do what it says it does or may not (a 100%).

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#324

Post by gitprolinux »

I like to code then when I resolved the solution to its completeness, I then know what to ask an llm to provide a solution to the same problem. This sometimes provides a different approach to the solution, other times, it provides variations to my solution thus improving upon my solid code solution.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#325

Post by aveao »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #317
ryan_n wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand your point about AI freeing up your time to do other stuff at your job. Does your employer let you work less hours since you’re finishing projects sooner? Mine certainly doesn’t, and I’d rather be coding than doing the other parts of my job. But maybe I’m misunderstanding why you were trying to say? I also would rather a project take longer and struggle through it without using AI as I find…

Maybe think of it this way: If your job is delivering mail and the only transport you have is a horse, your life would probably suck a lot. You'd barely be home and you still wouldn't cover that much distance. Now, if someone gave you a car for your job, you would not just cover a lot more distance and deliver a lot more mail (=happy employer), you would also get to sleep at home every day and not be exposed to the w…

Where I live we have labor rights and if your job is delivering mail and you're given a horse for it, you'd only be expected to deliver as much mail as you can in your contractual work time, which is then limited by the legal limits (8 hours/workday, up to 6 days/week). So you'd be home for most of the day, but delivering less letters per day.

(where I live a car would also be slower for delivering mail than a horse, most delivery people are given trikes, but alas)

This is how all industrialization/automation works in general: When you have a way to deliver faster/more, you're given more mail to deliver in your work time. Your pay does not go up, but any given road blockage or instance of traffic makes you fall behind quota significantly more. You're not paid by how many letters you deliver, but by the hours you work. Maybe you even make less as there's less overtime. Post will then proceed to simply employ less people over time as each employee is made to deliver more letters, then maybe you're part of the people whose jobs are cut. Or they might just reduce wages for everyone anyways, as now the job is much more accessible and there's more supply of labor than there is demand.

This is not an argument against industrialization or automation, but your perspective of what would happen if we had more industrialization is... very narrow.

We must consider the potential future where there's simply not enough work for most people to do (a realistic future now), and how we'll prevent that from going the same way it would currently go (losing income -> losing domicile -> starvation/freezing/etc).

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#326

Post by coldtea »

Ygg2 wrote: post #316
coldtea wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funnily enough, I had Linus in mind as a sort of no-coding Principal Engineer/Architect/Maintainer. He famously said he doesn't code anymore [1]. That's after he coded his ass out for 20 years. And he's doing reviewing and merging, which is not some lofty "software architect" function, but deals directly with written code.

I've met more Software Architects that coded their asses off for 10+ years than pure-type astronauts. Does that make them real software architects?

If they're Linus level sure. I've met more than enough clueless "have coded sometime in the past but have not touched a PC in 10 years" types promoted to such roles...

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#327

Post by spicyusername »

lazyfolder wrote: post #310
spicyusername wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while I have more time to do what? For work, I regularly have 2-4 agents going simultaneously, churning on 1-3 features, bug fixes, doc updates. I pop between them in the "down time", or am reviewing their output, or am preparing the requirements for the next thing, or am reviewing my coworkers MRs. Plenty to do that isn't doom scrolling.

Out of curiousity, how do you manage the constant context switching? It's hard for me to manage the context of one coding session, let along 2-4 sessions.

I usually don't find it too bad. I don't need to focus as much on the nitty gritty the whole time, which is where context switching really gets you.

Once you get to the review stage is where the focus is really needed and the context switching pauses.

That being said, it's definitely a different workflow from just getting in the zone and coding for four straight hours.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#328

Post by agentultra »

igravious wrote: post #318
swid wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally have jested many times I picked my career because the logical soundness of programming is comforting to me. A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value. I’ve also said code is prose for me. I am not some autistic programmer either, even if these statements out of context make me sound like one. The non-determinism…

> A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value. Linus Torvalds famously only uses ECC memory in his dev machines. Why? Because every now and again either a cosmic ray or some electronic glitch will flip a bit from a zero to a one or from a one to a zero in his RAM. So no, a one is not always a one. A zero is not always a zero.…

> That's astounding. I can now write in Haskell if I want. Or Rust. Or you-name-it.

You're responsible for what you ship using it. If you don't know what you're reading, especially if it's a language like C or Rust, be careful shipping that code to production. Your work colleague might get annoyed with you if you ask them to review too many PRs with the subtle, hard-to-detect kind of errors that LLMs generate. They will probably get mad if you submit useless security reports like the ones that flood bug bounty boards. Be wary.

IMO the only way to avoid these problems is expertise and that comes from experience and learning. There's only one way to do that and there's no royal road or shortcut.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#329

Post by igravious »

blks wrote: post #323
igravious wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A one is always a one; you don’t measure it and find it off by some error; you can’t measure it a second time and get a different value. Linus Torvalds famously only uses ECC memory in his dev machines. Why? Because every now and again either a cosmic ray or some electronic glitch will flip a bit from a zero to a one or from a one to a zero in his RAM. So no, a one is not always a one. A zero is not always a zero.…

You’re making quite long and angry sounding comments. If you’re making code in language you don’t know, then this code is as good as a magical black box. It will never be properly supported, it’s a dead code in the project that may do what it says it does or may not (a 100%).

I think you should refrain from replying to me until you're able to respond to the actual points of my counter-arguments to you -- and until you are able to do so I'm going to operate under the assumption that you have no valid or useful response.

Re: I am happier writing code by hand

#330

Post by [deleted] »

agentultra wrote: post #286
runarberg wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1. I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.

There’s a theory of neural networks that states: For every real valued function and every epsilon greater than zero, there’s a neural network (size unbounded) which approximates the function with precision epsilon . It sounds impressive and, as I understand it, is the basis for the argument that algorithms based on NN’s such as LLM’s will be able to put perform humans at tasks such as programming. But this theorem co…

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