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I'm going back to writing code by hand

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Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#531

Post by wsve »

estearum wrote: post #505
tuetuopay wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not, and will never be in their current form and architecture. Compilers are mechanical and engineered to produce a correct output. A compiler emitting incorrect machine code is exceedingly rare, and considered a bug. They have heuristics and probabilities in them, but those are to pick between a set of known-good outputs. An AI is a bag of weights outputting a probability of the most plausible token that fol…

Question: What do you think the word "effectively" means in the comment above?

Not OP, but it means nothing, because it's not "effectively" becoming a compiler.

Think about it from an information theory standpoint:

A compiler takes at least the exact amount of information it needs to produce a result, and produces exactly that result every time (unless it's bad at its job or has a bug).

An LLM always takes far less information than would actually be needed to fully describe the desired output, and extrapolates from that. It fetches contexts and such to give itself a glut of assumedly relevant information, but the prompt always contains less information than necessary to produce the code it generates. If it did fully contain enough information, then you've just written a far more verbose version of the program in human language.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#533

Post by atomicnumber3 »

pron wrote: post #264
perarneng wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to write good code you can force AI to write good code with various techniques. It's 100% doable. You just need to figure out the problems AI has and find solutions to make it easier for it. Ex: extremely small contexts Modularize to modules with clear boundaries and only allow the AI to work within those boundaries. Make modules pure from IO so they are easily testable. Hide modules behind interfaces…

That doesn't quite work, and precisely for the reason I mentioned: You can definitely tell the AI to follow some strategy, but at some point the strategy will need to change, and the AI won't tell you that (even if you tell it to). Unless you read the code every time you won't know if the AI is following the strategy and producing good results or following it and producing bad results because the strategy has to chan…

I also find that every additional "constraint" you add in your context window, the dumber the agent gets, and it goes double if your constraint is unusual. To illustrate:

"Do x" - for baseline, assume this generally does X fine.

"Do X, don't use javascript". - even if X already didn't use javascript, this will often perform worse. It will perform even _more_ worse if X is difficult or unusual to do without javascript even if there is some perfectly serviceable way to do it.

Also, despite "don't use javascript", sometimes it just still uses a little bit of javascript anyway, and usually in a spot that would actually be extremely annoying/inconvenient to them remove that js yourself (when you would've otherwise reconsidered your approach at a higher level, to either use js, or to just want something different that is easier to do without js).

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#534

Post by tuetuopay »

estearum wrote: post #505
tuetuopay wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not, and will never be in their current form and architecture. Compilers are mechanical and engineered to produce a correct output. A compiler emitting incorrect machine code is exceedingly rare, and considered a bug. They have heuristics and probabilities in them, but those are to pick between a set of known-good outputs. An AI is a bag of weights outputting a probability of the most plausible token that fol…

Question: What do you think the word "effectively" means in the comment above?

I interpret it as "in practice", "now". Non-native English speaker here, so I may have missed your meaning.

If you meant they’re now better at mimicking compilers, sure, but they’re only mimicks.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#535

Post by filoeleven »

ktzar wrote: post #185
yason wrote: post #177

We're still in the early ages and must discern hard what AI is good for, what it can maybe do, what it could potentially do and what it just can't do, and move those threshold marks very conservatively. AI is also cheap enough that it's worth shots of experiments. As long as you don't really rely on AI it's easy to test the capabilities of this new conversational autocomplete, and the random gains it offers can be ma…

I don't think we're in the early ages... LLMs technology has essentially stagnated since GPT3.5, we just have bigger models that can handle more context. We're trying to cope for the lack of progress of the actual technology by coming up with contraptions of multiple models stuck together, Mixture-of-Experts, Reviewer models, PM models...

Epicycles.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#536

Post by abustamam »

cevn wrote: post #520
abustamam wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs can learn, just not the same way that juniors do. When an LLM does something wrong you can always update it's rules or skills to not make that mistake again. Or you can utilize a subagent whose sole purpose is to review code to prevent that mistake. Lots of ways you can improve LLMs over time. Of course if you don't provide that feedback loop, no learning happens. I guess the same could be said of a junior, thou…

I've seen AI forget or ignore their own rules so not sure that really counts.

Well sure. But I've also seen juniors and even seniors do the same.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#537

Post by ojr »

I was able to release two new iOS apps including a game, and a cross desktop application just this year. I refuse to go back to writing code by hand. If it doesn't help your productivity that's okay, ignoring how productive it has made developers like myself is a choice.

AI was also able to help me create my first subscription payment workflow.

It is like farming without Roundup, less crops, more energy, less toxic chemical risks.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#539

Post by senordevnyc »

Kiro wrote: post #525
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people having success with LLMs right now are people who don't actually care about quality. Anyone who cares about producing good work recognized a long time ago that LLMs are not fit for purpose, and isn't relying on them.

Funny how you spend your days spreading this nonsense, like if someone would deny reality just because you keep repeating it. Everyone knows that what you're saying isn't true, so you're wasting your time.

It’s honestly kinda sad watching otherwise smart people have their cognition completely hijacked by their fear and insecurity. I had multiple comments on this post get downvoted because I shared my positive experience working with AI in my own company. Apparently that’s too threatening to some, who spend their time insulting the skills and intelligence of people who work with a technology they find threatening, rather than engaging their curiosity to understand what it’s good for and what it isn’t. Sad.

Re: I'm going back to writing code by hand

#540

Post by vetler »

The wide range of different responses to this post illustrates an important point; we can't agree on how to use LLMs in software development, and are still discovering new things.

And in a couple of months we might be doing things completely differently because of some new model or new framework.

That's really cool.

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