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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#401

Post by vidarh »

jibal wrote: post #397
vidarh wrote: 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.

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, huma…

No, twisting ot to be about how to create such a system is the strawman.

> Turing completeness not necessary for creativity--not by a long shot.

This is by far a more extreme claim than the others in this thread. A system that is not even Turing complete is extremely limited. It's near impossible to construct a system with the ability to loop and branch that isn't Turing complete, for example.

>(In fact, humans are not Turing complete.)

Humans are at least trivially Turing complete - to be Turing complete, all we need to be able to do is to read and write a tape or simulation of one, and use a lookup table with 6 entries (for the proven minimal (2,3) Turing machine) to choose which steps to follow.

Maybe you mean to suggest we exceed it. There is no evidence we can.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#402

Post by woeirua »

anematode wrote: post #88
woeirua wrote: post #84

The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.” First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful. Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than…

In agree in principle, but the compiler is a terrible example given the amount of scaffolding afforded to the LLMs, literally hundreds of thousands of test cases covering all kinds of esoteric corners. Also (and this is coming from someone who thinks it's quite close) "AGI" is not implied by the ability to implement very-long-horizon software tasks. That's not "general" at all.

You're moving the goal posts. A year ago, _no one_ thought it could write a working compiler. Yes, the compilers we've seen today are not great. Yes, they rely too much on existing implementations. But... if you can't see which way the wind is blowing then I can't help you at this point.

AGI is a meaningless milestone. No one can actually define it. The best definition I've seen is the one that ARC is using: "AI that is as good at a human at every task".

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#403

Post by oooyay »

esafak wrote: post #142
oblio wrote: 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...

"Shift-left" was a general term that occurred in the systems engineering / devops space – I'm not surprised to see it used in a security context now. More or less, about a decade ago most systems engineers were recruited into the industry without any application software engineering skills and that became a drag on organizations trying to scale. It was about moving testing, devops, security, etc into the software engineering role and attempting to consolidate systems engineering into SWE roles. It was a part of the larger "devops movement".

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#404

Post by woeirua »

stevekrouse wrote: post #104
woeirua wrote: post #84

The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.” First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful. Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than…

That's not my argument at all! Though I can see why you took that away; my bad for not making my argument clearer. I believe that even when we have AGI, code will still be super valuable because it'll be how we get precise abstractions into human heads, which is necessary for humans to be able to bring informed opinions to bear.

No, I think we just fundamentally disagree.

IMO, black boxes that "just work" will be fine provided they can produce intermediate artifacts and explanations that make sense. The people that I know who use CoWork already don't care about how the agent got the result as long as the outputs look right and the process is explainable.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#406

Post by shimman »

moconnor wrote: post #384
abcde666777 wrote: post #178

It seems to be inevitable that with any new technology we go through a phase of super duper excitement about the possibilities, where we try to use it to the extreme, and through that process start to absorb what it actually is and isn't capable of. The hype cycle's distasteful of course, but I've accepted that this is how humans figure out what things are. Like a child we have to abuse it before we learn how to prop…

I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Well, 24 really because in the whole last year I barely wrote a line myself but my output increased dramatically. If you can’t see that it’s over, I’m not sure what to tell you. You will, in time.

The type of work matters and understanding how capital interacts with labor is something that hasn't really changed over the last 150 years (not the first time productivity tools have been introduced in capitalism).

All we are going to get is increased mass surveillance and molding software engineers into more assembly line work.

Both things do not sound good or reasonable nor wanted by a majority in our industry.

But sure! Being able to do more busy work is useful I guess, too bad the workers will never benefit from such a scheme; hopefully the masses don't overthrow the country, but I wouldn't blame them if they did.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#407

Post by stevekrouse »

woeirua wrote: post #404
stevekrouse wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my argument at all! Though I can see why you took that away; my bad for not making my argument clearer. I believe that even when we have AGI, code will still be super valuable because it'll be how we get precise abstractions into human heads, which is necessary for humans to be able to bring informed opinions to bear.

No, I think we just fundamentally disagree. IMO, black boxes that "just work" will be fine provided they can produce intermediate artifacts and explanations that make sense. The people that I know who use CoWork already don't care about how the agent got the result as long as the outputs look right and the process is explainable.

I don't disagree with anything you just said

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#408

Post by jibal »

js8 wrote: post #145
lateforwork wrote: post #71

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…

> AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. Of course! But that's what makes them so powerful. In 99% of cases that's what you want - something that is conventional. The AI can come up with novel things if it has an agency, and can learn on its own (using e.g. RL). But we don't want that in most use cases…

That skit has nothing to do with Vihart ... Claude hallucinated that.

> This clearly shows that AI can think critically and reason.

No it doesn't ... Claude regurgitated human knowledge.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#410

Post by warkdarrior »

runarberg wrote: post #167
conception wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the problem with Chris’ take is “This one for fun project didn’t produce anything particularly interesting.” So outside of the fact that we have magic now that can just produce “conventional “ compilers. Take it to a Moore’s Law situation. Start 1000 create a compiler projects- have each have a temperature to try new things, experiment, mutate. Collate - find new findings - reiterate- another 1000 runs with some o…

Moors law states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. It has nothing to say about the capabilities of statistical models. In fact in statistics we have another law which states that as you increase parameters the more you risk overfitting. And overfitting seems to already be a major problem with state of the art LLM models. When you start overfitting you are pretty mu…

Modern LLMs showed that overfitting disappears if you add more and more parameters. "Double descent" is well documented, if not well understood.
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