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Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

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Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#631

Post by ArthurStacks »

postexitus wrote: post #618
ArthurStacks wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont hunt 'AI skeptics'. I just provide a viewpoint based on professional experience. Not one that is 'AI is bad at coding because everyone on Twitter says so"

and you happened to have created an account in hackernews just 3 months ago after 30 years in business just to provide a viewpoint based on professional experience?

Yes, you're right I should have made an account 30 years ago, before this website existed, and gotten involved in all the discussions taking place about the use of ChatGPT and LLMs in the software development workplace

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#632

Post by [deleted] »

concats wrote: post #620
jstummbillig wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no amount of prompting will get current models to approach abstraction and architecture the way a person does I find this sentiment increasingly worrisome. It's entirely clear that every last human will be beaten on code design in the upcoming years (I am not going to argue if it's 1 or 5 years away, who cares?) I wished people would just stop holding on to what amounts to nothing, and think and talk more about wha…

I won't deny that in a context with perfect information, a future LLM will most likely produce flawless code. I too believe that is inevitable. However, in real life work situations, that 'perfect information' prerequisite will be a big hurdle I think. Design can depend on any number of vague agreements and lots of domain specific knowledge, things a senior software architect has only learnt because they've been at t…

[deleted]

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#633

Post by jes5199 »

mbil wrote: post #626
concats wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't deny that in a context with perfect information, a future LLM will most likely produce flawless code. I too believe that is inevitable. However, in real life work situations, that 'perfect information' prerequisite will be a big hurdle I think. Design can depend on any number of vague agreements and lots of domain specific knowledge, things a senior software architect has only learnt because they've been at t…

I agree that there’s a lot of ambiguity and tacit information that goes into building code. I wonder if that won’t change directly as a result of wanting to get more value out of agentic AI coders. > Sure, if you write down a summary of each and every meeting you've attended for the past 12 months, as well as attach your entire company confluence, into the prompt, perhaps then the LLM can design the right architectur…

“as they’re already likely to have written artifacts of decisions and conversations”

I wish this matched my experience at all. So much is transmitted only in one-on-one Zoom calls

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#634

Post by okinok »

ArthurStacks wrote: post #560
hjgjhyuhy wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that at current rate your entire company will become irrelevant in 4 years. Your customers will simply use Gemini to build their own software. Better start applying!

Wrong. Because we dont just write software. We make solutions. In 4 years we will still be making solutions for companies. The difference will be that the software we design for that solution will likely be created by AI tools, and we get to lower our staff costs, whilst increasing our output and revenue.

If they are created by AI tools which we all have access to that means everyone will now become your competitor, and with all the people you are planning on letting go they can just as easily as you use these AI tools to create solutions for companies. So in a way you will have more competition, and calculation that you will have more revenue might not be that easy.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#635

Post by sigmaisaletter »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #433
sigmaisaletter wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, predicting the future is always hard. But if someone claims some extraordinary future event is going to happen, you at least ask for their reasons for claiming so, don't you. In my mind, at this point we either need (a) some previously "hidden" super-massive source of training data, or (b) another architectural breakthrough. Without either, this is a game of optimization, and the scaling curves are going to pla…

A couple of comments a) it hasn't even been a year since the last big breakthrough, the reasoning models like o3 only came out in September, and we don't know how far those will go yet. I'd wait a second before assuming the low-hanging fruit is done. b) I think coding is a really good environment for agents / reinforcement learning. Rather than requiring a continual supply of new training data, we give the model codi…

the "reasoning" models are already optimization, not a breakthrough.

They are not reasoning in any real sense, they are writing pages and pages of text before giving you the answer. This is not super-unlike the "ever bigger training data" method, just applied to output instead of input.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#636

Post by theshackleford »

ArthurStacks wrote: post #560
hjgjhyuhy wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that at current rate your entire company will become irrelevant in 4 years. Your customers will simply use Gemini to build their own software. Better start applying!

Wrong. Because we dont just write software. We make solutions. In 4 years we will still be making solutions for companies. The difference will be that the software we design for that solution will likely be created by AI tools, and we get to lower our staff costs, whilst increasing our output and revenue.

> Because we dont just write software.

Lolok. Neither do many using “AI” so what’s your point exactly?

It’s an odd thing to brag about being a dime a dozen “solutions” provider.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#638

Post by tomatovole »

energy123 wrote: post #534
AnIrishDuck wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM skeptics need to point out what differs with code compared to Chess, DoTA, etc from a RL perspective. An obviously correct automatable objective function? Programming can be generally described as converting a human-defined specification (often very, very rough and loose) into a bunch of precise text files. Sure, you can use proxies like compilation success / failure and unit tests for RL. But key gaps rema…

I'll hand it to you that only part of the problem is easily represented in automatic verification. It's not easy to design a good reward model for softer things like architectural choices, asking for feedback before starting a project, etc. The LLM will be trained to make the tests pass, and make the code take some inputs and produce desired outputs, and it will do that better than any human, but that is going to be…

the promo process :P no noise there!

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#639

Post by ArthurStacks »

theshackleford wrote: post #636
ArthurStacks wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Because we dont just write software. We make solutions. In 4 years we will still be making solutions for companies. The difference will be that the software we design for that solution will likely be created by AI tools, and we get to lower our staff costs, whilst increasing our output and revenue.

> Because we dont just write software. Lolok. Neither do many using “AI” so what’s your point exactly? It’s an odd thing to brag about being a dime a dozen “solutions” provider.

It means what it says. We dont just write software. An LLM cannot do the service that the company provides because it isnt just software and digital services.

Re: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview

#640

Post by mattlondon »

thewebguyd wrote: post #389
mattlondon wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs aren't intended to be used as calculators though? You could say that when I use my spanner/wrench to tighten a nut it works 100% of the time, but as soon as I try to use a screwdriver it's terrible and full of problems and it can't even reliably so something as trivially easy as tighten a nut, even though a screwdriver works the same way by using torque to tighten a fastener. Well that's because one tool is desig…

> AIs aren't intended to be used as calculators though? Then why are we using them to write code, which should produce reliable outputs for a given input...much like a calculator. Obviously we want the code to produce correct results for whatever input we give, and as it stands now, I can't trust LLM output without reviewing first. Still a helpful tool, but ultimately my desire would be to have them be as accurate as…

But this was my original point.

If we have an intern junior dev on our team do we expect them to be 100% totally correct all the time? Why do we have a culture of peer code reviews at all if we assume that every one who commits code is 100% foolproof and correct 100% of the time?

Truth is we don't trust all the humans that write code to be perfect. As the old-as-the-hills saying goes "we all make mistakes". So replace "LLM" in your comment above with "junior dev" and everything you said still applies wether it is LLMs or inexperienced colleagues. With code, there is very rarely a single "correct" answer to how to implement something (unlike the calculator tautology you suggest) anyway, so an LLM or an intern (or even an experienced colleague) absolutely nailing their PRs with zero review comments etc seems unusual to me.

So we go back to the original - and I admit quite philosophical - point: when will we be happy? We take on juniors because they do the low-level and boring work and we need to keep an eye on their output until they learn and grow and improve ... but we cannot do the same for a LLM?

What we have today was literally science fiction not so long ago (e.g. "Her" movie from 2013 is now a reality pretty much). Step back for a moment - the fact we are even having this discussion that "yeah it writes code but it needs to be checked" is just mind-blowing that it even writes code that is mostly-correct at all. Give things another couple of years and its going to be even better.

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