6 ms·

> We have AI agents that have been trained to review thousands of PRs that are produced by other, generative agents, and together they have already churned out

by amake 1y ago

> We have AI agents that have been trained to review thousands of PRs that are produced by other, generative agents, and together they have already churned out much more software than human teams can write in a year. Was your comment tongue-in-cheek? If not, where is this huge mass of AI-generated software?

rvnx 1y ago
All around you, just that it doesn’t make sense for developers to reveal that a lot of their work is now about chunking and refining the specifications written by the product owner. Admitting such is like admitting you are overpaid for your job, and that a 20 USD AI-agent can do better and faster than you for 75% of the work. Is it easy to admit that you have learnt skills for 10+ years that are progressively already getting replaced by a machine ? (like thousands of jobs in the past). More and more, developer is going to be a monkey job where your only task is to make sure there is enough coal in the steam machine. Compilers destroyed the jobs of developers writing assembler code, they had to adapt. They insisted that hand-written assembler was better. Here is the same, except you write code in natural language. It may not be optimal in all situations but it often gets the job done.
- bonzini 1y ago
  Good luck debugging
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    You don't debug AI-generated code - you throw the problematic chunk away and have AI write it again, and if that doesn't help, you repeat the process, possibly with larger chunks. Okay, not in every case, but in many, and that's where we're headed. The reason is economics - i.e. the same reason approximately no one in the West repairs their clothes or appliances; they just throw the damaged thing away and buy a new one. Human labor is expensive, automated production is cheap - even more so in digital space.
    - alganet 1y ago
      You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. There is a lot of man made stuff you just cannot easily replace. Instead, we maintain it. Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. I would argue that qemu is analogous to one of these pieces of infrastructure. There is only a handful of powerful virtual machines. These are _not_ easily replaceable commodities.
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        > You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. Maintenance involves replacing parts that are broken or are approaching the end of their service period. (Infrastructure in some places is also special because it's so badly funded it's not maintained at all, but that's out of scope of this analogy). > Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. The post is about qemu. The comment, as well as most of the comment thread, is talking about coding in general. Sure, many things still get repaired - usually when they're expensive enough to dwarf marginal cost of repair labor. But if you dig into it, repair often involves treating parts as disposables, and tools as consumables.
        alganet 1y ago
        > You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. You don't build these parts in assembly lines. They're often not cheap commodities. Satellites, for example, are full of parts made by hand because no assembly line can handle the requirements. These, require specialized troubleshooting (debugging). If you're talking exclusively about the cheap stuff (trivial programs), you're in the wrong thread (arguibly, the wrong website). We gave you a little space, but that's a courtesy that other environments might not extend.
        fc417fc802 1y ago
        Satellites are the most extreme of edge cases. The equivalent might be a binary that gets burned into a ROM chip installed in an impossible to access location. QEMU is not that. Granted I don't think something as specialized as QEMU is well suited to a component replacement model. But large parts of the codebases of the vast majority of software out there is.
- amake 1y ago
  > All around you, just that it doesn’t make sense for developers to reveal that OK, but I asked for evidence and people just keep not providing any. "God is all around you; he just works in mysterious ways" OK, good luck with that.
  - rvnx 1y ago
    Billions of people believe in god(s). In fact, 75 to 85% of the world population, btw.
    - amake 1y ago
      And?
      - fc417fc802 1y ago
        Obviously it's the basis for a religion. We're to have faith in the ability of LLMs. To ask for evidence of that is to question the divine. You can ask a model itself for the relevant tenants pertaining to any given situation.
    - latexr 1y ago
      And not that long ago, the majority of the population believed the Earth is flat, and that cigarettes are good for your health. Radioactive toys were being sold to children. Wide belief does not equal truth.
    - alganet 1y ago
      Billions of people _say_ they believe in god. It's very different. -- When you analyze church attendance, it drops to roughly 50% instead of 85% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance#Demographics If you start to investigate many aspects of religious belief, like how many christians read the bible, the numbers drop drastically to less than 15% https://www.statista.com/statistics/299433/bible-readership-in-the-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299433/bible-readership-... This demonstrates that we cannot rely on self-reporting to understand religious belief. In practice, most people are closer to atheists than believers.
- alganet 1y ago
  I have a complete proof that P=NP but it doesn't make sense to reveal to the world that now I'm god. It would crush their little hearts.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    P = NP is less "crush their little hearts", more "may cause widespread heart attacks across every industry due to cryptography failing, depending on if the polynomial exponent is small enough".
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      A very very big if. Also a sufficiently good exponential solver would do the same thing.

by amake 1y ago

rvnx 1y ago

All around you, just that it doesn’t make sense for developers to reveal that a lot of their work is now about chunking and refining the specifications written by the product owner. Admitting such is like admitting you are overpaid for your job, and that a 20 USD AI-agent can do better and faster than you for 75% of the work. Is it easy to admit that you have learnt skills for 10+ years that are progressively already getting replaced by a machine ? (like thousands of jobs in the past). More and more, developer is going to be a monkey job where your only task is to make sure there is enough coal in the steam machine. Compilers destroyed the jobs of developers writing assembler code, they had to adapt. They insisted that hand-written assembler was better. Here is the same, except you write code in natural language. It may not be optimal in all situations but it often gets the job done.

bonzini 1y ago
Good luck debugging
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  You don't debug AI-generated code - you throw the problematic chunk away and have AI write it again, and if that doesn't help, you repeat the process, possibly with larger chunks. Okay, not in every case, but in many, and that's where we're headed. The reason is economics - i.e. the same reason approximately no one in the West repairs their clothes or appliances; they just throw the damaged thing away and buy a new one. Human labor is expensive, automated production is cheap - even more so in digital space.
  - alganet 1y ago
    You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. There is a lot of man made stuff you just cannot easily replace. Instead, we maintain it. Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. I would argue that qemu is analogous to one of these pieces of infrastructure. There is only a handful of powerful virtual machines. These are _not_ easily replaceable commodities.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      > You don't throw away dams, bridges, factories, submarines, planes. You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. Maintenance involves replacing parts that are broken or are approaching the end of their service period. (Infrastructure in some places is also special because it's so badly funded it's not maintained at all, but that's out of scope of this analogy). > Remember, _this is not about you_. The post is about qemu. The post is about qemu. The comment, as well as most of the comment thread, is talking about coding in general. Sure, many things still get repaired - usually when they're expensive enough to dwarf marginal cost of repair labor. But if you dig into it, repair often involves treating parts as disposables, and tools as consumables.
      - alganet 1y ago
        > You don't fix their parts either, unless you absolutely have no other options. You don't build these parts in assembly lines. They're often not cheap commodities. Satellites, for example, are full of parts made by hand because no assembly line can handle the requirements. These, require specialized troubleshooting (debugging). If you're talking exclusively about the cheap stuff (trivial programs), you're in the wrong thread (arguibly, the wrong website). We gave you a little space, but that's a courtesy that other environments might not extend.
        fc417fc802 1y ago
        Satellites are the most extreme of edge cases. The equivalent might be a binary that gets burned into a ROM chip installed in an impossible to access location. QEMU is not that. Granted I don't think something as specialized as QEMU is well suited to a component replacement model. But large parts of the codebases of the vast majority of software out there is.
amake 1y ago
> All around you, just that it doesn’t make sense for developers to reveal that OK, but I asked for evidence and people just keep not providing any. "God is all around you; he just works in mysterious ways" OK, good luck with that.
- rvnx 1y ago
  Billions of people believe in god(s). In fact, 75 to 85% of the world population, btw.
  - amake 1y ago
    And?
    - fc417fc802 1y ago
      Obviously it's the basis for a religion. We're to have faith in the ability of LLMs. To ask for evidence of that is to question the divine. You can ask a model itself for the relevant tenants pertaining to any given situation.
  - latexr 1y ago
    And not that long ago, the majority of the population believed the Earth is flat, and that cigarettes are good for your health. Radioactive toys were being sold to children. Wide belief does not equal truth.
  - alganet 1y ago
    Billions of people _say_ they believe in god. It's very different. -- When you analyze church attendance, it drops to roughly 50% instead of 85% of the population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance#Demographics If you start to investigate many aspects of religious belief, like how many christians read the bible, the numbers drop drastically to less than 15% https://www.statista.com/statistics/299433/bible-readership-in-the-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299433/bible-readership-... This demonstrates that we cannot rely on self-reporting to understand religious belief. In practice, most people are closer to atheists than believers.
alganet 1y ago
I have a complete proof that P=NP but it doesn't make sense to reveal to the world that now I'm god. It would crush their little hearts.
- ben_w 1y ago
  P = NP is less "crush their little hearts", more "may cause widespread heart attacks across every industry due to cryptography failing, depending on if the polynomial exponent is small enough".
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    A very very big if. Also a sufficiently good exponential solver would do the same thing.