5 ms·

This is the glaring fallacy! We are turning to unreliable stochastic agents to churn out boilerplate and do toil that should just be abstracted or automated awa

This is the glaring fallacy! We are turning to unreliable stochastic agents to churn out boilerplate and do toil that should just be abstracted or automated away by fully deterministic, reliably correct programs. This is, prima facie, a degenerative and wasteful way to develop software.

mquander 1y ago
I guess this is probably what Lucifer said to God about why it was stupid to give humans free will.
jclarkcom 1y ago
When humans are in the loop everything pretty much becomes stochastic as well. What matters more is the error rate and result correctness. I think this shifts the focus towards test cases, measurement, and outcome.
- elzbardico 1y ago
  No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.
  - MostlyStable 1y ago
    We don't understand how human minds work anywhere close to well enough to say this.
  - aargh_aargh 1y ago
    You don't? I do. A few days ago I lost some data including recent code changes. Today I'm trying to recreate the same code changes - i.e. work I've just recently worked through - and for the life of me I can't get it to work the same way again. Even though "just" that is what I set out to do in the first place - no improvements, just to do the same thing over again.
    - jamesnorden 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - tankenmate 1y ago
    I have a strong suspicion that the world is not as deterministic as you'd like it to be.
    - lukan 1y ago
      Or it is deterministic, but infinitely complex, so that also leaves us only with stochastic.
      - Chris2048 1y ago
        stochastic vs deterministic is arguable a property of modelling, not reality. Something so complex that we cannot model it as deterministic is hence stochastic. We can just as easily model a stochastic thing by ignoring the stochastic parts. separating subjective appearance of things from how we can conceptualise them as models begs a deeper philosophical question of how you can talk about the nature of things you cannot perceive.
  - jxf 1y ago
    Everything we do is a stochastic process. If you throw a dart 100 times at a target, it's not going to land at the same spot every time. There is a great deal of uncertainty and non-deterministic behavior in our everyday actions.
    - utyop22 1y ago
      Go say this to a darts player who has hit a 9 darter….. Actually no wait let’s expand it. Why not go say this to Ronnie O’Sullivan too! The way you’re describing is such that there is no determinism behind what is being done. Simply not true.
      - tankenmate 1y ago
        a stochastic system can can deterministic sub-parts, a deterministic system cannot have stochastic sub-parts.
        utyop22 1y ago
        Theres nothing stochastic about a human that hits a 147 mate nor a 9 darter mate. I cant believe people seriously post this nonsense.
        Chris2048 1y ago
        If we are talking in terms of IRL/physics, there is no such thing as a deterministic system outside of theory - everything is stochastic to differing degrees - including you brain that came up with these thoughts.
    - jay-barronville 1y ago
      As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.
  - jay-barronville 1y ago
    I think that both of you are right to some extent. It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable. In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.
  - jcelerier 1y ago
    I remember one of my ex-bosses in 2015 telling us basically he was doing "intuitive programming" instead of rational. Worked quite well.
  - flir 1y ago
    Not interested in joining a pile-on, but I just wanted to point out how difficult reproducible builds are. I think there's still a bit of unpredictability in there, unless we go to extraordinary lengths (see also: software proofs).
zer00eyz 1y ago
> This is the glaring fallacy! It feels like toil because it's not the interesting or engaging part of the work. If you're going to build a piece of furniture. The cutting, nailing, gluing are the "boiler plate" that you have to do around the act of creation. LLM's are just nail guns.
- baq 1y ago
  and sanding. don't forget sanding. 90% of building furniture is sanding.
- nickserv 1y ago
  At least for me when woodworking, the cutting, nailing, and gluing are the fun bits. The sanding and finishing is the grunt work/boilerplate.
  - peteforde 1y ago
    The AI BAD folks camping in this thread would be angry that you're still producing work that requires sanding.
    - abathologist 1y ago
      Not me, because I know how to avoid falling into nonsense speculation based on worthless analogies :D Sand away! Enjoy copying and pasting your nails, or having LLMs apply your varnish or whatever. I hope it brings happiness.
- jamesnorden 1y ago
  Maybe nail guns that have a chance to randomly shoot nails into your leg and apologize when you ask why it did that.
- ori_b 1y ago
  Great analogy. As someone else pointed out in a different subthread, quality furniture isn't held together with nails.
nurettin 1y ago
Great point, but there is absolutely no way of doing this for every framework and then maintain it for ages. It is logistically impossible.
- abathologist 1y ago
  How big a dent do you think we could make if poured $252 billion dollars[0] just into paying down all our towers of tech debt and developing clean abstractions for all these known problems? [0]: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/economy https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo...
  - nurettin 1y ago
    I imagine people pouring money expect at least 3/1 ROI in a couple of years.
jama211 1y ago
Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.
- okr 1y ago
  Love this analogy.
- philjackson 1y ago
  Great analogy. We've attempted to produce these systems and every time what emerges is software which makes easy things easy and hard things impossible.
- jampekka 1y ago
  Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer. Some amount of boilerplate probably needs to exist, but in general it would be better off minimized. For a decade or so there's sadly been a trend of deliberately increasing it.
  - kazinator 1y ago
    Rather, it is boilerplate that replicates hammers along with nails.
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer It's rather saying that we should have parts that join without nailing by now, especially for things we do again and again and again and again.
    - jama211 1y ago
      Did you read shouldn’t when they wrote should?
  - 1y ago
jazzyjackson 1y ago
Yes and its why AI fills me with impending doom: handing over the reigns to an AI that can deal with the bullshit for us means we will get stuck in a groundhog day scenario of waking up with the same shitty architecture for the foreseeable future. Automation is the opposite of plasticity.
- ako 1y ago
  I don’t think that will happen. It’s more like a 3d printer where you can feed in a new architecture and new design every day and it will create it. More flexibility instead of less.
- Chris2048 1y ago
  I find it more likely it will result in an influx of new architectures. Eventually, prog-lang designers will figure out how to get llms to create new prog-langs.
- bicx 1y ago
  Maybe if you fully hand over the reigns and go watch Youtube all day. LLMs allow us to do large but cheap experiments that we would never attempt otherwise. That includes new architectures. Automation in the traditional sense is opposite of plasticity (because it's optimizing and crystalizing around a very specific process), but what we're doing with LLMs isn't that. Every new request can be different. Experiments are more possible, not less. We don't have to tear down years of scaffolding like old automated systems. We just nudge it in a new direction.
- abathologist 1y ago
  Ground Hog day is optimistic, I think. It will be like "The Butterfly Effect": every attempt to fix the systems using the same dumb, wrote solutions will make the next iteration of the architecture worse and more shitty.
baq 1y ago
nothing prevents stochastic agents from producing reliable, deterministic and correct programs. it's literally what the agents are designed for. it's much less wasteful than me doing the same work and much much less wasteful trying to find a framework for all frameworks.
eru 1y ago
Reliably correct is good, but why does it need to be fully deterministic?
- skydhash 1y ago
  Reduced mental load. When it’s proven that a set of input will always result in the same output, you don’t have to verify the output. And you can just chain process together and not having to worry about time wasted because of deviations.
- abathologist 1y ago
  Good point. Non-determinism is not fundamentally problematic on many levels. What is important is that the essential behavioral invariants of the systems are maintained.
Wowfunhappy 1y ago
Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad? I actually think I like the idea that, maybe by handling my boilerplate over to AI we can be more comfortable with having boilerplate to begin with.
- abathologist 1y ago
  > Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad? No. That is a result of bad software engineer practices and stacks, not a symptom of proper abstraction.
j45 1y ago
This is very true. For the most basic approaches of using stochastic agents for this purpose, especially with genralized agents and approaches. It is possible to get much higher quality with not just oversight, but creating the alignment from the stochastic agents to have no choice but to converge towards the desired vector of work reliably. Human in the loop AI is fine, I'm not sure that everything doesn't to be automated, it's entirely possible to get further and more reps in on a problem with the tool as long as the human is the driver and using the stochastic agent as a thinking partner and not the other way around.

mquander 1y ago

I guess this is probably what Lucifer said to God about why it was stupid to give humans free will.

jclarkcom 1y ago

When humans are in the loop everything pretty much becomes stochastic as well. What matters more is the error rate and result correctness. I think this shifts the focus towards test cases, measurement, and outcome.

elzbardico 1y ago
No. This is a fundamentally erroneous analogy. We don't generate code by a stochastic process.
- MostlyStable 1y ago
  We don't understand how human minds work anywhere close to well enough to say this.
- aargh_aargh 1y ago
  You don't? I do. A few days ago I lost some data including recent code changes. Today I'm trying to recreate the same code changes - i.e. work I've just recently worked through - and for the life of me I can't get it to work the same way again. Even though "just" that is what I set out to do in the first place - no improvements, just to do the same thing over again.
  - jamesnorden 1y ago
    [flagged]
- tankenmate 1y ago
  I have a strong suspicion that the world is not as deterministic as you'd like it to be.
  - lukan 1y ago
    Or it is deterministic, but infinitely complex, so that also leaves us only with stochastic.
    - Chris2048 1y ago
      stochastic vs deterministic is arguable a property of modelling, not reality. Something so complex that we cannot model it as deterministic is hence stochastic. We can just as easily model a stochastic thing by ignoring the stochastic parts. separating subjective appearance of things from how we can conceptualise them as models begs a deeper philosophical question of how you can talk about the nature of things you cannot perceive.
- jxf 1y ago
  Everything we do is a stochastic process. If you throw a dart 100 times at a target, it's not going to land at the same spot every time. There is a great deal of uncertainty and non-deterministic behavior in our everyday actions.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    Go say this to a darts player who has hit a 9 darter….. Actually no wait let’s expand it. Why not go say this to Ronnie O’Sullivan too! The way you’re describing is such that there is no determinism behind what is being done. Simply not true.
    - tankenmate 1y ago
      a stochastic system can can deterministic sub-parts, a deterministic system cannot have stochastic sub-parts.
      - utyop22 1y ago
        Theres nothing stochastic about a human that hits a 147 mate nor a 9 darter mate. I cant believe people seriously post this nonsense.
      - Chris2048 1y ago
        If we are talking in terms of IRL/physics, there is no such thing as a deterministic system outside of theory - everything is stochastic to differing degrees - including you brain that came up with these thoughts.
  - jay-barronville 1y ago
    As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.
- jay-barronville 1y ago
  I think that both of you are right to some extent. It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable. In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.
- jcelerier 1y ago
  I remember one of my ex-bosses in 2015 telling us basically he was doing "intuitive programming" instead of rational. Worked quite well.
- flir 1y ago
  Not interested in joining a pile-on, but I just wanted to point out how difficult reproducible builds are. I think there's still a bit of unpredictability in there, unless we go to extraordinary lengths (see also: software proofs).

zer00eyz 1y ago

> This is the glaring fallacy! It feels like toil because it's not the interesting or engaging part of the work. If you're going to build a piece of furniture. The cutting, nailing, gluing are the "boiler plate" that you have to do around the act of creation. LLM's are just nail guns.

baq 1y ago
and sanding. don't forget sanding. 90% of building furniture is sanding.
nickserv 1y ago
At least for me when woodworking, the cutting, nailing, and gluing are the fun bits. The sanding and finishing is the grunt work/boilerplate.
- peteforde 1y ago
  The AI BAD folks camping in this thread would be angry that you're still producing work that requires sanding.
  - abathologist 1y ago
    Not me, because I know how to avoid falling into nonsense speculation based on worthless analogies :D Sand away! Enjoy copying and pasting your nails, or having LLMs apply your varnish or whatever. I hope it brings happiness.
jamesnorden 1y ago
Maybe nail guns that have a chance to randomly shoot nails into your leg and apologize when you ask why it did that.
ori_b 1y ago
Great analogy. As someone else pointed out in a different subthread, quality furniture isn't held together with nails.

nurettin 1y ago

Great point, but there is absolutely no way of doing this for every framework and then maintain it for ages. It is logistically impossible.

abathologist 1y ago
How big a dent do you think we could make if poured $252 billion dollars[0] just into paying down all our towers of tech debt and developing clean abstractions for all these known problems? [0]: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/economy https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report/econo...
- nurettin 1y ago
  I imagine people pouring money expect at least 3/1 ROI in a couple of years.

jama211 1y ago

Saying boilerplate shouldn’t exist is like saying we shouldn’t need nails or screws if we just designed furniture to be cut perfectly as one piece from the tree. The response is “I mean, sure, that’d be great, not sure how you’ll actually accomplish that though”.

okr 1y ago
Love this analogy.
philjackson 1y ago
Great analogy. We've attempted to produce these systems and every time what emerges is software which makes easy things easy and hard things impossible.
jampekka 1y ago
Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer. Some amount of boilerplate probably needs to exist, but in general it would be better off minimized. For a decade or so there's sadly been a trend of deliberately increasing it.
- kazinator 1y ago
  Rather, it is boilerplate that replicates hammers along with nails.
- coldtea 1y ago
  >Saying boilerplate should exist is like saying every nail should have its own hammer It's rather saying that we should have parts that join without nailing by now, especially for things we do again and again and again and again.
  - jama211 1y ago
    Did you read shouldn’t when they wrote should?
- 1y ago

jazzyjackson 1y ago

Yes and its why AI fills me with impending doom: handing over the reigns to an AI that can deal with the bullshit for us means we will get stuck in a groundhog day scenario of waking up with the same shitty architecture for the foreseeable future. Automation is the opposite of plasticity.

ako 1y ago
I don’t think that will happen. It’s more like a 3d printer where you can feed in a new architecture and new design every day and it will create it. More flexibility instead of less.
Chris2048 1y ago
I find it more likely it will result in an influx of new architectures. Eventually, prog-lang designers will figure out how to get llms to create new prog-langs.
bicx 1y ago
Maybe if you fully hand over the reigns and go watch Youtube all day. LLMs allow us to do large but cheap experiments that we would never attempt otherwise. That includes new architectures. Automation in the traditional sense is opposite of plasticity (because it's optimizing and crystalizing around a very specific process), but what we're doing with LLMs isn't that. Every new request can be different. Experiments are more possible, not less. We don't have to tear down years of scaffolding like old automated systems. We just nudge it in a new direction.
abathologist 1y ago
Ground Hog day is optimistic, I think. It will be like "The Butterfly Effect": every attempt to fix the systems using the same dumb, wrote solutions will make the next iteration of the architecture worse and more shitty.

baq 1y ago

nothing prevents stochastic agents from producing reliable, deterministic and correct programs. it's literally what the agents are designed for. it's much less wasteful than me doing the same work and much much less wasteful trying to find a framework for all frameworks.

eru 1y ago

Reliably correct is good, but why does it need to be fully deterministic?

skydhash 1y ago
Reduced mental load. When it’s proven that a set of input will always result in the same output, you don’t have to verify the output. And you can just chain process together and not having to worry about time wasted because of deviations.
abathologist 1y ago
Good point. Non-determinism is not fundamentally problematic on many levels. What is important is that the essential behavioral invariants of the systems are maintained.

Wowfunhappy 1y ago

Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad? I actually think I like the idea that, maybe by handling my boilerplate over to AI we can be more comfortable with having boilerplate to begin with.

abathologist 1y ago
> Isn’t trying to remove boilerplate how we end up with situations like left-pad? No. That is a result of bad software engineer practices and stacks, not a symptom of proper abstraction.

j45 1y ago

This is very true. For the most basic approaches of using stochastic agents for this purpose, especially with genralized agents and approaches. It is possible to get much higher quality with not just oversight, but creating the alignment from the stochastic agents to have no choice but to converge towards the desired vector of work reliably. Human in the loop AI is fine, I'm not sure that everything doesn't to be automated, it's entirely possible to get further and more reps in on a problem with the tool as long as the human is the driver and using the stochastic agent as a thinking partner and not the other way around.