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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#391

Post by robertlagrant »

enraged_camel wrote: post #184
robertlagrant wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both your error and the OP's error is in imagining that the same people are saying both things. The "community" fallacy, which has been around for about 10 years now, that pretends that people with something in common (e.g. "uses HN") are somehow a community that thinks identically is completely wrong.

Actually, it's some of the same people. I won't name names, but there are a lot of AI skeptics on this site who loudly and prominently comment on every AI story. And if you look at their posting histories you'll see the exact type of goalpost-shifting the parent commenter is talking about. You see it elsewhere as well. There's now a cottage industry (with visible members like Ed Zitron) who have made a career out of…

There are 8 billion people on the planet. You can find a seemingly large group of people who believe anything. That doesn't mean the group exists in a way that's worth talking about.

> There's now a cottage industry (with visible members like Ed Zitron) who have made a career out of creating and selling anti-AI content

I can't believe that Ed Zitron, who I just looked up, has made a career out of creating and selling anti-AI content. He's 40. He cannot have been doing that for very long.

> At first they were complaining that AI lies constantly. As AI got better, they shifted to other talking points.

Calling the truth "complaining" seems more revealing of you than them. If the AI was lying constantly, they weren't "complaining". They were telling the truth. Once the AI stopped lying so much, they stopped saying that as keeping on saying it would no longer be true. But there are still other issues to talk about. That's...right? Isn't it?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#392

Post by coldtea »

physPop wrote: post #358
coldtea wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing code is not the bottleneck, as in we can develop features faster than they can be deployed. That's an organizational issue due to over-regulation, bureucracy, too many stakeholders each with their own irrelevant opinion, etc. Startups or FOSS projects without the above absolutely can't "develop features faster than they can be deployed", and usually have a huge backlog of bugs and features they'd like to ha…

If you don't have stakeholders I contend you probably don't have a product, or you're building the bare minimum MVP which upon becoming a product will be woefully inadequate, generating the aforementioned bottleneck.

I said "too many". And mostly meant people with a say, as in "design by executive board/committee" as opposite to someone or a small team with a vision. Not about not having users.

In any case, the point still stands: most companies absolutely can't code "faster than they can ship" and for that have huge backlogs of things they'd want to add or bugs to fix.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#393

Post by miellaby »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

No Thats not the same persons.Thats as simple as that. Those who used to be hyperfocused in the zone/flow so to get integrated designed consistent opiniated KISS Small-Is-Beautifull antipattern-free reusable code featuring the best abstraction layering with just the right amount of external dependencies and cognitive load ... these people are suffering a lot seeing the skills they cherished their whole life being devalued in less than a year. This opinion is a project manager's one. He's probably right. Both sides are right.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#394

Post by imtringued »

kenforthewin wrote: post #31
nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

Looks like this comment is touching a nerve. This community is progressing from "AI can't write code", to "Well, AI can write code but it's not really about the code". I wonder where the goalposts will be moved next?

I'm still at the "AI can write code, but it needs to go through me and I need to deeply understand the generated code base" stage. It's still about the code, it has always been about the code and how well it satisfies the requirements.

Since I didn't agree with the premise of the top level post, I was scrolling down as far as possible to get to the second top level comment and yet here I am still scrolling.

From my perspective AI doesn't really accelerate me per se, it's more like the AI helps me avoid getting stuck.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#395

Post by remilouf »

coldtea wrote: post #319

> The goal was to test our structured-generation algorithms and their open-source counterparts, replacing the naive “does it accept this string?” with something closer to the real problem: “does it produce the right token distribution?” The experiment kept coming up in conversation, then returning to the roadmap. Last month, I spent half an hour explaining the method to Codex. A few hours later, it had produced a wor…

Author here. Sorry my writing is tedious. Next time I’ll use AI to make it more readable.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#396

Post by imtringued »

aspenmartin wrote: post #271
jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

- systemic tech debt is now addressable at scale with LLMs. Future models will be good enough to sustain this, if people don’t believe this I would challenge them to explain why. First consider if you understand what scaling laws are like chinchilla and how RL with verification works fundamentally - I completely agree with you about fundamentally the limitation being the business able to coherently articulate itself…

>- systemic tech debt is now addressable at scale with LLMs. Future models will be good enough to sustain this, if people don’t believe this I would challenge them to explain why.

Is this some sort of troll attempt? Like, are you fundamentally misunderstanding the problem with tech debt? This is the equivalent of throwing garbage on the floor and expecting professional cleaners to keep your house clean.

You can produce tech debt faster than you can pay it back, that's the core aspect of tech debt. If tech debt was more expensive in the short term than not doing it, nobody would be doing it.

A labor saving device doesn't reduce or deal with tech debt since tech debt is a decision made independently of the competence of the developers. If you have a company with a tech debt culture, the labor saving device will just let you accumulate more tech debt until you reach the same level of burden per person.

>First consider if you understand what scaling laws are like chinchilla and how RL with verification works fundamentally

Honestly, this tells me that you basically understand nothing, not even chinchilla scaling laws and how RL works. Not only are you trying to brute force the problem, you're listing completely irrelevant factors to the problem at hand.

Chinchilla scaling laws are "ancient" by LLM standards. Everyone who designs a model architecture that is supposed to beat their competitors is pulling out every trick in the books and then come up with their own on top of that and chinchilla scaling laws have been done to death in that regard.

Reinforcement Learning is also a pretty bad example here, because there is no obvious way to encode a reward function to deal with something as ill defined as tech debt. You didn't even say avoid tech debt which would be actionable to some extent, just "systemic tech debt is now addressable at scale with LLMs". I.e. you're implying that if LLMs were to generate tech debt, you can just keep scaling and produce more of it, solving the problem once and for all Futurama style with ever bigger ice cubes.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#397

Post by imtringued »

aspenmartin wrote: post #364
crabbone wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look at say Claude sonnet 3.x. It’s an entire world away in like a year In the area I work I find them to be of very little value both then and now... I see no real difference. They help in marginal tasks. Eg. they catch typos, or they help new programmers to faster explore the existing codebase. So far, I haven't used a single line of code generated by AI, even though I've seen thousands. Some of them worked to dr…

I think if you honestly don’t believe there is a major difference between 3.x and 4.7 I don’t think there is much anyone will be able to do to convince you. I do find it disappointing when technical professionals are so disinterested in building a real understanding of a fairly complex topic. > I see no reason to believe it's going to get better. Waving hands more forcefully isn't helping, there's no argument behind…

What's up with the buzzword bragging?

You don't know buzzword A, B, C? Heh, he must be incompetent and know nothing.

The buzzwords mean nothing, really. The math is the same for a stupid or a smart model, because the model is trying to mimic properties of the training dataset.

You can give me the ultimate model architecture that will beat every model in existence and I can still figure out a way to make it perform worse than what's available today, but you're not even doing that, you're just drumming up some old news.

If someone "threatened" me with tech advancements I would be more worried about things like an imminent massive drop in token costs for bigger context windows or other game changers like continual learning where the model internalizes your code base into its weights rather than just keeping it in its context.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#398

Post by nottorp »

coldtea wrote: post #322
nottorp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. It's annoying and disruptive to be interrupted when doing work that requires deep focus. Steering a LLM also requires deep focus. Unless you want to end up on accidentally quadratic or have a CVE named after your project.

Many people today just trust whatever shit comes out. Some even brag about it, even famous devs like Yegge. And requiring review of the result is not a "flow state". Flow states means continuous and uninterrupted focus while actively performing, LLMs block and return with new code or questions for minutes on end. That's the opposite of flow, it's the "let's take a break now, see you in a few minutes" for every intera…

> even famous devs

Are they devs or performance artists by now?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#399

Post by imtringued »

dyauspitr wrote: post #89
jugg1es wrote: post #17

I think veteran engineers have always known that the real problems with velocity have always been more organizational than technical. The inability for the business to define a focused, productive roadmap has always been the problem in software engineering. Constantly jumping to the next shiny thing that yields almost no ROI but never allowing systemic tech debt to be addressed has crippled many company's I have work…

It’s part of the problem but AI also can crush this on pure lines of code and functionality alone. It can put out 100,000 lines of somewhat decent code in a day. That usually takes months or years of manual coding for a team.

[dead]

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#400

Post by bamboozled »

nayroclade wrote: post #15

It's hilarious to me to see the same kind of engineer, who throughout my career have constantly bitched and moaned about team meetings, agile ceremonies, issue trackers, backlogs, slack, emails, design reviews, and anything else that disrupted the hours of coding "flow state" they claimed as their most essential and sacred activity to be protected at all costs, suddenly, and with no hint of shame, start preaching abo…

If coding by hand took 10x longer, why would it have bee unreasonable for people to demand more time to code? Seems like floored logic and you're just exciting to dunk on people?
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