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The Eternal Sloptember
81–90 of 389 posts
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#82I agree that I can write better code than an agent. But it can write working code much faster than I can. And in a lot of cases, unfortunately, faster beats better.
I agree it can write faster in a language I don’t know very well
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#83[deleted]
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#84ai agents can program, in fact, in our current time with current models, i'd say they program better than most people in the industry (an industry where people were literally copying and pasting from stack overflow for years prior)
being able to program is not the only skill required to be a successful software engineer, so no ai agents cannot be software engineers
very important distinction - i personally like the radiologist example - looking at scans is a part of a radiologist job, AI can do it better than most of them, but looking at scans is a small part of the job, most of it communicating with doctors to help their patients
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#85" Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming" In other words - they can program, and probably better than you. I don't like being too critical but this is a really superficial post - as if either 'AI is a Software Engineer - or - It must be Fraud' It's an extremely powerful too…
It’s not like the author is a noob. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz In fact, he’s done several things that are truly hard, and has a well-deserved engineering reputation.
The author is absurdly wrong.
It's ridiculous to suggest that 'AI can't code' - when the entire development world has moved into agentic coding, including all of the best developers in the world, and it's yielding positive results in most scenarios.
It's a callow 'bad twitter take' the length of an article.
He's not wrong to suggest that IA is a 'stochastic mechanism' over all the code that's ever been written, but that's evidence of the mechanism, and frankly, describe how it is able to code.
And yes - organizations will misappropriate AI at scale as they do with everything.
His premise is so far out of proportion and misguided, it's tantamount to 'fake moon landing' conspiracy theory.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were on Usenet before '93 the words still haunt you
Joined Usenet in 1990 and for a few years it was great. I always wonder whether HN suffers from periodic influxes of newbies who don't get it yet and rile up the regulars.
There was the Reddit Exodus of 2023 and there seems to be a fair few new accounts posting recently, which feels like an Attempted Agentic Takeover.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#87how do you measure if google’s engineering org is more productive than meta’s?
What about comparing 2 startups/small teams?
I think the discussion about methods (coding agents included) depends on answering those questions. Seems pointless to claim these agents [dont] make you more productive.
Although, at a first glance, the productivity increase does seem like nothing I’ve seen before. Even more than the transition of making webapps in plain js -> jquery -> frameworks or going from something like Flask to using Rails.
Problem is this is not evidence based. I just feel prototyping has speed up 100x. So the number of iterations/attempts has gone up. Transforming specs into a test suite takes a fraction of the time. Dunno, feels weird not to be able to be overall more productive (do more with less time) if you have these new tools.
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#88I'm in the "haven't written any code in a while" boat ATM. I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding. My main issue has been the inconsistent quality across between model releases and the tendency to insert older APIs or documentation, especially with command line tools. I can understand if the model struggles with a million line monolithic codebase with a decade…
> I'd love to see examples of issues that are so big that they warrant reverting to manual coding Ah I see your org hasnt yet had an outage caused by a bad LLM code push.
sounds like bad deployment practices - canaries, guardrails, fast rollbacks, ring based promotions, cell based architecture, blah blah etc... humans write bad code too, there should be systems in place to protect it from releasing
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#89Coders underestimate the utility of AI in so many boring day to day tasks. If you freelance, that’s where the money is at, not in creating a startup that fills holes in AI offerings or in creating generic slop while hoping for ad money.
The amount of domain specific apps that will be created will likely make excel look like yesterday’s news.
People have been trying to replace Excel for the last 40 years...
Re: The Eternal Sloptember
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish people would stop comparing AI with cryptocurrency. The hype/perception was the only thing that was similar between them. The fundamental usefulness of the respective technologies are not comparable.
That's the fallacy. You think technology usefulness dictates the outcomes. There are billions of people living in poverty the world over, starving every day, we have the technology and resources to solve that right now, we have for decades, but we don't because we don't want to. Could AI technology change the world? Sure. Will it? That depends on so much more than what the technology can do. Why are we all still work…
What "society is likely to do" with a technology drops to zero for things that technology cannot do. That's a technical property. On the other hand, people quite reliably find unexpected uses for technology, beyond the initial hype, again, due to inherent technical properties. You're vastly overcorrecting against "nerds".