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The thing to remember about recent AI developments is that they speed up development itself. Copilot is already useful. It does not write its own code, but that
by SanderNL 4y ago
The thing to remember about recent AI developments is that they speed up development itself. Copilot is already useful. It does not write its own code, but that’s not the bar. The bar to clear is, can this speed up itself and I think the answer is yes even if humans stay in the loop.
AI that can code is one the most awesome and at the same time tragically idiotic moves we can make. Even if they are only 1% effective, it’s a one percent we did not have and it makes iterating on the next version faster.
Making LLMs and other types of models is becoming a toy project already. This will only accelerate.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoYou're conflating the "code" of an LLM which is just basic calculus with the vast data, fine tuning, human confirmation and filtering that make these things work. You're also conflating the downloading and fine tuning of pretrained models with the creation of foundational models. AI can iterate on model architecture all it wants, that's really 10% of the solution.
- SanderNL 4y agoNo, I mean basic development of all kind - not just AI directly - is sped up. The fact that downloading and finetuning models is the only hard part of these systems is a testament to how frigging far along we came. We forgot just how hard software development and compute in general was just a short time ago.
- sirsinsalot 4y agoYeah I agree with this, and at the same time people's expectations grow to meet the capability. I remember when writing some C to do some basic network IO felt like witchcraft.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoWe've basically already seen this with computer aided design. It's essentially the root of Moore's law. I'm not entirely convinced AI-aided software development (via copilot or whatever) is actually going to speed up development. It makes writing code faster, but pressing the keys or implementing simple functions was never the slow or difficult part. The problem for the last several decades has been managing complexity, and that's something AI-aided programming doesn't help with. If anything my hunch is that it makes the problem worse. The increased speed of producing code means designs become even more shortsighted, the spaghetti even more byzantine and entangled.
- primroot 4y agoI upvoted when I had read up to where you wrote "doesn't help with." I felt I was reading my own thoughts when I read the last two sentences. I think it is not just software design that will become shortsighted we may even see less interest in improving programming languages. I've always hoped for people to come up with some mathematical insights (beyond functional programming) that will describe code organizing structures in a more sensible way, so that experience no longer appears as the main argument for software patterns being tools to manage complexity. Now a programming language is just another language to be modeled, and its texts generated and proofread by a fallible human.
- giovannibonetti 4y ago> I think it is not just software design that will become shortsighted we may even see less interest in improving programming languages. I believe in the contrary. AI code generators and modern languages that enforce type and memory safety are a great match, since the compiler ensures the mess doesn't grow too much.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThis is an entirely class of problems than what I'm describing.
- SanderNL 4y agoKeypressing is a hurdle for me. I know that comes with experience. Very little if any software is truly novel and it all looks and feels very similar. Everything I see is patterns and boilerplate. I do not see the insurmountable complexity anymore. Scientists are the ones coming up with novelty. We hook up databases to UIs and manage infrastructure. Sure there is complexity but it is of a very superficial kind. Like a ball of Christmas lights.
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIf there is a universal pattern that lets you effortlessly design large non-trivial software systems across all domains, please do publish it. It will do more for productivity than Copilot or ChatGPT ever will.
- causi 4y agoWriting code gets faster but programs get slower. Sometimes I wonder what a modern desktop would be capable of if every piece of code was written in assembly with as much care and purposefulness as, say, an Atari game.
- api 4y agoEverything would be basically instantaneous.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoIt would likely have massive security holes you could drive a truck through.