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AI coding is gambling

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Re: AI coding is gambling

#431

Post by sublinear »

ctoth wrote: post #417
sublinear wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of words just to say you never liked programming. You could just as easily make claims about carpentry or cooking because you discovered Ikea or microwave meals. They serve a purpose and technically satisfy the needs of anyone, yet they aren't a good enough solution for anything important. That's where we're at with this tech.

I'm building a Klatt-style formant speech synthesizer targeting behavioral compatibility with a specific commercial synthesizer. The architecture is driven by hundreds of academic papers, uses declarative YAML with CEL expressions for phased rule execution, and every parameter is citation-backed to specific phonetics research[0]. Nobody is selling this off a shelf. The market for "Eloquence-compatible formant synthes…

I think you're missing my point. It has nothing to do with what I like.

I'm saying there's a ton of nuance and human feedback necessary to build the software most developers work on for a living. It's built to requirements that evolve with the business. Businesses ultimately serve people with opinions and preferences. Businesses need to pass audits. Specs can change quarterly. Clients and their contracts come and go. It's exactly like building/maintaining custom furniture for a bespoke house, or consistently cooking a signature recipe at any scale and considering any necessary accommodations. If it wasn't true, the business wouldn't be viable regardless if AI is used or not. I'm talking about systems and services, not products.

You are building a product for a narrow use case requiring DSP. Modeling was always the point. I don't doubt AI helped, but we're not talking about the same thing.

If you were building something for an enterprise client, nobody would give a shit how you got it done as long as you have a demo by monday and it ships next month. No excuses and no gotchas. Any incident risks breaking the SLA and losing the contract. If the client calls a meeting at the last minute to make changes, you're probably working on the weekend. People don't like using AI for stuff like that. Efficiency is not the priority. People don't want cutting edge or novel. They want reliability and competence. Their livelihood depends on knowing exactly how it works and how it can be extended and maintained. They want to stay at least one step ahead of what the client asks for next. People want to test the hell out of it and nobody wants to get fired for not noticing what is obvious to other stakeholders who don't share their tunnel vision. Clients don't have much tolerance for delays or bugs. This is why AI has mixed or negative results for all but personal projects or startups.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#432

Post by mskogly »

strangattractor wrote: post #122
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

One size never fits all. I am old enough to remember what a game changer Spreadsheets (VisiCalc) where. They made the personal computer into a SwissArmy knife for many people that could not justify investing large sums of money into software to solve a niche problem. Until that time PCs simply were not a big thing. I believe AI will do something similar for programming. The level of complexity in modern apps is high…

I agree. I remember working as a front end web developer years ago and needing to parse and transform xml/xslt from an api, and spending days and days trying to get it to work. The problem was the version of the IIs web server, version of xslt parser, and version format of the xslt etc. spent days on stack overflow trying to get a working solution. With ai I would have solved that idiotic problem in 1 minute.

Ai is tool, that lets us do what we want to do.

I also remember trying to create my first iOS app in Xcode and thinking «this is simply beyond me». Wouldn’t say app coding is trivial with ai, but its at least feasible now.

The bad part that none of us have a competitive edge anymore, and are close to unemployable. We can’t all be self taught founders who starts our own businesses. It’s going to get weird.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#433

Post by raxxorraxor »

itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

I heavily use AI for coding, but you cannot skip the understanding part. At some point it falls apart and then you need someone to wade through the results. If you understand the architecture, server and service configuration and how they interact, you can use AI to be quite productive. But you still need the deep level understanding.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#435

Post by intended »

maplethorpe wrote: post #426
sixtyj wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In media there was a rule 1-9-90. One creates, 9 comment, 90 use or are silent/don’t care. Richard Branson realized that a company starts to behave differently when it reaches more than stuff of 135 people that coincides with average number of people you can consider as personally known to you. Context switching is a bitch. You cannot do it for a long time. Abundance brought by AI will somehow consolidate as people c…

One potential solution to this is AI summarization. Imagine coming home, and while preparing dinner your AI assistant recounts what happened in all your favourite tv shows that day. Then while you're doing the laundry, it tells you about all the new games it found and tested for you. These are just thought starters, but something like this could significantly raise the ceiling on what one person is able to consume in…

Nah. These would be pseudo calories.

Adults tend to forget that they gained their powers of reasoning by exercising them.

Getting a summary, the way you described it, will be minus the effort required to think about it. This is great for information that you are already informed.

This is related to the illusion of explanatory depth. Most of us “know” how something works, until we have to actually explain it. Like drawing a bi-cycle, or explaining how a flush works.

People in general are not aware of how their brain works, and how much mental exercise they used get with the way the world is set up.

I suppose we can set up brain gyms, where people can practice using mental skills so that they don’t atrophy?

Re: AI coding is gambling

#436

Post by cess11 »

pdntspa wrote: post #230
cess11 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these things that no one previously built and published, so you can go and take a look at their implementation?

Possibly. Mostly? I wanted a stackable desk tray shelf thing for my desk in literally any size for my clutter. Too lazy to go shopping for one, and couldn't find one on any of the maker sites, so I had claude write me an openSCAD file over lunch break then we iterated on it after-hours. By end of work next day I had three of them sitting on my desk after about 3 hours of back-and-forth the night before (along with ab…

Yeah, sure.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#437

Post by Finbel »

bakugo wrote: post #258
itsgrimetime wrote: post #92

All of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falli…

> Going to McDonalds made me realize that the reason I love cooking isn't the actual cooking itself. Being able to order a food at McDonalds and getting it without doing anything myself is the best part about cooking! Now that I only eat McDonalds, I feel like I'm _good_ at cooking. You do not like and have never liked programming. You wanted to be a manager. They are completely different things.

That's silly, they don't want to manage people, they prefer to build actually useful things. I've recently learned how many programmers actually don't care about building things.

They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.

They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#438

Post by maplethorpe »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #414
maplethorpe wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a website called InfiniteAppStore, which contained every app imaginable, and where you could type in your search and it would return the code for that app, would you find that as satisfying to use as Claude Code? On the surface this does not sound as satisfying, because it more resembles shopping than coding. But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using tha…

>But once Claude Code is finally tuned to do its job perfectly, you will essentially be using that infinite app store You really believe that? What has lead you to the conclusion that LLMs will ever be capable of that?

No, I don't. But I hoped that asking the question "what would an AI tool look like once it was functioning perfectly?" might reveal something important about its underlying nature.

For example, if a carpenter was given a perfect hammer, or a painter a perfect paintbrush, would they find their craft any less enjoyable? AI, on the other hand, falls into a different category of tools (if we can call them tools at all) since they would no longer be enjoyable as tools of creation once they reached their "perfect" state.

Re: AI coding is gambling

#439

Post by duskdozer »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #192
mkehrt wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of my side projects are things where I want the output. They're all things where I want to write the code myself so I understand it better. AI is antithetical to this.

I have three side projects that revolve around taking public access data from shitty, barely usable local government websites, and then using that data to build more intuitive and useful UIs around them. They're portfolio pieces, but also a public service. I already know how to build all of these systems manually, but I have better things to do. So, hell yeah I'm just going to prompt my way to output. If the code wor…

>If the code works, I don't care how it was written

This doesn't concern you for something you're presenting as a portfolio piece?

Re: AI coding is gambling

#440

Post by mjburgess »

Retr0id wrote: post #27
mjburgess wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first anthropomorphization of AI which is actually useful.

It's not even an anthropomorphization, the reward function in RLHF-like scenarios is usually quite literally "did the user think the output was good"

> adversary that is trying to trick me
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