61–70 of 486 posts
Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you’re right about modern LLMs. But you seem to be making an unstated assumption: “there is something special about humans that allow them to create new things and computers don’t have this thing.” Maybe you can’t teach current LLM backed systems new tricks. But do we have reason to believe that no AI system can synthesize novel technologies. What reason do you have to believe humans are special in this regard?
After thousands of years of research we still don’t fully understand how humans do it, so what reason (besides a sort of naked techno-optimism) is there to believe we will ever be able to replicate the behavior in machines?
But sure, instantiating these capabilities in hardware and software are beyond our current abilities. It seems likely that it is possible though, even if we don’t know how to do it yet.
So much of society's intellectual talent has been allocated toward software. Many of our smartest are working on ad-tech, surveillance, or squeezing as much attention out of our neighbors as possible. Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? Funny, I'd say the same thing about traditional programming. Someone from K&R's group at Bell Labs, straight out of 1972, would have no problem recognizing my day-to-day workflow. I fire up a text editor, edit some C code, compile it, and run it. Lather, rinse, repeat, all by hand. That's not OK. That's not the way this industry was ever suppose…
You're probably using an IDE that checks your syntax as you type, highlighting keywords and surfacing compiler warnings and errors in real time. Autocomplete fills out structs for you. You can hover to get the definition of a type or a function prototype, or you can click and dig in to the implementation. You have multiple files open, multiple projects, even. Not to mention you're probably also using source control,…
Reply due to rate limiting:
K&R didn't know about CI/CD, but everything else you mention has either existed for over 30 years or is too trivial to argue about.
Conversely, if you took Claude Code or similar tools back to 1996, they would grab a crucifix and scream for an exorcist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're probably using an IDE that checks your syntax as you type, highlighting keywords and surfacing compiler warnings and errors in real time. Autocomplete fills out structs for you. You can hover to get the definition of a type or a function prototype, or you can click and dig in to the implementation. You have multiple files open, multiple projects, even. Not to mention you're probably also using source control,…
I disagree that any of those things are even slightly material to the topic. It's like saying my car is fundamentally different from a 1972 model because it has ABS, airbags, and a satnav. Reply due to rate limiting: K&R didn't know about CI/CD, but everything else you mention has either existed for over 30 years or is too trivial to argue about. Conversely, if you took Claude Code or similar tools back to 1996, they…
I think you're taking for granted the massive productivity boost that happened even before today's era of LLM agents.
I believe the same pattern is inevitable for these higher level abstractions and interfaces to generate computer instructions. The language use must ultimately conform to a rigid syntax, and produce a deterministic result, a.k.a. "code".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you’re right about modern LLMs. But you seem to be making an unstated assumption: “there is something special about humans that allow them to create new things and computers don’t have this thing.” Maybe you can’t teach current LLM backed systems new tricks. But do we have reason to believe that no AI system can synthesize novel technologies. What reason do you have to believe humans are special in this regard?
After thousands of years of research we still don’t fully understand how humans do it, so what reason (besides a sort of naked techno-optimism) is there to believe we will ever be able to replicate the behavior in machines?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't really accept the argument that AI makes mistakes and therefore cannot be trusted to write production code (in general, at least - obviously depends on the types of mistakes, which code, etc.). The reality is we have built complex organizational structures around the fact that humans also make mistakes, and there's no real reason you can't use the same structures for AI. You have someone write the code,…
> humans also make mistakes This is broadly true, but not comparable when you get into any detail. The mistakes current frontier models make are more frequent, more confident, less predictable, and much less consistent than mistakes from any human I'd work with. IME, all of the QA measures you mention are more difficult and less reliable than understanding things properly and writing correct code from the beginning.…
my experience literal 180 degrees from this statement. and you don’t normally get the choose humans you work with, some you may be involved in the interview process but that doesn’t tell you much. I have seen so much human-written code in my career that, in the right hands, I’ll take (especially latest frontier) LLM written code over average human code any day of the week and twice on Sunday
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?
So much of society's intellectual talent has been allocated toward software. Many of our smartest are working on ad-tech, surveillance, or squeezing as much attention out of our neighbors as possible. Maybe the current allocation of technical talent is a market failure and disruption to coding could be a forcing function for reallocation.
Those are business goals that don't just go away because tech changes.