341–350 of 608 posts
It’s a tool like a linter. It’s a fancy tool, but calling it anything more than a tool is hype
Maybe I'm biased but I don't buy someone truly thinking that "it's just a tool like a linter" after using it on non-trivial stuff.
There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…
Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence. - Jensen Huang, February 2024 https://www.techradar.com/pro/nvidia-ceo-predicts-the-death-...
Far from everyone are cut out to be programmers, the technical barrier was a feature if anything.
There's a kind of mental discipline and ability to think long thoughts, to deal with uncertainty; that's just not for everyone.
What I see is mostly everyone and their gramps drooling at the idea of faking their way to fame and fortune. Which is never going to work, because everyone is regurgitating the same mindless crap.
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This goes both ways. You can't assume capabilities based on impressions. Especially with LLMs, which are purpose built to give an impression of producing language. Also, designers of these systems appear to agree: when it was shown that LLMs can't actually do calculations, tool calls were introduced.
It's true that they only give plausible sounding answers. But let's say we ask a simple question like "What's the sum of two and two?" The only plausible sounding answer to that will be "four." It doesn't need to have any fancy internal understanding or anything else beyond prediction to give what really is the same answer. The same goes for a lot of bugs in code. The best prediction is often the correct answer, bein…
Again - they're very useful, as they give great answers based on someone else's knowledge and vague questions on part of the user, but one has to remain vigilant and keep in mind this is just text presented to you to look as believable as possible. There's no real promise of correctness or, more importantly, critical thinking.
There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…
> 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.
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The way I imagine greedy sampling for autoregressive language models is guaranteeing a deterministic result at each position individually. The way I'd imagine it for diffusion language models is guaranteeing a deterministic result for the entire response as a whole. I see diffusion models potentially being more promising because the unit of determinism would be larger, preserving expressivity within that unit. Additi…
I guess it depends on the definition of deterministic, but I think you're right and there's strong reason to expect this will happen as they develop. I think the next 5 - 10 years will be interesting!
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Why is it bizarre? It is inevitable. After all, AI has not ruined creative professions, it merely disrupted and transformed them. And yes, I fully understand my whole comment here being snarky, but please bear with me. Let's rewind 4 years to this HN article titled "The AI Art Apocalypse": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133 and read some of the comments. > Actually all progress will definitely will have a…
The premise of those comments, just like the premise in this thread, is ridiculous and fantastical. The only way generative AI has changed the creative arts is that it's made it easier to produce low quality slop. I would not call that a true transformation. I'd call that saving costs at the expense of quality. The same is true of software. The difference is, unlike art, quality in software has very clear safety and…
Gen AI is the opposite of crypto. The use is immediate, obvious and needs no explanation or philosophizing.
You are basically showing your hand that you have zero intellectual curiosity or you are delusional in your own ability if you have never learned anything from gen AI.
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> it can't find actual flaws in your code I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. It might just be a "text predictor" but in the real world it can take a messy log file, and from that navigate and fix issues in source. It can appear to reason about root causes and issues with sequencing and logic. That might not be what is actually happening at a technical level, but it is indi…
> I can tell from this statement that you don't have experience with claude-code. I happen to use it on a daily basis. 4.6-opus-high to be specific. The other day it surmised from (I assume) the contents of my clipboard that I want to do A, while I really wanted to B, it's just that A was a more typical use case. Or actually: hardly anyone ever does B, as it's a weird thing to do, but I needed to do it anyway. > but…
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> 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.
Your brain is a slab of wet meat, not a logic engine. It can't find actual flaws in your code - it's just half-decent at pattern recognition.
> We're thinking about AI wrong. And this write up is not an exception. Why even bother thinking about AI, when Anthropic and OpenAI CEOs openly tell us what they want (quote from recent Dwarkesh interview) - "Then further down the spectrum, there’s 90% less demand for SWEs, which I think will happen but this is a spectrum." So save thinking and listen to intent - replace 90% of SWEs in near future (6-12 months accor…
Not without some major breakthrough. What's hilarious is that all these developers building the tools are going to be the first to be without jobs. Their kids will be ecstatic: "Tell me again, dad, so, you had this awesome and well paying easy job and you wrecked it? Shut up kid, and tuck in that flap, there is too much wind in our cardboard box."