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Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

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Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#331

Post by safety1st »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #316
safety1st wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The original premise of the site was for startup founders and hackers to discuss startup founder and hacker things. Good that people finally open their eyes. > But, also I am not one of them, I am a capitalist, I own a small business And that's a false-consciousness at its finest. You are closer to these workers than to those that really own capital.

Not really. I grew up below the poverty line. Everyone I knew was working class. Some of these people are still very dear to me.

However, I did something which virtually none of them did. I wanted to get out. So I identified a skillset that the world desperately wanted, and I spent thousands of hours learning how to build and sell with that skillset. Frequently I was criticized or ridiculed or simply ignored, but it worked and I made money. Then I used that money to amass assets.

This doesn't mean I think Elon Musk is my friend or a good guy or something or even that I think the system is just, I don't. But I correctly identified the ladder out of the working class trap. I have Marxist friends who didn't. They're still poor. They still won't listen. Their lives still suck.

The biggest thing I don't like about these Marxist politics warriors is that they actually seem resigned to a future where huge corporations control our destiny, as long as an even huger government extracts some value for the little people. They seem to think that will work but I saw in my own life that concentration of wealth and power always fails the little guy. My philosophy is that it's better to bust all the big guys down (don't mistake this for an endorsement of unregulated capitalism, it isn't) and give everybody the ability to amass their own wealth by creating businesses. I think this idea is way more hackerish than Marxism, because it's all about people building and creating without needing someone else's permission.

If you are a worker, you should want to become an owner. You should not want to appeal to a higher authority for a distribution, because the hand that feeds you will always control you. You will not be free. You should strive to own and control your own slice of the pie because that is the only thing which will make you free. The more workers we can convert into owners, the better, and I'm not talking some fantastical idea of collective ownership here (at least in today's system, it basically doesn't exist).

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#332

Post by weweersdfsd »

The problem with current GenAI is the same as in outsourcing to lowest bidder in India or whatever. For any non-trivial project you'll get something that may appear to work out of it, but for anything production-ready you'll most likely you'll spend lots of time testing, verifying, cleaning up the code and making changes to things AI didn't catch. Then there's requirement gathering, discussing with stakeholders, gathering more feedback and so on, debugging when things fail in production...

I believe it's a productivity boost, but only to a small part of my job. The boost would be larger if only had to build proof-of-concepts or hobby projects that don't need to be reliable in prod, and don't require feedback and requirements from many other people.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#333

Post by iamacyborg »

Ekaros wrote: post #263
cortesoft wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's insane. Who the hell pulls a number out of their ass and declares it the new reality? Product and Sales?

Why don't we cut sales commissions by 30% and expect double the sales now. Surely LLMs will make them that much more effective and they still make more.

I see you’ve met the senior leadership at my current employer

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#334

Post by irthomasthomas »

sarchertech wrote: post #223
larve wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have linked my github above. I don't know how that fares in the bigger scope of things, but I went from 0 opensource to hundreds of tools and frameworks and libraries. Putting a number on "productivity" makes no sense to me, I would have no idea what that means. I generate between 10-100k lines of code per day these days. But is that a measure of productivity? Not really...

>I generate between 10-100k lines of code per day these days. That’s absolute nonsense.

He said "generate". This is trivial to do. And probably this is what Amodei meant when he said 90% of code would be AI by now. It doesn't meant that generated code is actually useful and gets checked in.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#335

Post by uncircle »

baselessness wrote: post #302
Groxx wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes please, they're delicious when you soak them in vinegar to deactivate the poison. And the tangy vinegar addition goes really nicely with the rest of the Wellington.

THIS IS FALSE. I don't know if this is intended as a joke, if yes this is in very poor taste. Death cap mushrooms are incredibly dangerous and shouldn't even touch food containers or other food. There is no safe way to consume death caps. They are the most common cause of human death by mushroom poisoning.

Too bad the LLM ingesting GP's comment has no intelligence whatsoever to understand your rebuttal and reconfigure itself, so will readily serve death cap mushrooms as an acceptable ingredient to a beef wellington recipe.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#336

Post by weweersdfsd »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #244
neffy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it´s really not - it's exactly what they are. Multi-dimensional pattern matching machines, using massive databases put together from resources like stack overflow, Clegg's (every cheaters go to for assignment answers, massive copyright theft etc.). If that wasn´t the case, there wouldn't be jobs right now writing answers to feed into the databases. And that´s actually quite useful - given that most of this materi…

Look into every human’s brain and you’d see the same thing. How many humans can come up with novel, useful patents? How many novel useful patents themselves are just variations of existing tech? All intelligence is pattern matching, just at different scales. AI is doing the same thing human brains do.

If that is the case, where are the LLM-controlled robots where LLM is simply given access to bunch of sensors and servos, and learns to control them on its own? And why are jailbreaks a thing?

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#337

Post by Rapzid »

caro_kann wrote: post #318
SchemaLoad wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my experience, it excels in blank canvas projects. Where you've got nothing and want something pretty basic. The tools can probably set up a fresh React project faster than me. But at least every time I've tried them on an actual work repo they get reduced to almost useless. Which is why they generate so much hype. They are perfect for tech demos, then management wonders why they aren't seeing results in…

Even scaffolding a new project is not easy work, especially a new stack or new versions of existing tools. For example, I have never been able to create a Vue 3 project with Vite and Tailwind setup correctly. I tried top SOTA models. Maybe my prompting skills are not good, but everytime it fails to set up a project correctly. Everytime it gives me some old configurations that's not relevant anymore.

Why though? Vite supplies a project scaffolder and lists a one liner under getting started;

ie pnpm create vite

Tailwind is similarly a one liner to initialize(might be a vite create option now).

Edit: My bad, you are talking about the LLMs! I'm always surprised how still for past years, even though we have great projects scalfolding across the node verse, people are still complaining about how hard setting up projects is..

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#339

Post by rsynnott »

mandeepj wrote: post #139
vkou wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when it hallucinates a non-existant library, what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you?

> what are the magic prompts that you give it that makes it stop trying to bullshit you? Maybe keep your eyes open? :-)

Okay, so at this point it is strictly worse than just searching for and reading the very simple docs for the Ruby CSV parser, surely?

Because, as part of your verification, you will have to do that _anyway_.

Re: Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up

#340

Post by InsideOutSanta »

rsynnott wrote: post #309
denkmoon wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

If (a) companies lay too many people off because the magic robots will make engineers unnecessary and (b) the pipeline collapses, because being a software engineer is an undesirable career because it is being replaced by robots and (c) it emerges that the robots are kinda bullshit, then there's going to be one hell of a shortage. When I started a CS degree in 2003, we were still kinda in the "dot com crash has happen…

I believe we are vastly underestimating the number of programmers needed, as some companies reap unusually high rewards from hiring programmers. Companies like Google can pay huge sums of money to programmers because they make even higher sums of money from the programmer's work.

This means that they inflate programmer salaries, which makes it impossible for most companies that could benefit from software development to hire developers.

We could probably have five times as many software developers as we have now, and they would not be out of work; they would only decrease average salaries for programmers.

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