Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated • Hacker News Board

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#431

Post by pier25 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:34 PM UTC

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #421

pier25 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory a computer should be able to model any physical process so I do agree it's only a matter of time. That said I don't think I will be alive to see it honestly. The current tech won't get us there just like the steam engine or the internal combustion engine didn't get us to the Moon. And getting to AGI is probably more like getting to Mars.

I personally think we have some tremendous energy problems (and the negative externalities derived from “solutions”) to contend with before we even sniff AGI.

Definitely.

Comercial fusion is still decades away.

Solar and lithium batteries are getting cheaper every year but unfortunately still lots of political issues in many countries.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#432

Post by elgertam » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

sigbottle wrote: post #389

Terr_ wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst integration problems tend to be conceptual mismatches between the systems, where--even with the same names--they have different definitions and ideas of how things work. That's a category of problem I wouldn't expect a text-based system to detect very well.. Though it might disguise the problem with a solution that seems to work until it blows up one day or people discover a lot of hard-to-fix data.

This is fundamental. Well, not really - a strategy SV tried to use is absolute market dominance to the point where you have to integrate with them . But in spaces where true interoperability is required, it's just philosophically hard. People don't mean the same thing.

Yeah, semantics is extremely important. Just no way around it.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#433

Post by ryanobjc » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

koromak wrote: post #385

I desperately want this to be true, but at least in my sector, it isn't. You still need talented and knowledgable programmers, but they don't do very much programming. Its all code review, infrastructure, devops. At least for a small business, users are catching on that they can build a dirty app that gets them what they specifically want, instead of relying on some paid software to give everyone a little bit of what…

The price hikes are going to be absolutely devastating.

Imagine oracle level price acuity along with 0 competition and utter dependence. This is the future the AI labs are drooling for. You will be charged based on the value it delivers. People will be start making trade offs on if hiring humans would be cheaper than AI, etc.

There's no way they're going to leave all that money on the table when there is all that investment to pay back.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#434

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #246

realusername wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bar to create the new X framework has just been lowered so I expect the opposite, even more churn.

All frameworks make some assumptions and therefore have some constraints. There was always a well-understood trade-off when using frameworks of speeding up early development but slowing down later development as the system encountered the constraints. LLMs remove the time problem (to an extent) and have more problems around understanding the constraints imposed by the framework. The trade-off is less worth it now. I…

If you are doing js, that makes sense since all the frameworks are a mess anyway.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#435

Post by viftodi » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #427

smokedetector1 wrote: post #367

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

>I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent. There's absolutely nothing mysterious about human intelligence unless you refuse to give it a clear definition. All the people waffling on about AGI refuse to give a clear, measurable definition of intelligence, because if they defined it exactly then it's possible to clearly determ…

Until the hard problem of consciousness is solved, this is absolutely false

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#436

Post by glhaynes » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #334

Philpax wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This feels like an unfair comparison to me; the objective of the compiler was not to be innovative, it was to prove it can be done at all. That doesn't demon…

Yeah, it's a bit like taking the output of a student project in a compiler construction class and using it to judge whether said student is capable of innovation without telling them in advance they'd be judged on that rather than on the stated requirements of the course.

It'd be interesting to prompt it to do the same job but try to be innovative.

To your point, yeah, I mostly don't want AI to be innovative unless I'm asking for it to be. In fact, I spend much more time asking it "is that a conventional/idiomatic choice?" (usually when I'm working on a platform I'm not super experienced with) than I do saying "hey, be more innovative."

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#437

Post by pegasus » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

smokedetector1 wrote: post #367

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

Sure, but it's entirely possible this point lies way past the expiry date of the universe itself (if there is such a thing). Plus, I do believe in magic - the magic of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And "42" doesn't dispel it for me.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#438

Post by MattGrommes » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

pacman128 wrote: post #16

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

Look at the history of art. Lots of people used the same paint that had always been used and the same brushes, and came up with wildly different uses for those tools. Until there are literally no people involved, we'll always be using the tools in new ways.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#439

Post by keeda » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

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…

Wait, is novelty really the benchmark here?

1. The experiment was to show that AI can generate working code for a fairly complicated spec. Was it even asked to do things in a novel way? If not, why would we expect it do anything other than follow tried and tested approaches?

2. Compilers have been studied for decades, so it's reasonable to presume humans have already found the most optimal architectures and designs. Should we complain that the AI "did nothing novel" or celebrate because it "followed best practices"?

I'm actually curious, are there radically different compiler designs that people have hypothesized but not yet built for whatever reasons? Maybe somebody should repeat the experiment explicitly prompting AI agents to try novel designs out, would be fascinating to see the results.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#440

Post by ryanobjc » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #146

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong. People are just drinking the AI kool-aid too hard to realize that the emperor has no clothes.

How come it works with humans? Give seasoned engineers a spec and they'll create a working product. Many software companies are created and guided on the verbal directions of people who don't code.

I think "working product" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you here.

I think anyone who has done serious product development wouldn't be so flippant and dismissive about the difficulties of even conveying WHAT to build, let along getting the right balance of quality, timeliness, and actual functionality.