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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#341

Post by r_lee »

abcde666777 wrote: post #178

It seems to be inevitable that with any new technology we go through a phase of super duper excitement about the possibilities, where we try to use it to the extreme, and through that process start to absorb what it actually is and isn't capable of. The hype cycle's distasteful of course, but I've accepted that this is how humans figure out what things are. Like a child we have to abuse it before we learn how to prop…

that's the problem.

I don't know if I'm just not seeing something that the vibe coders do, or if it's not really that crazy?

like I'd say it's a productivity boost in some aspects, definitely. but it's not like you'd be able to get the same output unless you had years of experience and know what you're doing

and going full unsupervised agentic mode I haven't seen much benefit from that. still have to pretty much just guide em to do this and that in this way

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#342

Post by pylua »

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…

Isn’t this what mcp is supposed to solve?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#343

Post by chongli »

Calazon wrote: post #234
chongli wrote: post #139

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. But it's a different 1% for every area of expertise! Add it all up and you get a lot more than 1% of humans contributing to the sum of knowledge. And of course, if you don't limit yourself to "advancing the state of the art at the far frontiers of human knowledge" but…

If 1% of the people in each specialization are advancers, and you add up all the specializations together, then 1% of the total number of people are advancers. Even this assumes that everyone has a specialization in which 1% of people contribute to the sum of human knowledge. I would probably challenge that. There are a lot of people in the world who do not do knowledge-oriented work at all.

You don’t need to do knowledge work to advance the state of the art. You could be working in a shoe factory and discover a better way to tie your shoes.

Your math assumes each person has exactly one thing they do in life. The shoe factory worker could also be a gardener. He might not make any advancements in gardening, but his contribution means that if you add up all the fields of specialization the sum is greater than the population of humans. Take 1% of that sum and it’s greater than 1% of humans. 1% of people in a specialization is not the same as 1% of specialists. In fact, I would say it’s a much higher proportion of specialists making contributions (especially through collaboration).

Oh, and don’t get caught up on the 1% number. I used it as shorthand for whatever small number it is. Maybe it’s only 10 people in some hyper-specialized field. But that doesn’t matter. Some other field may have thousands of contributors. You don’t have to be a specialist in a field to make a contribution to that field, for example: glassmakers advanced the science of astronomy by making the telescope possible.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#344

Post by chongli »

coldtea wrote: post #323
chongli wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, humans do experiments for one, as I explained elsewhere in the discussion. Experiments give us access to new knowledge from the world itself, which is not merely a synthesis of what we already know.

Real progress in science is made by the hard collection and cataloguing of data every single day, not by armchair philosophizing.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#345

Post by elgertam »

pylua wrote: post #342
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…

Isn’t this what mcp is supposed to solve?

MCP connects the LLM to the APIs, which can be consulted with "tool calls." I'm talking about integrating the software I produce (with LLM assistance) to APIs. Traditionally, this is a nightmare given poor documentation. LLMs have helped me cut through the noise.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#346

Post by thunky »

coldtea wrote: post #322
thunky wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What I'm saying is that LLMs don't have to do truly novel work in order to be useful. They are useful because the lion's share of all work is a variation on an existing theme (even if the creator may not realize it).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#347

Post by ben_w »

Verdex wrote: post #190
derrak wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Church-Turing thesis comes to mind. It would at least suggest that humans aren’t capable of doing anything computationally beyond what can be instantiated in software and hardware. But sure, instantiating these capabilities in hardware and software are beyond our current abilities. It seems likely that it is possible though, even if we don’t know how to do it yet.

Church turing is about computable functions. Uncomputable functions exist. For example how much rain is going to be in the rain gauge after a storm is uncomputable. You can hook up a sensor to perform some action when the rain gets so high. This rain algorithm is outside of anything church turing has to say. There are many other natural processes that are outside the realm of was is computable. People are bathed in t…

That example is completely false: how much rain will fall is absolutely a computable function, just a very difficult and expensive function to evaluate with absurdly large boundary conditions.

This is in the same sense that while it is technically correct to describe all physically instantiated computer programs, and by extension all AI, as being in the set of "things which are just Markov chains", it comes with a massive cost that may or may not be physically realisable within this universe.

Rainfall to the exact number of molecules is computable. Just hard. A quantum simulation of every protein folding and every electron energy level of every atom inside every cell of your brain on a classical computer is computable, in the Church-Turing sense, just with an exponential slowdown.

The busy beaver function, however, is actually un-computable.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#348

Post by elgertam »

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.

Every time I request the wrong OAuth scope that doesn't have the authorization to do what I need, then make a failing request, I hear Jim Gaffigan affecting a funny authoritative voice saying, "No." I can't be the only one who defensively requests too much authority beyond what I need with extra OAuth scopes, hoping one of them will give me the correct access. I've had much better luck with LLMs telling me exactly which scopes to select.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#349

Post by vidarh »

wiseowise wrote: post #308
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. I’ve recently taken a look at our codebase, written entirely by humans and found nothing innovative there, on the opposite, I see such brainrot that it makes…

Compilers are a hobby of mine, and I'd extend that to argue that the majority of compilers do not contain anything innovative either.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#350

Post by elgertam »

Terr_ wrote: post #328
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…

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.

Well that's another use I have for LLMs: asking questions about these informational or architectural impedance mismatches. LLMs get it wrong sometimes, but with proper guidance (channel your inner Karl Popper), they can be quite helpful. But this doesn't really speed me up that much, though it makes me more confident that my deliverable is correct.
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