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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#361

Post by strogonoff »

tern wrote: post #346
strogonoff wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimising the cost of “operating” humans means getting rid of humans. When human beings are not slaves and operate in a fair system, humans doing things is part humans living . Believe it or not, they may actually enjoy doing things; taking away the ability to do things we enjoy, and especially for compensation, is in fact harmful.

Historically, it leads to more humans—not fewer—and they get to do something else. Whether the new things they get to do are better is a matter of some debate.

Historically, it never happened that “get to do something else” would mean “get to do something no one needs and therefore no one will pay you for”. It would be harmful not only for humans flourishing but also for their basic survival.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#362

Post by Eliezer »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #245
Eliezer wrote: post #232

Every time somebody writes an article like this without any dates and without saying which model they used, my guess is that they've simply failed to internalize the idea that "AI" is a moving target; nor understood that they saw a capability level from a fleeting moment of time, rather than an Eternal Verity about the Forever Limits of AI.

Funnily enough we have had those comments with every single model release saying "Oh yeah I agree Claude 3 was not good but now with Claude 3.5 I can vibe-code anything". Rinse and repeat with every model since. There also ARE intrinsic limits to LLMs, I'm not sure why you deny them?

There's intrinsic limits to vanilla transformer stacks. Nobody knows where they are. We don't know how unvanilla Opus 4.6 or GPT 5.3 are. We don't know what's in development or which new ideas will pan out. But it will still probably be called an "LLM".

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#363

Post by runeks »

nly wrote: post #221
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five hours ago I was reviewing some failed tests in a PR. The affected code was probably 300 lines, total source for the project ~1200 lines. Reading the code, I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on... and I wrote all the code. Why would that be failing? This all looks totally fine. There that should fix it! Fuck. When you write code, your brain follows a logical series of steps to produce the code, based o…

Sounds like you were just reviewing bad code. The author should have provided context via comments and structured the code in a way that is easy to change and understand

> Sounds like you were just reviewing bad code.

Software engineering in a nutshell

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#364

Post by EnPissant »

xigoi wrote: post #255
EnPissant wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try again with gpt-5.3-codex xhigh.

The goalposts have been moved so many times that they’re not even on the playing field.

Nahh, just trying to make it concrete. I could instead just ask which model they used instead.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#365

Post by kuschku »

crazygringo wrote: post #154
layer8 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in order to write the code, you might have to try 4 different top-level approaches until you figure out the one that works , try integrating with a function from 3 different packages until you find the one that works properly If you haven’t spent the time to try the different approaches yourself, tried the different packages etc., you can’t really judge if the code you’re reading is really the appropriate thing…

The goal isn't usually to determine whether the function is the perfect optimal version of the function that could ever exist, if the package it integrates with the the best possible package out of the 4 mainstream options, or to become totally and intimately familiar with them to ensure it's as idiomatic as possible or whatever. You're just making sure it works correctly and that you understand how. Not superficiall…

> And when it is, then you've got code that requires design documents where the approach is described in great detail

And how do you write those design documents? First, you need to understand the landscape, and that means reading code, building experiments and trying out different variants, which then allows you to specify a design.

Our job isn't writing code, our job is to gain the understand required that allows us to write specifications and/or optimal code.

And while AI may be a better typewriter, it obscures the actually hard part of our job, the actual engineering, and the reason why others pay us to consult them.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#366

Post by oblio »

crazygringo wrote: post #342
oblio wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you're describing sounds closer to studying the Talmud than to reading and reviewing most code. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/26/reading-code-is-li... Most human written code has 0 (ZERO!) docs. And if it has them, they're inaccurate or out of date or both. Lots of code is simple and boring but a fair amount isn't and reading it is non trivial, you basically need to run it in your head or do step by s…

Hilarious you found that reference. I think it's obvious that's in reference to poorly written code . Or at least horrifically underdocumented/undercommented code. There's a reason coders are constantly given the advice to write code for a future reader , not just the compiler/interpreter. If I got code like Joel describes for a code review, I'm sending it back asking for it to be clearly commented.

> If I got code like Joel describes for a code review, I'm sending it back asking for it to be clearly commented.

I'd argue that most code written today is never code reviewed. Heck, most code today isn't even read by another human being, and I'm talking about code generated by other humans! :-)

Most code written today (and most likely most code ever written) is poorly written code.

Now, these days there are many companies with good engineering practices, so there are lots of islands where this isn't the case.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#367

Post by salawat »

Aerroon wrote: post #317
AngryData wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too. The big problem I think comes in when AI is allowed to do things that humans can't. Right now if I publish a book that is 70% somebody else's book but slightly rehashed with certain key phrases and sentences or more as perfect copies, I would get sued and I would lose. Right now though if a…

> I don't think people would care as much about AI reusing code or images or text so directly if people were allowed to do so too. But the system is never going to get changed if something doesn't give. I thought big companies using copyrighted content in such a way was finally something that might enact change, but apparently the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnig…

>the people who were all against copyright previously became ardent supporters of it overnight.

Oh, no, no. You misunderstand my friend. I might loosely be called one of those who was anti-copyright, but turn my desire to see it's draconian enforcement cranked up to 11 on corporations. I believe fundamental reform is necessary, however, if you're running a for profit enterprise, and have not in good faith with the laws of of the land, which let's be clear, AI companies absolutely haven't; there is no mercy deserved. If a grandma or teen can get saddled with life ruining punitive damages for something as innocent as filesharing, then these companies should not exist in any way shape or form in a functioning justice system as currently configured. That they do illustrates the woeful state of our State.

Things need to change.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#368

Post by dredmorbius »

tomhow wrote: post #42
Trufa wrote: post #5

[flagged]

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And you can escape asterisks using backslashes:

Italic

*Escaped asterisks*

\*Double-Escaped asterisks\*

  *Italic* 
  
  \*Escaped asterisks\*

  \\*Double-Escaped asterisks\\*
(tomhow seems to have goofed his escapes above. As I've done many times myself...)

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#369

Post by jama211 »

wredcoll wrote: post #360
jama211 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said, you’re absolutely right. In practice code review is orders of magnitude faster than code creation and it always has been, baffling anyone is arguing otherwise. Perhaps they’ve never worked in a real organisation, or they’ve only worked on safety critical code,m or something?

Sometimes code review is so fast it's literally instant (because people aren't actually reading the code). I think it's one of those sort of, dunno, wink wink situations where we all know that doing real in depth code reviews would take way more time than the managers will give (and generally isn't worth it anyways) so we just scan for obvious things and whatever happens to interact with our particular speciality in…

I’ve rarely seen this happen personally but it does happen from time to time. Even thorough code reviews don’t take anywhere near as long as the writing though.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#370

Post by jama211 »

wredcoll wrote: post #359
jama211 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of life saving critical software or military spec software, no one needs to review so hard they understand it to the level you’re describing, and they do not. There is a mathematical principle that verification of a proof is easier than any proof. The same is true in code.

I mean, it's even easier to just not read the code in the first place, I'm not sure what that proves, other than perhaps an implicit collorary to the original quote "reading code is quite hard (so people rarely bother)"

Not even sure what you’re trying to say here mate. Sure, some people aren’t gonna do their work. That’s not really relevant here
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