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Don't you mean extinct?

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Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#41

Post by echelon »

skydhash wrote: post #21
marginalia_nu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just about every professional coding job I've ever had has had programmers eager to code more, complaining about how much rigmarole there is around making changes, complaining about constant meetings and endless bureaucracy around change management and requirements. Meanwhile business mostly saw programmer velocity and output as a problem and a business risk, as they struggled to keep up with the rate of change and k…

> My output sometimes rivals that of entire teams' I've been part of, mostly because I get to just code to my heart's content. The fact is that often I code less than most of my peers. Because I prefer spending some time to design suitable data structures/algorithms for the problem at hand. I don't aim for perfection, just that it align with the business domain (and/or the interface) so that future works are proporti…

> I prefer spending some time to design suitable data structures/algorithms for the problem at hand.

I'm doing this at LLM speed now.

I feel like I'm doing the work of two whole teams and designing rock-solid software.

Rust, strong types, enums, fantastic interfaces, brevity.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#42

Post by lelanthran »

bitwize wrote: post #27
singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

No, he is correct. LLMs have much larger working memories for the kind of details you work with in programming tasks. You are at an objective cognitive deficit by not taking advantage of this. Everybody knows what he means by left behind. When you program, you do so with a goal in mind, and you will not be able to reach that goal as quickly without LLMs. You will be outcompeted by those who use them, and this means t…

> This is the future. Adapt or die.

I'm curious about what adaptation you have in mind.

You use LLMs to write specific functions? The person who uses it in an agent loop will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMs in an agent loop? The person who uses LLMs to supervise loops will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMS to supervise agent loops? The person who uses LLMs to determine product offering and automatically start supervision on producing the product will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMs to determine product offering and kick off the supervision? The person who uses LLMs to clone your product without the initial product research will leave you behind to die.

You use LLMs to clone products gaining traction? The person who runs a cluster 100x the size of yours will leave you behind to die.

I am trying to understand where you think you fit in, in this Brave New World.

You obviously think that you're adapting, but if you're correct, anything you do now can be replaced by an LLM in the near future.

Just where were you going with "Adapt or die".

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#43

Post by BearOso »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

It's marketing. The big AI companies know what they're doing and are trying to drive adoption with FOMO. Some people bought into the idea early on and feel self-important. Meanwhile, using AI is so easy that it's tantamount to pushing a button, because that's the whole point of it: to make things easy to do. You can pick it up in half an hour, so it's impossible to "fall behind," unless you're holding stock when the bubble inevitably crashes.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#44

Post by My_Name »

With the improvements that AI has made in just the last year, it should be obvious to anyone that code written by an AI will at some point stop being "AI slop" and be better than the majority of coders are able to put out. Reduced to its basics, all code is just characters put into a sequence. Similar to chess or Go, both of which, it was claimed at one point or another, would be impossible for a computer to beat a human, until they did (chess 1997, go 2016), so computers will eventually produce better quality code than even a team of humans is capable of.

A genuine question : If an AI can reliably write code better than most coders, do it quicker, and produce code that runs efficiently which has less, or at least no more, bugs than human written code, why on earth would a company not use an AI to write all their code for most purposes?

And if they did, why is it important for that code to be 'elegant' or even human readable if the bug checking is also done by AI? (as seems to be the direction we are moving in)

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#45

Post by stronglikedan »

pocksuppet wrote: post #3

It's probably best to learn about LLMs, and then don't use them most of the time. It's much harder to justify not even knowing how the new thing works, than to justify not using it because the old thing is better.

This is the path I'm on. I want to know enough about them to actually demonstrate their weaknesses when I choose to not use them for a given task. Upper management doesn't want to hear "because they suck" when they ask why. My company (and many others) just added a new "AI proficiency" metric to their hiring process, and I can take a hint.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#46

Post by CamperBob2 »

lstodd wrote: post #31
01284a7e wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they should be fighting for independent development and universal access". Well stated.

I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing. I only snark at those who try to mislabel that thing as something useful. Which it is not.

I see no sense in fighting for "independent development and universal access" of and to a fundamentally useless thing.

That's why they call us "hackers," and they call you something else.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#47

Post by Chance-Device »

My_Name wrote: post #44

With the improvements that AI has made in just the last year, it should be obvious to anyone that code written by an AI will at some point stop being "AI slop" and be better than the majority of coders are able to put out. Reduced to its basics, all code is just characters put into a sequence. Similar to chess or Go, both of which, it was claimed at one point or another, would be impossible for a computer to beat a h…

This is exactly right, but a lot of people have motivated reasoning about it. I can’t really blame them, the kind of shifts that AI is looking like it will bring are unprecedented, and usually when people claim big, world changing things will happen, they don’t, so most people are primed not to believe it.

However as you say, we already have the evidence about this one, and it would require some unknown wall to exist where AI could suddenly not improve further, and I’m just not seeing it. Most likely it will get more capable and cheaper as time goes on, and then every industry will be impacted the way software currently is.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#48

Post by beepbooptheory »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

It's extra weird because the Carmack quote immediately following seems to invalidate this very point!

Or at the very least: "It was never about the actual coding" and "coding more separates you from those who will fall behind" is classic kettel logic.

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#49

Post by dcuthbertson »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #2

I mostly like this article but > Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take. Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

I worked for a company that measures developer's output in number of commits, PRs created and approved, and Jira tickets per sprint. Management doesn't even insist on that the tickets have any kind of an effort estimate.

It can be pretty depressing, until you learn how to game the system - create tickets for yourself that are tiny amounts of work. I hear that it's getting harder to do that, because management is looking more carefully at tickets generated and it looks like they'll start having developers assign points to their tickets before the tickets are added to the sprint

Re: Don't you mean extinct?

#50

Post by My_Name »

Chance-Device wrote: post #47
My_Name wrote: post #44

With the improvements that AI has made in just the last year, it should be obvious to anyone that code written by an AI will at some point stop being "AI slop" and be better than the majority of coders are able to put out. Reduced to its basics, all code is just characters put into a sequence. Similar to chess or Go, both of which, it was claimed at one point or another, would be impossible for a computer to beat a h…

This is exactly right, but a lot of people have motivated reasoning about it. I can’t really blame them, the kind of shifts that AI is looking like it will bring are unprecedented, and usually when people claim big, world changing things will happen, they don’t, so most people are primed not to believe it. However as you say, we already have the evidence about this one, and it would require some unknown wall to exist…

I think for some people, it's partly that they think that, unlike physical work, work that involves thinking is somehow special, and humans are the only beings capable of it.

In the 40s, the argument was that computers will never think because they are made of matter, Turing rebutted this by saying that brains are made of matter and introduced The Turing Test, which was then replied to by Searle with his famous 'Chinese Room', which to my mind just made all consciousness suspect, even humans.

At every stage, though, computers have outpaced the predictions for their capabilities, and as you say, the unknown wall that blocks this march is yet to be seen.

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