Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated • Hacker News Board

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#321

Post by coldtea » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:36 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #207

coldtea wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on Zero preexisting examples of your particular frameworks . Huge number of examples of similar existing frameworks and code patterns in their training set though. Still not a novel thing in any meaningful way, not any more than someone who has coded in dozens of established web frameworks, can write against an unfamiliar to them…

I'm not talking about web frameworks. I'm talking about other frontiers with darn near zero preexisting examples, and no code samples to borrow from in any language or in any similar framework (because there is no such thing). "LLMs can only emit things they've been trained on" is wholly obsolete.

>I'm not talking about web frameworks. I'm talking about other frontiers

Such as what?

>with darn near zero preexisting examples

Whatever it is, you'd be surprised.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#322

Post by coldtea » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

thunky wrote: post #198

coldtea wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on Zero preexisting examples of your particular frameworks . Huge number of examples of similar existing frameworks and code patterns in their training set though. Still not a novel thing in any meaningful way, not any more than someone who has coded in dozens of established web frameworks, can write against an unfamiliar to them…

> Still not a novel thing in any meaningful way Right. What you're saying is that barely anyone is doing truly novel work. 100% agree.

Almost no e.g. web or app or enterprise or even game developer is doing any novel work, does that come as a surprise?

And is that fact supposed to be an argument in favor of how LLMs can do novel work and move the state of the art (which is what we're arguing about).

I mean, "LLMs can do novel work because: barely anyone is doing truly novel work" doesn't really compute as an argument.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#323

Post by coldtea » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:39 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #171

coldtea wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of humans in a particular specialization, sure. It's the 1% who become experts in that specialization who are able to advance the state of the art How? By also "synthesizing the data they were trained on" (their experience, education, memories, etc.).

No, that's not all we're doing. If that's all humans ever did, we'd still be living in the stone age.

That's begging the question though.

Where's the proof we don't do exactly this? The mind as a prediction engine is one of the handful most accepted theories.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#324

Post by coldtea » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:41 AM UTC

ch4s3 wrote: post #220

coldtea wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the benefits of LLMs: they don't care for bullshit fashion

Sure they do, just whatever the average of "fashion" was across the training set.

That approach they have for everything. Zero special care for fashion.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#325

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:45 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #207

coldtea wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m using models to work on frameworks with nearly zero preexisting examples to train on Zero preexisting examples of your particular frameworks . Huge number of examples of similar existing frameworks and code patterns in their training set though. Still not a novel thing in any meaningful way, not any more than someone who has coded in dozens of established web frameworks, can write against an unfamiliar to them…

I'm not talking about web frameworks. I'm talking about other frontiers with darn near zero preexisting examples, and no code samples to borrow from in any language or in any similar framework (because there is no such thing). "LLMs can only emit things they've been trained on" is wholly obsolete.

[deleted]

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#326

Post by thinkindie » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

storus wrote: post #199

pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

There is even a bigger problem; if AI didn't see your framework, you don't exist. Soon AI companies will be asking for money from devs to include their frameworks in the training dataset. Worse than Google's SEO that could at least be gamed somewhat.

I don't think people discovered frameworks with Google, nor they are going to do so with LLMs. It might be a different topic for libraries.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#327

Post by standarditem » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:15 AM UTC

I've enjoyed using Claude to essentially build my own APIs at whatever level of complexity I'm comfortable with at the time. I can use lower level APIs for graphics (for example), and Claude can abstract the boiler plate into my own personal API. Then when performance gets to be an issue, I can dig into the abstractions Claude handled for me and start to pick apart the slow-downs.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#328

Post by Terr_ » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

elgertam wrote: post #174

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…

You know where LLMs boost me the most? When I need to integrate a bunch of systems together, each with their own sets of documentation. Instead of spending hours getting two or three systems to integrate with mine with the proper OAuth scopes or SAML and so on, an LLM can get me working integrations in a short time. None of that is ever going to be innovative; it's purely an exercise in perseverance as an engineer to…

The worst integration problems tend to be conceptual mismatches between the systems, where--even with the same names--they have different definitions and ideas of how things work.

That's a category of problem I wouldn't expect a text-based system to detect very well.. Though it might disguise the problem with a solution that seems to work until it blows up one day or people discover a lot of hard-to-fix data.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#329

Post by Tade0 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

jofzar wrote: post #290

elgertam wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know where LLMs boost me the most? When I need to integrate a bunch of systems together, each with their own sets of documentation. Instead of spending hours getting two or three systems to integrate with mine with the proper OAuth scopes or SAML and so on, an LLM can get me working integrations in a short time. None of that is ever going to be innovative; it's purely an exercise in perseverance as an engineer to…

> Instead of spending hours getting two or three systems to integrate with mine with the proper OAuth scopes or SAML and so on As someone who's job is handling oauth and saml scope, I am not convinced anyone can get these right. Saml atleast acts nice, oauth on the other hand is a fucking nightmare.

And the libraries provided by the various OAuth vendors are only adding fuel to the fire.

A while ago I spent some time debugging a superfluous redirect and the reason was that the library would always kick off with a "not authenticated" when it didn't find stored tokens, even if it was redirecting back after successful log in (as the tokens weren't stored yet).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#330

Post by imtringued » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC

nurettin wrote: post #263

pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

I still research efficient algorithms. You can describe these to LLMs and they do it without any prior art. They just took away the stomach churners. In fact, we probably started a communist revolution in software with anthropic/openai streaming your solutions to lesser coders.

You're actually better off using the LLM to consult textbooks from the 70s, because most likely someone already came up with a better algorithm that hasn't seen adoption yet.