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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#71

Post by lateforwork »

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 systems are trained on vast bodies of human work and generate answers near the center of existing thought. A human might occasionally step back and question conventional wisdom, but AI systems do not do this on their own. They align with consensus rather than challenge it. As a result, they cannot independently push knowledge forward. Humans can innovate with help from AI, but AI still requires human direction.

You can prod AI systems to think critically, but they tend to revert to the mean. When a conversation moves away from consensus thinking, you can feel the system pulling back toward the safe middle.

As Apple’s “Think Different” campaign in the late 90s put it: the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do—the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, the ones who see things differently. AI is none of that. AI is a conformist. That is its strength, and that is its weakness.

[1] https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-r...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#72

Post by derrak »

danaris wrote: post #54
derrak wrote: post #47

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?

That's irrelevant. The claim being made is not "no computer will ever be able to adapt to and assist us with new technologies as they come out." The claim being made is "modern LLMs cannot adapt to and assist us with new technologies until there is a large corpus of training data for those technologies." Today , there exists no AI or similar system that can do what is being described. There is also no credible way fo…

Note that I prefaced my comment by saying the parent might be right about LLMs.

> That's irrelevant.

My comment was relevant, if a bit tangential.

Edit: I also want to say that our attitude toward machine vs. human intelligence does matter today because we’re going to kneecap ourselves if we incorrectly believe there is something special about humans. It will stop us from closing that gap.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#73

Post by oblio »

oooyay wrote: post #10
deadbabe wrote: post #4

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

> I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management. You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage…

Shift left?

Edit: I've googled it and I can't find anything relevant. I've been working in software for 20+ years and read a myriad things and it's the first time I hear about it...

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#74

Post by lifis »

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?

You can have the LLM itself generate it based on the documentation, just like a human early adopter would

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#75

Post by sophrosyne42 »

derrak wrote: post #47
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?

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?

Its not an assumption, it is a fact about how computers function today. LLMs interpolate, they do not extrapolate. Nobody has shown a method to get them to extrapolate. The insistence to the contrary involves an unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#76

Post by noident »

oooyay wrote: post #10
deadbabe wrote: post #4

My problem is that while I know “code” isn’t going away, everyone seems to believe it is, and that’s influencing how we work. I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management.

> I have not really found anything that shakes these people down to their core. Any argument or example is handwaved away by claims that better use of agents or advanced models will solve these “temporary” setbacks. How do you crack them? Especially upper management. You let them play out. Shift-left was similar to this and ultimately ended in part disaster, part non-accomplishment, and part success. Some percentage…

Shift-left was a disaster? A large number of my day to day problems at work could be described as failing to shift-left even in the face of overwhelmingly obvious benefits

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#77

Post by sophrosyne42 »

derrak wrote: post #62
adamiscool8 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Church-Turing thesis comes to mind. It would at least suggest that humans aren’t capable of doing anything computationally beyond what can be instantiated in software and hardware. 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.

The church turing thesis is about following well-defined rules. It is not about the system that creates or decides to follow or not follow such rules. Such a system (the human mind) must exist for rules to be followed, yet that system must be outside mere rule-following since it embodies a function which does not exist in rule-following itself, e.g., the faculty of deciding what rules are to be followed.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#78

Post by NewJazz »

jedberg wrote: post #45
NewJazz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A framework is different than a paradigm shift or new language.

Yes and no. How does a human learn a new language? They use their previous experience and the documentation to learn it. Oftentimes they way someone learns a new language is they take something in an old language and rewrite it. LLMs are really good at doing that. Arguably better than humans at RTFM and then applying what's there.

And LLMs will get retrained eventually. So writing one good spec and a great harness (or multiple) might be enough, eventually.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#79

Post by derrak »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #75
derrak wrote: post #47

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?

Its not an assumption, it is a fact about how computers function today. LLMs interpolate, they do not extrapolate. Nobody has shown a method to get them to extrapolate. The insistence to the contrary involves an unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

As long as agnosticism is the attitude, that’s fine. But we shouldn’t let mythology about human intelligence/computational capacity stop us from making progress toward that end.

> unstated assumption that technological progress towards human-like intelligence is in principle possible. In reality, we do not know.

For me this isn’t an assumption, it’s a corollary that follows from the Church-Turing thesis.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#80

Post by sophrosyne42 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #38
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?

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…

If all problems were solved, we should have already found a paradise without anything to want for. Your editing workflow being the similar to another for a 1970s era language does not have any relevance to that question.
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