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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

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Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#81

Post by derrak »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #77
derrak wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We can keep our discussion about church turing here if you want.

I will argue that the following capacities: 1. creating rules and 2. deciding to follow rules (or not) are themselves controlled by rules.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#82

Post by stravant »

adamiscool8 wrote: post #52
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?

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?

Thousands of years?

We've only had the tech to be able to research this in some technical depth for a few decades (both scale of computation and genetics / imaging techniques).

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#83

Post by woeirua »

cratermoon wrote: post #48

Yet again we can pull out Edsger W.Dijkstra's 1978 article, "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"" "In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would…

Djikstra wasn’t a god. He’s going to be wrong on this one.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#84

Post by woeirua »

The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.”

First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful.

Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than a year. Anyone who thinks AGI is far away deserves to be blindsided.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#86

Post by stalfie »

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.

Well, to be fair, judging by the shift in the general vibes of the average HN comment over the past 3 years, better use of agents and advanced models DID solve the previous temporary setbacks. The techno-optimists were right, and the nay-sayers wrong.

Over the course of about 2 years, the general consensus has shifted from "it's a fun curiosity" to "it's just better stackoverflow" to "some people say it's good" to "well it can do some of my job, but not most of it". I think for a lot of people, it has already crossed into "it can do most of my job, but not all of it" territory.

So unless we have finally reached the mythical plateau, if you just go by the trend, in about a year most people will be in the "it can do most of my job but not all" territory, and a year or two after that most people will be facing a tool that can do anything they can do. And perhaps if you factor in optimisation strategies like the Karpathy loop, a tool that can do everything but better.

Upper managment might be proven right.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#87

Post by j_bum »

ffsm8 wrote: post #60
sd9 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are very much NIH machines

i'd go one step further, they're going to turbo charge the NIH syndrome and treat every code file as a seperate "here"

For others like me who know “NIH” to be “National Institutes of Health”…

“NIH” here refers to “Not Invented Here” Syndrome, or a bias against things developed externally.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#88

Post by anematode »

woeirua wrote: post #84

The argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.” First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful. Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than…

In agree in principle, but the compiler is a terrible example given the amount of scaffolding afforded to the LLMs, literally hundreds of thousands of test cases covering all kinds of esoteric corners.

Also (and this is coming from someone who thinks it's quite close) "AGI" is not implied by the ability to implement very-long-horizon software tasks. That's not "general" at all.

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