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Ape Coding [fiction]

rsaksida.com

91–100 of 154 posts

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#91
post #35

It's pretty strange to me that we imagine a world where AI can handle every problem but we still talk about code. It's like how the Jetson's had bulky TVs. You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things. We don't say "look at this assembly I compiled." Instead the entire concept fades to the back.

> You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things.

Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and tools have limits.

Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical “key frame” sections by hand keep it on track.

People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code clearly work on very different problems than I do.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work. Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.

> This is why I never use a calculator. I always use the calculator. But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball park. Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist, and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I catch it early I just re-run the equation bu…

Solution for a hallucinating calculator: get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one. This message brought to you by a trillion dollars in investment desperately trying to replace the labor force with pseudo-intelligent calculators.

Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of the corporate-state.

Not to forget, the calculator consumes so much processing power that most people are unable to run it at home, so you need a subscription service to access general-purpose calculation.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#95
post #70

Anyone else bothered by ape being overwhelmingly derogatorily slang for black people? Seems like it's a doubly offensive term. Are there better terms, less encumbered by bigotry, while still covering the "meat space" quality to this development approach?

Racism sucks and I'm bothered by it tremendously. For example the dog whistles in bored ape yacht club were obnoxious to say the least. But I don't think this is that. This is a silly satire on the ways people are getting tripped up on a fallacy, taking the concept of "ai" as being an autonomous force separable from people way too seriously. It's not of course. It's another iteration of the same old tools.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#96
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Producing code that does what's intended. The metric is fuzzy and based on the usage of the software, not the scale of lines of code. The extent of the importance of the code itself is that I'm practice software tends not to be "one and done", so you need to be able to go back and modify it to fix bugs, add features, etc., and it turns out that's usually hard when the code is sloppy. Those needs still should stem fro…

Would my user rather have a program that works 100% in 2 weeks, or a program that works 80% in one day? When the user needs a change made, would they prefer I spend another two weeks extending my perfect program, or throw a few LLMs at their sloppy code and have it done in a day?

You're really asking if a user would want a program that fails a fifth of the times?

In some cases it might be better to have some crap right away and more cheaply, but even you would probably not like a 20% failure rate in most of the software you use.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#97
post #71

If everything is C why not generate the entire bootloader to kernel stack with programs specifically tailored to the user.

Tokens cost money; bugs get created and have to be found and fixed. Mature software has been more valuable than new software since 1946.

You sound like someone in 1992 explaining to me why the internet will never be useful.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#98
post #90
post #50

This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots. It should be flagged and taken down.

> This is meant to insult AI skeptics, let's not pretend to be idiots. Only an idiot would read the piece in that way. >It should be flagged and taken down. Even if it really did "insult AI skeptics" (and, again, no one with any reasonable ability to comprehend wit and satire would take it that way), how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?

Well, one of us is probably that indeed.

> how is that justification to get it "flagged and taken down"?!?

Posts that are likely to result in flames generally are.

Re: Ape Coding [fiction]

#100
post #33

I call it Tradcoding. Not using AI for anything. (You just copy-paste from StackOverflow, as our forefathers once did ;) I also have two levels "beneath" vibe coding: - Power Coding: Like power armor, you describe chunks of code in English and it's built. Here you outsource syntax and stdlib, but remain in control of architecture and data flow. - Backseat Coding: Like vibe coding but you keep peeking at the code and…

I'm waiting for someone to polish a well thought out interface for power coding
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