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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

391–400 of 486 posts

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#391

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered la…

[deleted]

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#392

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered la…

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#393
post #142
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shift left? Edit: I've googled it and I can't find anything relevant. I've been working in software for 20+ years and read a myriad things and it's the first time I hear about it...

It's a security practice. https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/cybersecurity-101/cloud-se...

I've heard a ton of times about "designing/planning for quality and security from the start", I guess it can't hurt to also have a buzzword for it.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anther perspective, AI is fast turning [0.1x to 0.5x] low cost X-world Sofwate Engineers into >1x engineers. Contrary to pre AI era, one of my close relative he has become very good "understand / write the requirement" guy. HN may be dominated by >1x engineers, another revolution is happening at lower /bulk end of spectrum as well.

AI makes it possible for someone who has never written code to generate a program that does what they want. One of my friends wanted to simulate a 7,9 against a dealer 10 upcard in the card game blackjack. GPT was able to write the simulation for him in javascript/html. So it took a 0.001x coder and turned him into a 0.2x coder.

Was it actually correct? How would they tell?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#395
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’ve built some live programming systems in the past that are innovative, but not very practical, and now I’m trying to figure out how to get a 1.5B model (a small language model) into the pipeline if a custom small programming language. That is human driven innovation, but an LLM is definitely very useful.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#396

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…

Maybe you are already an expert in those so its fine. But for anybody else, using llms extensively would mean becoming way less proficient in those topics. Skip building some deeper senior knowledge and have a rather shallow knowledge. Anytime I grokked anything deeper like encryption, these saml/jwt auths, complex algorithms was only and unavoidably due to having to go deep with them.

Good for the company, not so much for the given engineer. But I get the motivation, we all are naturally lazy and normally avoid doing stuff if we can. Its just that there are also downsides, and they are for us, engineers.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#397
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an irrelevant strawman. It tells us nothing about how create such a system ... how to pluck it out of the infinity of TMs. It's like saying that bridges are necessarily built from atoms and adhere to the laws of physics--that's of no help to engineers trying to build a bridge.

And there's also the other side of the GP's point--Turing completeness not necessary for creativity--not by a long shot. (In fact, humans are not Turing complete.)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#398
post #373
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe that quantum oracles are more powerful than Turing oracles, because quantum oracles can be constructed, from what I understand, and Turing oracles need infinite tape. Our brains use quantum computation within each neuron [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5

There's no evidence to suggest a quantum computer exceeds the Turing computable.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#399
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because humans are fundamentally different from LLMs regardless of how much people draw the comparison.

Go on. How, in this context?

A) My coworkers care. Their job is to solve the problem in the most pragmatic way possible, and the LLMs job is to produce plausible answers, even if they literally write broken syntax. They are not capable of caring about anything, but they can sound like they care.

B) They are shit for frontend work. This is the big one, and maybe we will someday, but we really haven't bridged the gap between an LLM seeing code and matching it to something on screen. People are well aware that agents need tight feedback loops to really be effective, which is more doable for server side code where you can setup a good test apparatus (still a pain in the ass for other reasons). But the thing a developer does most often is instantly see what their code changes did to a project visually. This is a huge gap with LLMs. We are at the level where an LLM can check that the site loads to begin with. That's it. We can't trust it to make functioning UI, and we sure as hell can't trust it to compare code against UI unless we ask it something very specific. Watch the LLM clocks sometime [1]. I was shocked to see even 5.2 codex making complete nonsense every few minutes.

C) My coworkers have narrow experience in the field we work in, which means they are frequently zooming past things that a general approximation of intelligence like Claude gets tripped up on. ChatGPT is trained on the entire corpus of humanity, yet doesn't understand there is such a thing as bad language servers. That a linting error is not inherently problematic and you don't need to spend $5 in tokens investigating it. This is something a junior developer understands. Why do I need to constantly watch and stop my agent and re-explain things we learned in the first week of programming?

D) Because LLMs are an approximation of correct solutions, god help you if you work in spaces where your syntax looks similar to other frameworks. I work in a lot of legacy apps that are framework spin-offs of other framework spin-offs. Stuff that's half documented and poorly made. There is no testing for these projects and no good IDE support. So if something is an offshoot of OctoberCMS, ChatGPT is just going to make up a bunch of methods from OctoberCMS even if they are completely invalid in this project. Agents are completely useless in projects like these.

E) Local models aren't there yet, and the fact that the entire industry is cool with letting their skills atrophy so hard that they are completely dependent on the livelihoods and structures of a few companies they hadn't even heard of 5 years ago is deeply concerning and unprofessional. I personally wouldn't hire someone so short sighted. Believing in LLMs taking over all coding work is a fundamental disbelief in Humanity, and I'm just not behind it. The most amazing thing about development is how much knowledge share we have and how cooperative we are. A future where no one knows how to do anything anymore is the future where tech truly goes off the rails.

[1] https://clocks.brianmoore.com/

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