Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 608 posts

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

#331

Post by jychang »

wamiks wrote: post #322
jychang wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. Let's assume a modern cutting edge model but even with fairly standard GQA attention, and something obviously bigger than just monosemantic features per neuron. Based on any reasonable mechanistic interpretability understanding of this model, what's preventing a circuit/feature with polysemanticity from representing a specific error in your code? --- Do you actually understand ML? Or are you just parro…

Ok, let's chew on that. "reasonable mechanistic interpretability understanding" and "semantic" are carrying a lot of weight. I think nobody understands what's happening in these models -irrespective of narrative building from the pieces. On the macro level, everyone can see simple logical flaws.

> I think nobody understands what's happening in these models

Quick question, do you know what "Mechanistic Interpretability Researcher" means? Because that would be a fairly bold statement if you were aware of that. Try skimming through this first: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/NfFST5Mio7BCAQHPA/an-ex...

> On the macro level, everyone can see simple logical flaws.

Your argument applies to humans as well. Or are you saying humans can't possibly understand bugs in code because they make simple logical flaws as well? Does that mean the existence of the Monty Hall Problem shows that humans cannot actually do math or logical reasoning?

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

#332

Post by viking123 »

itemize123 wrote: post #224
jimbokun wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

we are. you can check the APP STORE release yoy. it's skyrocketing.

I have barely downloaded any apps in the last 5-10 years except some necessary ones like bank apps etc. Who even needs that garbage? Steam also has tons of games but 80% make like no money at all and no one cares. Just piles of garbage. We already have limited hours per day and those are not really increasing so I wonder where are the users.

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

#333

Post by RealityVoid »

IX-103 wrote: post #293
RealityVoid wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can build prototypes real fast, and that's cool. You can't really build products with it. You can use it at most as an accelerant, but you need it in skilled hands else it goes sideways fast.

I think you could build a product with it, but you need to carefully specify the design first. The same amount of actual engineering work needs to go in, but the AI can handle the overhead of implementing small pieces and connecting them together. In practice, I would be surprised if this saves even 10% of time, since the design is the majority of the actual work for any moderately complex piece of software.

It's kind of tricky though because if you want to have a good design, you should be able to do the implementation yourself. You see this with orgs that separate the design and implementation and what messes they create. Having an inability to evaluate the implementation will lead to a bad product.

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

#334

Post by pu_pe »

jacquesm wrote: post #271
pu_pe wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the exact opposite. We will see open source contributions skyrocket now. There are a ton of people who want to help and share their work, but technical ability was a major filter. If the barrier to entry is now lowered, expect to see many more people sharing stuff.

Yes, more people will be sharing stuff. And none of it will have long term staying power. Or do you honestly believe that a project like GCC or Linux would have been created and maintained over as long as they have been by the use of AI tools in the hands of noobs? Technical ability is an absolute requirement for the production of quality work. If the signal drowns in the noise then we are much worse off than where w…

Ok but now you have raised the bar from "open source" to "quality work" :)

Even then, I am not sure that changes the argument. If Linus Torvalds had access to LLMs back then, why would that discourage him from building Linux? And we now have the capability of building something like Linux with fewer man-hours, which again speaks in favor of more open source projects.

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

#335

Post by tripledry »

RealityVoid wrote: post #270
fdefitte wrote: post #163

[dead]

You can build prototypes real fast, and that's cool. You can't really build products with it. You can use it at most as an accelerant, but you need it in skilled hands else it goes sideways fast.

My experience exactly, I have some toy projects I've basically "vibe coded" and actually use (ex. CV builder).

Professionally I have an agent generating most code, but if I tell the AI what to do, I guide it when it makes mistakes (which it does), can we really say "AI writes my code".

Still a very useful tool for sure!

Also, I don't actually know if I'm more productive than before AI, I would say yes but mostly because I'm less likely to procrastinate now as tasks don't _feel_ as big with the typing help.

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

#336

Post by skydhash »

IX-103 wrote: post #293
RealityVoid wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can build prototypes real fast, and that's cool. You can't really build products with it. You can use it at most as an accelerant, but you need it in skilled hands else it goes sideways fast.

I think you could build a product with it, but you need to carefully specify the design first. The same amount of actual engineering work needs to go in, but the AI can handle the overhead of implementing small pieces and connecting them together. In practice, I would be surprised if this saves even 10% of time, since the design is the majority of the actual work for any moderately complex piece of software.

Code is also design. It’s a blueprint for the process that is going to do the useful work we want. When something bad happens to the process, we revise its blueprint. And just like blueprint, the docs in natural language shows the why, not the how or the what. The blueprint is the perfect representation of the last two.

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

#337

Post by autoexec »

jimbokun wrote: post #201
falcor84 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there is a level of magnitude difference between coordinating AI agents and humans - the AIs are so much faster and more consistent than humans, that you can (as Steve Yegge [0] and Nicholas Carlini [1] showed) have them build a massive project from scratch in a matter of hours and days rather than months and years. The coordination cost is so much lower that it's just a different ball game. [0] https://steve-yeg…

Then why aren’t we seeing orders of magnitude more software being produced?

It doesn't appear to have improved the quality of the software we have either.

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

#338

Post by doublerabbit »

ottah wrote: post #87

Make centaurs, not unicorns. The human is almost always going to be the strongest element in the loop, and the most efficient. Augmenting human skill will always outperform present day SOTA AI systems (assuming a competent human).

What about centaur unicorns? A cenintaunicorn?

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

#339

Post by nake89 »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #162
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…

>writing code is a solved problem sure is news for the models tripping on my thousands of LOC jquery legacy app...

Could the LLM rewrite it from scratch?

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

#340

Post by pousada »

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.

Some people are still stuck in the “stochastic parrot” phase and see everything regarding LLMs through that lense.
Post reply on HN