401–410 of 467 posts
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They also heat other things up like food but take less space than an oven.
Yes, they miraculously leave your food cold but heat up your plate enough to burn you.
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> Modern AI tools are just the next step to abstracting away syntax as a gatekeeper function, but the need for precise systemic thinking is as glaringly necessary as ever. Syntax is not a gatekeeper function. It’s exactly the means to describe the precise systemic thinking. When you’re creating a program, you’re creating a DSL for multiple subsystem, which you then integrate. The subsystem can be abstract, but we usu…
The difference is that human language is a much more information-dense, higher-level abstraction than code. I can say "an async function that accepts a byte array, throws an error if it's not a valid PNG image with a 1:1 aspect ratio and resolution >= 100x100, resizes it to 100x100, uploads it to the S3 bucket env.IMAGE_BUCKET with a UUID as the file name, and retries on failure with exponential backoff up to a maxim…
I won't unless both you and I have a shared context which will tie each of these concept to a specific thing. You said "async function", and there's a lot of languages that don't have that concept. And what about the permissions of the s3 bucket, what's the initial time of the wait time? And what algorithm for the resizing? What if someone sent us a very big image (let say the maximum that the standard allows).
These are still logic questions that have not been addressed.
The thing is that general programming languages are general. We do have constructs like procedure/functions and class, that allows us for a more specialized notation, but that's a skill to acquire (like writing clear and informative text).
So in pseudo lisp, the code would be like
(defun fn (bytes)
(when-let\* ((png (byte2png bytes))
(valid (and (valid-png-p png)
(square-res-p png)))
(small-png (resize-image png))
(bucket (get-env "IMAGE_BUCKET"))
(filename (uuid)))
(do-retry :backoff 'exp
(s3-upload bucket small-png))))
square(P) :- width(P, W), height(P, H), W is H.
validpng(P, X) :- a whole list of clauses that parses X and build up P, square(P).
resizepng(P) :- bigger(100,100, P), scale(100, 100, P).
smallpng(P, X) :- validpng(P, X), resizepng(P).
s3upload(P): env("IMAGE_BUCKET", B), s3_put(P, B, (exp_backoff(100))))
fn(X) :- smallpng(P, X), s3upload(P)
Code can be as highlevel as you want and very close to natural language. Where people spend time is the implementation of the lower level and dealing with all the failure modes.
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Yeah, I'll gladly AI-gen code, but I still write docs by hand. Have yet to see one good AI generated doc, they're all garbage.
Incidentally, I just spent some time yesterday with Gemini and Grok writing a first draft of docs for a complex codebase. The end result is far more useful and complete than anything I could have possibly produced without AI in the same amount of time, and I didn't even have to learn Mermaid syntax to fill the docs with helpful visual aids. Of course it's a collaborative process — you can't just tell it to document t…
In this case, the reaction is already visible: more interest in decentralized systems, peer-to-peer coordination, and local computing instead of cloud-centric pipelines. Many developers have wanted this for years.
AI companies are spending heavily on centralized infrastructure, but the trend does not exclude the rise of strong local models. The pace of progress suggests that within a few years, consumer hardware and local models will meet most common needs, including product development.
Plenty of people are already moving in that direction.
Qwen models run well locally, and while I still use Claude Code day-to-day, the gap is narrowing. I'm waiting on the NVIDIA AI hardware to come down from $3500 USD
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Where’s all the data showing productivity increases from AI adoption? If AI is so useful, it shouldn’t be hard to prove it.
Measuring productivity in software development, or even white collar jobs in general, let alone the specific productivity gains of even things like the introduction of digital technology and the internet at all , let alone stuff like static vs dynamic types, or the productivity difference of various user interface modalities, is notoriously extremely difficult. Why would we expect to be able to do it here? https://en…
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The difference is that human language is a much more information-dense, higher-level abstraction than code. I can say "an async function that accepts a byte array, throws an error if it's not a valid PNG image with a 1:1 aspect ratio and resolution >= 100x100, resizes it to 100x100, uploads it to the S3 bucket env.IMAGE_BUCKET with a UUID as the file name, and retries on failure with exponential backoff up to a maxim…
> and you know exactly what I'm describing. I won't unless both you and I have a shared context which will tie each of these concept to a specific thing. You said "async function", and there's a lot of languages that don't have that concept. And what about the permissions of the s3 bucket, what's the initial time of the wait time? And what algorithm for the resizing? What if someone sent us a very big image (let say…
The fact that you're able to confidently take what I wrote and stretch it into pseudocode with zero deviation from my intended meaning proves my point.
The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underly…
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> and you know exactly what I'm describing. I won't unless both you and I have a shared context which will tie each of these concept to a specific thing. You said "async function", and there's a lot of languages that don't have that concept. And what about the permissions of the s3 bucket, what's the initial time of the wait time? And what algorithm for the resizing? What if someone sent us a very big image (let say…
Details like the language/stack and S3 configuration would presumably be somewhere else in the spec, not in the description of that particular function. The fact that you're able to confidently take what I wrote and stretch it into pseudocode with zero deviation from my intended meaning proves my point.
I can create a pseudocode because I know the relevant paradigm as well as how to design software. There’s no way you can have a novice draft pseudo-code like this because they can’t abstract well and discern intent behind abstractions.
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Details like the language/stack and S3 configuration would presumably be somewhere else in the spec, not in the description of that particular function. The fact that you're able to confidently take what I wrote and stretch it into pseudocode with zero deviation from my intended meaning proves my point.
To draft a spec like this, it would take more time and the same or more knowledge than to just write the code. And you still won’t have reliable results, without doing another lengthy pass to correct the generated code. I can create a pseudocode because I know the relevant paradigm as well as how to design software. There’s no way you can have a novice draft pseudo-code like this because they can’t abstract well and…
Collaborating with AI also speeds this up a lot. For example, it's much faster to have the AI write a code snippet involving a dependency/API and manually verify the code's correctness for inclusion in the spec than it is to read though documentation and write the same code by hand.
The feat of implementing that function based on my description is well within the capabilities of AI. Grok did it in under 30 seconds, and I don't see any obvious mistakes at first glance: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_fa68bae1-3436-404b-bf9e-09....