7 ms·
Also, you know who did measure every angle to make sure it was correct? The engineers who put together the initial design. They sure as hell took their time get
by lolinder 1y ago
Also, you know who did measure every angle to make sure it was correct? The engineers who put together the initial design. They sure as hell took their time getting every detail of the design right before it ever made it to the assembly line.
Who's filling that role in this brave new world?
- mrheosuper 1y agoit would be the SA guy, but look like he will also be replaced by a bunch of "vibe coder"
- alpaca128 1y agoThey took their time precisely specifying the robot movements so they're always repeatable. Almost like...some sort of carefully crafted code.
- close04 1y agoYou misconstrue the analogy. The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code. The robot operates deterministically, it has a fixed input and a fixed output. This is what makes it reliable. Your “AI coder” is nothing like that. It’s non deterministic on its best day, and it gets everything thrown at it so even more of a coin toss. This seriously undermines any expectation of reliability. The guy’s comparison shows a lack of understanding of either of the systems.
- nojito 1y agoExcept the code it creates is deterministic.
- danparsonson 1y agoLLMs almost always operate at least partly stochastically.
- close04 1y agoI don't know what you mean with "the code it creates is deterministic" but the process an LLM uses to generate code based on an input is definitely not entirely deterministic. To put it simply, the chances that an LLM will output the same result every time given the same input is low. The LLM does not operate deterministically, unlike the manufacturing robot who will output the same door panel every single time. Or as ChatGPT put it: > The likelihood of an LLM like ChatGPT generating the exact same code for the same prompt multiple times is generally low.
- 33hsiidhkl 1y agoFor any given seed value, the output of an LLM will be identical- it is deterministic. You can try this at home with Llama.cpp by specifying a seed value when you load a LLM, and then seeing that for a given input the output will always be the same. Of course there may be some exceptions (cosmic ray bit flips). Also, if you are only using online models, you can't set the seed value, plus there are multiple models, so multiple seeds. In summary, LLMs are deterministic.
- skeeter2020 1y agoI feel this is technically correct but intentionally cheating. no one - including the model creators - expects that to be the interface; it undermines they entire value proposition of using an LLM in the first place if I need to engineer the inputs to ensure reproducability. I'd love to hear some real world scenarios that do this where it wouldn't be simpler to NOT use AI.
- 33hsiidhkl 1y agoWhen should a model's output be deterministic? When should a model's output be non-deterministic? When many humans interact with the same model, then maybe the model should try different seed values, and make measurements. When model interaction is limited to a single human, then maybe the model should try different seed values, and make measurements.
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- rco8786 1y ago> The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy. It’s the thing that generates the code. I think this inversion is what a lot of people are missing, or just don't understand (because they don't understand what code is or how it works).
- lolinder 1y agoI totally understand that inversion but I think it's a bad analogy. Industrial automation works by taking a rigorously specified designs developed by engineers and combining it with rigorous quality control processes to ensure the inputs and outputs remains within tolerances. You first have to have a rigorous spec, then you can design a process for manufacturing a lot of widgets while checking 1 out of every 100 of them for their tolerances. You can only get away with not measuring a given angle on widget #13525 because you're producing many copies of exactly the same thing and you measured that angle on widget #13500 and widget #13400 and so on and the variance in your sampled widgets is within the tolerances specified by the engineer who designed the widget. There's no equivalent to the design stage or to the QC stage in the vibe-coding process advocated for by the person quoted above.
- rco8786 1y agoYea I think we're saying the same thing
- Revisional_Sin 1y agoThat was exactly their point.
- alpaca128 1y ago> The robot isn’t equivalent to the code in this analogy I never said it is. The code is the code that controls the robot and makes it behave deterministically.
- throwup238 1y ago> Who's filling that role in this brave new world? Us? (Yeah, we’re fucked)
- lukan 1y agoIn a world of vibe coders, those who can still debug on their own, will have quite a valuable skill.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoI already imagine future devs wide-eyed saying things like: "He/She can _debug_!!"
- fao_ 1y agoI mean I already heard comments about myself when I went and RTFM'd "You read manuals?!?" "... Yeah? (pause) Wait, you don't?!?!?"
- vbezhenar 1y agoImagine reading in 2025, when you can just watch tiktok about it! /s
- johnisgood 1y agoPretty much. The hesitancy to read documentation was there long before TikTok and LLMs. "Teach me how to use Linux [but I hate reading documentation]". It infuriated me.
- lukan 1y agoTo be honest, I do find most manuals (man pages) horrible to quickly get information how to do something and here LLMs do shine for me (as long as they don't mix up version numbers).
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- b112 1y agoThis also seems, to me, like composer/npm issues. An entire generation of devs, who grew up using unaudited, unverified, unknown license code. And which at a moments notice, can be sold to a threat actor. And I've seen devs try to add packages to the project without even considering the source. Using forks of forks of forks, without considering the root project. Or examing if it's just a private fork, or what is most active and updated. If you don't care about that code, why care about AI code? Or even your own?
- noosphr 1y agoAfter putting off learning JS for a decade, I finally bit the bullet since I can talk to an LLM about it while going through the slog of getting a mental model up and running. After a month, I can say that the inmates run that whole ecosystem, from the language spec, to the interpreter, to packaging. And worse, the tools for everyone else have to cater to them. I can see why someone who has never had a stable foundation to build a project on would view vibe coding as a good idea. When you're working in an ecosystem where any project can break at any time because some dependency pushed a breaking minor version bundled with a security fix for a catastrophic exploit, rolling the LLM gacha to see if it can get it working isn't the worst idea.
- skeeter2020 1y agosince you mention JS specifically, I think it's important to seperate that from the framework ecosystem. I'd suspect that most LLMs don't which is part of the problem. I had a similar experience with Python lately, where the LLM-generated code (once I could get it to run) resulted in code that I would generously evaluate as "Excel VBA Macro quality". It does the task - for now - but I didn't learn much about what production-grade python would look like.
- tanseydavid 1y agoInterview with a Senior JS Developer (satire) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo3cL4nrGOk (you've probably already seen it--everyone else has. But if not, you're in for a treat)
- d0gsg0w00f 1y agoThis is an underrated comment. Who's job is it to do the thinking? I suppose it's still the software engineer, which means the job comes down to "code prompt engineer" and "test prompt engineer".
- skeeter2020 1y agoWild times where a task that used to be described as "good at using google" now gets the title of "Engineer". It was bonkers enough when software devs co-opted the title.
- d0gsg0w00f 1y agoI mean, building applications that are maintainable, will fail gracefully, and keeps costs low, has all the same needs as any classic engineering discipline. You could spend just as much time designing a well thought out CLI as it could take to design a bridge or a sewer system. Whether people do, or not, is a different question.
- bumby 1y agoJust wait to you hear what some traditional capital “E” engineers (meaning licensed) think about programmers usurping the title “engineer”. It’s been a joke for decades and decades that “engineer” is used to church up any job, including “domestic engineering” (housekeeping/homemaking).
- genewitch 1y agoSanitation engineer and custodial engineer are older than I am, as well.
- xeonmc 1y agoCory Doctorow described this cart-before-the-horse arrangement as Reverse Centaurs[0][1] [0] https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/ https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenize... [1] https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/ https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/
- nothercastle 1y agoNot true anymore, lots of places want to reduce engineering hours and let production eat the cost of defects.