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The bottleneck was never the code

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Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#401

Post by habinero »

mothballed wrote: post #178
Jensson wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goomba is assuming contradictions are coming from the same person, presumably b/c it's coming to the Goomba through the same app. Its because it comes from the same political faction. In general people are open about A when A seems palatable, and openly B when B seems palatable, but they almost never admit to do that when its obviously wrong to do so. That is the rational part of the fallacy, even if these are diff…

This is exactly it. You see it on HN all the time. You will debate someone. Then deep in thread, a second person appears with a gotcha. when you point out that the gotcha doesn't fit in with the prior argument, they point out that was a separate person. They knew damn well what they're doing with their little conniving deflection fuck-fuck game. They're acting for the same surrogate argument. The Goomba is real and t…

You, uh, you alright there my dude?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#402

Post by habinero »

SkyBelow wrote: post #264
plorg wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in A, I don't take a strong position on B, I am in coalition with people who believe in B and don't take a strong position on A, we both believe in C, D, E, and F, which some other people believe in with differing weights. Browbeating me about position B (or, the most useless kind of Internet banter, complaining about me and my hypocritical position on A+B to your friends who oppose both in a likewise contr…

>I believe in A, I don't take a strong position on B But if A and B are opposed, then there is a question of why a strong position on A can be allowed with a weak position on B, if the reason for the strong position on A would also indicate a strong position against B. The underlying argument being implied (but rarely ever directly stated) is to question if your reason for the strong position on A is really the reaso…

That's just "why do you hate waffles" with more words.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#403

Post by longevitygreenl »

36 years in, solo founder now, and this matches what I'm living. The code stopped being the bottleneck a while ago — Codex and Claude ship features faster than I can decide which features are worth shipping. The Jevons Paradox point lands hard: I have to actively resist building things just because I now can in an afternoon. Solo doesn't escape the coherence problem either, it just turns it into a fight with my past self about what this product actually is.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#404

Post by nilirl »

locknitpicker wrote: post #375
nilirl wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not merely stating other bottlenecks. I'm saying they're more important bottlenecks. They can't all be equally important bottlenecks; a bottleneck is by definition a singular component or sub-system most-limiting to the system's output. What are we trying to output from our businesses? Code? What is this magical context floating around every business that will unlock AI agents to produce ... what? [Edit] I apol…

> I was not merely stating other bottlenecks. I'm saying they're more important bottlenecks. This is a pointless statement though. The fact that writing code is a bottleneck, and a critical one, doesn't mean it's the only thing standing between us and fixing/implementing something. It's like downplaying the time taken by international flights, because people can spend time passing through security. The truth of the m…

No, it is not pointless to say other things are more important. An order of importance is how you prioritize things.

You're asserting that it is critical. Why is code change speed critical?

What is your analogy getting it? It does not map to my argument evidently.

You're asserting it is slow code that has evolved our development process. Why? It used to be correctness and appropriateness. How is it suddenly speed?

Bottleneck for what?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#405

Post by Pannoniae »

skiing_crawling wrote: post #363
Pannoniae wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, you're definitely right about the shifting goalposts ("it's a stochastic parrot" -> "it hallucinates all the time, it can't even get APIs right" -> "it can generate functions but can't reason about the codebase" -> "the bottleneck was never shipping code") At the same time, humans can move up the abstraction ladder faster than the LLMs can. At least, some humans. Agents can produce lots of code. They can also d…

> At the same time, humans can move up the abstraction ladder faster than the LLMs can This was kind of the point, its only true for now. I agree with you that this kind of stuff will take longer. I don't think there's probably good training data for it right now. Handling abstractions and course correcting is probably the job now, and it also happens to be exactly the data that we will be typing in our prompts. They…

Unless something radical changes (and that isn't unprecedented! I'm just writing this as of today), the trend is still "just" a bigger hammer. It's bigger, you can get way more done, but the blast radius is also larger.

Take the strawman: even if AI can one-shot basically any application below let's say, 1MLoC, if your prompt is 4 lines, it will generate something. It can't read your mind. If you make proper specs, then you'll get what you want - but many people don't know what they want. And even if they do, they might have contradictions in their requirements, might be asking for something impossible, etc.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#406

Post by aspenmartin »

imtringued wrote: post #397
aspenmartin wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

It’s not buzzword bragging they are the prerequisites to having an coherent conversation. If someone doesn’t know what chinchilla scaling laws are the discussion about “I think things are saturated” is not grounded in anything. It’s like sitting around debating quantum mechanics and you don’t know the math, it’s just meaningless. If these sound like buzzwords the implication is not “you’re an idiot” it’s “you are not yet informed on the key basics of the discussion” and that is something you can fix with curiosity and a couple of prompts to ChatGPT to speed up the learning curve. It’s not like any of this stuff is gatekept.

> 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.

Sorry I don’t understand what you’re saying here — what is the old news? You can break new models — yes. What’s the point you are trying to make here?

> 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.

I also don’t really know the point you’re trying to make here — like token cost drops seem like a good thing? Bigger context window too? Are we saying the same thing here?

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#407

Post by aspenmartin »

imtringued wrote: post #396
aspenmartin wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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 produ…

- Not a troll.

Both of these lectures misunderstand my point and how things work.

- “tech debt” is not some special problem…? You accumulate cruft and bad design decisions…you spend tokens to fix this. Is your point there is always a fundamental tension between spending tokens on new stuff and spending tokens on cleaning stuff?

> 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.

That’s a very interesting take because I would say the same thing! RL and scaling laws are not relevant to the performance and capabilities of coding agents? Thats something you don’t hear everyday

- chinchilla-like scaling laws are not ancient…people try to derive scaling laws for new paradigms all the time it is how researchers get their company/lab to invest in scaling up a new idea. No idea what you mean here. Maybe you think I meant “the literal constants from the chinchilla paper”? No I mean: scaling laws generally, and Chinchilla, due to the impact of that work, is used more generally. Regardless, scaling laws generally continue to hold, and in fact improve with architectural/data mix/training recipes.

> 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.

Well that’s a bit of a strong claim to make… I don’t agree with this at face value but even if I did, you don’t need to explicitly do RL on tech debt as a specific task.. you do RL to build better programming skills generally which then generalize to many coding tasks.

> 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".

Tech debt is strategic, why avoid it?

> 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.

I’m saying you can take, successively over time larger and larger, and more complex codebases with thorny debt problems and resolve them by spending money on tokens.

You keep scaling and, just like we do today, decide when some tech debt austerity needs to take place. I’m saying “the guy that built our house of cards over 10 years and left” is no longer so devastating and expensive a problem as it was before

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#408

Post by devonkim »

fao_ wrote: post #356
Aurornis wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obvious that they're not referring to the author or a specific person at all. They're talking about how the zeitgeist has changed. Look at Hacker News archives 3 or more years ago and it would be really hard to find anyone arguing that coding speed is not a bottleneck or that engineers need to spend more time in collaboration. You would find a lot of arguments that leaving engineers alone to code is the…

I don't think that this is very hypocritical on the part of the developer holding such views. Typing code has never been the bottleneck, building the mental model has. You need the mental model so you know how the domain and the actual model will interact, which is needed for pre-empting what tests you need, what QA you need to do, etc etc. and the limitations of the system. You can demo this out with a specification…

One of the core problems we have in software engineering is the longstanding philosophical problem around creation of cohesive, consistent, objective mental models of inherently subjective concepts like identifying a person, place, etc. Look at the endless lists of falsehoods programmers (tend to) believe about any topic.

You’re right that LLMs specifically have no guarantees about accuracy nor veracity of the text they generate but I posit that that’s the same with people, especially when filtered through the socialization process. The difference is in the kind of errors machines make compared to ones that humans make.

It’s frustrating we’re using anthropomorphic concepts like hallucinations when describing LLM behaviors when the fundamental units of computation and thus failures of computation are so different at every level.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#409

Post by bombcar »

paldepind2 wrote: post #237
TheLudd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the paradox not be that we PAY more for it? Or, if some process is made more effective, i.e. takes shorter time, we spend more time in that process.

Jevons paradox starts with some resource being used more efficiently. A classic example could be coal. The first steam engines used a ton of coal, but over time more efficient steam engines where created that used way less coal. One might think that this caused the global coal usage to go down. But the opposite happened, as the overall cost of doing something with a steam engine went down. Note, that the price of coa…

The Jevons paradox is just two curves overlaid - demand and supply. As supply goes up and the price goes down, “new” demand appears that couldn’t be satisfied (economically) at the higher price.

Once the majority of the latent demand has been realized it will stabilize and start to go down.

In the current case of LLMs we’re seeing a Cambrian explosion of code that was quite doable before (demand was there) but there wasn’t the economics to dedicate a coder to it - now anyone with Claude can hack together something that works for them alone.

Re: The bottleneck was never the code

#410

Post by tempaccount5050 »

gib444 wrote: post #241
tempaccount5050 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% denial/ego. I've been a contractor longer than I'd like and it's the exact same response I see when I join a new team. The team complains they have too much work and can't get anything done, so their manager pulls me in. Suddenly, they don't want to give anything up. I'm actually in the middle of this right now. The team "is swamped" yet somehow, they are able to argue that almost everything I can handle is…

This sounds like my ideal job. How do you land such gigs?

Recruiters.
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