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

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#331

Post by holoduke » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:34 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…

Itops related work in general is so suitable for ai agents. Configuring clusters of barebone servers. I normaly spend days on configuring things like nfs, sysctls, firewalls, upgrades, disks, crons, monitoring etc. now it's hours max. I can literally ask it to ssh into 50 vps machines and perform all tasks I tell him to do.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#332

Post by imtringued » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:34 AM UTC

3836293648 wrote: post #113

bluGill wrote: post #103

A week ago there was an artical about Donald Knuth asking an ai to prove something then unproved and it found the proof. I suppose it is possible that the great Knuth didn't know how to find this existing truth - but there is a reason we all doubted it (including me when I mentioned it there) i have never written a c compiler yet I would bet money if you paid me to write one (it would take a few years at least) it wo…

You could probably do it in a few days, C is not that hard to compile

Famous last words.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#333

Post by vidarh » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:37 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #149

fasterik wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been proven that recurrent neural networks are Turing complete [0]. So for every computable function, there is a neural network that computes it. That doesn't say anything about size or efficiency, but in principle this allows neural networks to simulate a wide range of intelligent and creative behavior, including the kind of extrapolation you're talking about. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article…

Turing conpleteness is not associated with crativity or intelligence in any ateaightforward manner. One cannot unconditionally imply the other.

No, but unless you find evidence to suggest we exceed the Turing computable, Turing completeness is sufficient to show that such systems are not precluded from creativity or intelligence.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#334

Post by vidarh » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:38 AM UTC

Philpax wrote: post #267

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…

> 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. This feels like an unfair comparison to me; the objective of the compiler was not to be innovative, it was to prove it can be done at all. That doesn't demon…

Yeah, it's a bit like taking the output of a student project in a compiler construction class and using it to judge whether said student is capable of innovation without telling them in advance they'd be judged on that rather than on the stated requirements of the course.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#335

Post by vidarh » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:43 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #167

conception wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the problem with Chris’ take is “This one for fun project didn’t produce anything particularly interesting.” So outside of the fact that we have magic now that can just produce “conventional “ compilers. Take it to a Moore’s Law situation. Start 1000 create a compiler projects- have each have a temperature to try new things, experiment, mutate. Collate - find new findings - reiterate- another 1000 runs with some o…

Moors law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. It has nothing to say about the capabilities of statistical models. In fact in statistics we have another law which states that as you increase parameters the more you risk overfitting. And overfitting seems to already be a major problem with state of the art LLM models. When you start overfitting you are pretty mu…

In their example it doesn't matter is this case if the models get better or not. It matters whether inference gets cheaper to the point that we can afford to basically throw huge amounts of tokens at exploring the problem space.

Further model improvements would be a bonus, but it's not required for us to get much further.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#336

Post by isaachinman » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

linolevan wrote: post #215

isaachinman wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would strongly advise using Codex for a project like that

How much is OpenAI paying you for this

Absolutely nothing. I have active subscriptions for both. Claude is better at FE stuff. Codex is better at actual programming.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#337

Post by edgyquant » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 11:08 AM UTC

ehsanu1 wrote: post #189

g9yuayon wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI I don't think the replacement is binary. Instead, it’s a spectrum. The real concern for many software engineers is whether AI reduces demand enough to leave the field oversupplied. And that should be a question of economy: are we going to have enough new business problems to solve? If we do, AI will help us but will not replace us. If not, well, we are go…

Business problems are essentially neverending. And humans have a broader type of intelligence that LLMs lack but are needed to solve many novel problems. I wouldn't worry.

I know multiple engineers who have spent months or even years trying to find a job. How can you say not to worry when the industry has already gotten this bad?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#338

Post by edgyquant » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

closewith wrote: post #305

scorpioxy wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add, just keeping up in this industry was already a problem. I don't know of many professions[1] with such demands on time outside of a work day to keep your skills updated. It was perhaps an acceptable compromise when the market was hot and the salaries high. But I am hearing from more and more people who are just leaving the field entirely labeling it as "not worth it anymore". [1] Medicine may be one example of…

> I don't know of many professions[1] with such demands on time outside of a work day to keep your skills updated. This is an extremely miopic view (or maybe trolling). The vast majority of software developers never study, learn, or write any code outside of their work hours. In contrast, almost all professional have enormous, _legally-required_ upskilling, retraining, and professional competence maintenance. If you…

Basically everything you mentioned is covered by L&D

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#339

Post by edgyquant » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 11:11 AM UTC

blackqueeriroh wrote: post #265

komali2 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business problems are essentially neverending That feels overly optimistic. LLMs seems on track to automate out basically any "email job" or "spreadsheet job," in which case we'll be looking at higher unemployment numbers than the great depression for at least some period of time. Combine with increased automation... There are a LOT of people in the world and already a not insignificant portion can't find work desp…

Do you really think the billionaires are willing to have consumers so impoverished that they can’t continue to spend large sums of discretionary income buying the things that make the billionaires themselves richer?

“The billionaires” are a boogeyman and not a cabal with all that much power in the west.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#340

Post by Schlagbohrer » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 11:18 AM UTC

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?

According to the nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, these LLMs will be able to talk to each other and self-train in the same way that AlphaGo started playing games against itself to be able to surpass all human experts, on who's games it had originally been trained and therefore originally been restricted to their ability. This is how LLMs will surpass human knowledge rather than being limited to a statistical average from human generated training data.