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Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#371

Post by jim180 »

crmi wrote: post #245
sensanaty wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also those instances where Microsoft unleashed Copilot on the .NET repo, and it resulted in the most hilariously terrible PRs that required the maintainers to basically tell Copilot every single step it should take to fix the issue. They were basically writing the PRs themselves at that point, except doing it through an intermediary that was much dumber, slower and less practical than them. And don't get me s…

I've got a working theory that models perform differently when used in different timezones... As in during US working hours they dont work as well due to high load. When used at 'offpeak' hours not only are they (obviously) snappier but the outputs appear to be a higher standard. Thought this for a while but now noticing with Claude4 [thinking] recently. Textbook case of anecdata of course though.

Same! I did notice, a couples of months ago, that same prompt in the morning failed and then, later that day, when starting from scratch with identical prompts, the results were much better.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#372

Post by iLoveOncall »

greybox wrote: post #353

He's talking about "LLM Utility companies going down and the world becoming dumber" as a sign of humanity's progress. This if anything should be a huge red flag

He lives in a GenAI bubble where everyone is self-congratulating about the usage of LLMs.

The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#373

Post by poorcedural »

imiric wrote: post #178

It's fascinating to see his gears grinding at 22:55 when acknowledging that a human still has to review the thousand lines of LLM-generated code for bugs and security issues if they're "actually trying to get work done". Yet these are the tools that are supposed to make us hyperproductive? This is "Software 3.0"? Give me a break.

Because we are still using code as a proof that needs to be proven. Software 3.0 will not be about reviewing legible code, with its edge-cases and exploits and trying to impersonate hardware.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#374

Post by diggan »

bgwalter wrote: post #279
diggan wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality You clearly have strong feelings about it, which is fine, but it would be much more interesting to know exactly why it would terrible and demotivating, and why it cannot produce anything of quality? And what is "real quality" and does that mean "fake quality" exists? > million monkey interns banging on one million keyboards and submi…

If "AI" worked (which fortunately isn't the case), humans would be degraded to passive consumers in the last domain in which they were active creators: thinking. Moreover, you would have to pay centralized corporations that stole all of humanity's intellectual output for engaging in your profession. That is terrifying. The current reality is also terrifying: Mediocre developers are enabled to have a 10x volume (not q…

> If "AI" worked (which fortunately isn't the case), humans would be degraded to passive consumers in the last domain in which they were active creators: thinking.

"AI" (depending on what you understand that to be) is already "working" for many, including myself. I've basically stopped using Google because of it.

> humans would be degraded to passive consumers in the last domain in which they were active creators: thinking

Why? I still think (I think at least), why would I stop thinking just because I have yet another tool in my toolbox?

> you would have to pay centralized corporations that stole all of humanity's intellectual output for engaging in your profession

Assuming we'll forever be stuck in the "mainframe" phase, then yeah. I agree that local models aren't really close to SOTA yet, but the ones you can run locally can already be useful in a couple of focused use cases, and judging by the speed of improvements, we won't always be stuck in this mainframe-phase.

> Mediocre developers are enabled to have a 10x volume (not quality).

In my experience, which admittedly been mostly in startups and smaller companies, this has always been the case. Most developers seem to like to produce MORE code over BETTER code, I'm not sure why that is, but I don't think LLMs will change people's mind about this, in either direction. Shitty developers will be shit, with or without LLMs.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#375

Post by maleldil »

bawana wrote: post #331
matiasmolinas wrote: post #327

https://github.com/EvolvingAgentsLabs/llmunix An experiment to explore Kaparthy ideas

how do i install this thing?

As far as I understand, you don't. You open Claude Code inside the repo and prompt `boot llmunix` inside Claude Code. The CLAUDE.md file tells Claude how to respond to that.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#376

Post by diggan »

3dsnano wrote: post #277
diggan wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality You clearly have strong feelings about it, which is fine, but it would be much more interesting to know exactly why it would terrible and demotivating, and why it cannot produce anything of quality? And what is "real quality" and does that mean "fake quality" exists? > million monkey interns banging on one million keyboards and submi…

> And what is "real quality" and does that mean "fake quality" exists? I think there is no real quality or fake quality, just quality. I am referencing the quality that Persig and C. Alexander have written about. It’s… qualitative, so it’s hard to measure but easy to feel. Humans are really good at perceiving it then making objective decisions. LLMs don’t know what it is (they’ve heard about it and think they know).

> LLMs don’t know what it is

Of course they don't, they're probability/prediction machines, they don't "know" anything, not even that Paris is the capital of France. What they do "know" is that once someone writes "The capital of France is", the most likely tokens to come after that, is "Paris". But they don't understand the concept, nor anything else, just that probably 54123 comes after 6723 (or whatever the tokens are).

Once you understand this, I think it's easy to reason about why they don't understand code quality, why they couldn't ever understand it, and how you can make them output quality code regardless.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#377

Post by pja »

elif wrote: post #308
osigurdson wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that AI code has to be sloppy. I've had some success with hand coding some examples and then asking codex to rigorously adhere to prior conventions. This can end up with very self consistent code. Agree though on the "pick the best PR" workflow. This is pure model training work and you should be compensated for it.

Yep this is what Andrej talks about around 20 minutes into this talk. You have to be extremely verbose in describing all of your requirements. There is seemingly no such thing as too much detail. The second you start being vague, even if it WOULD be clear to a person with common sense, the LLM views that vagueness as a potential aspect of it's own creative liberty.

> You have to be extremely verbose in describing all of your requirements. There is seemingly no such thing as too much detail.

Sounds like ... programming.

Program specification is programming, ultimately. For any given problem if you’re lucky the specification is concise & uniquely defines the required program. If you’re unlucky the spec ends up longer than the code you’d write to implement it, because the language you’re writing it in is less suited to the problem domain than the actual code.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#378

Post by diggan »

chamomeal wrote: post #336
latexr wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one. That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality. Why are we doing this to ourselves and embracing it? A few years ago, it would have been seen as a joke to say “the future of software development will be to have a million monkey interns banging on one million keyboar…

I say this all the time! Does anybody really want to be an assembly line QA reviewer for an automated code factory? Sounds like shit. Also I can’t really imagine that in the first place. At my current job, each task is like 95% understanding all the little bits, and then 5% writing the code. If you’re reviewing PRs from a bot all day, you’ll still need to understand all the bits before you accept it. So how much time…

> Does anybody really want to be an assembly line QA reviewer for an automated code factory? Sounds like shit.

On the other hand, does anyone really wanna be a code-monkey implementing CRUD applications over and over by following product specifications by "product managers" that barely seem to understand the product they're "managing"?

See, we can make bad faith arguments both ways, but what's the point?

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#379

Post by bandoti »

freehorse wrote: post #333
eddd-ddde wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With lazy people the same applies for everything, code they do write, or code they review from peers. The issue is not the tooling, but the hands.

The more tedious the work is, the less motivation and passion you get for doing it, and the more "lazy" you become. Laziness does not just come from within, there are situations that promote behaving lazy, and others that don't. Some people are just lazy most of the time, but most people are "lazy" in some scenarios and not in others.

Seurat created beautiful works of art composed of thousands of tiny dots, painted by hand; one might find it meditational with the right mindset.

Some might also find laziness itself dreadfully boring—like all the Microsoft employees code-reviewing AI-Generated pull requests!

https://blog.stackademic.com/my-new-hobby-watching-copilot-s...

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