7 ms·

You're comment history suggests a pro-AI bias on par with AI companies. I don't understand it. It seems like critical thinking, nuance, and just basic caution h

by elktown 10mo ago

You're comment history suggests a pro-AI bias on par with AI companies. I don't understand it. It seems like critical thinking, nuance, and just basic caution have been turned off like a light-switch for far too many people.

naasking 10mo ago
Our industry never exhibited an abundance of caution, but if you have trouble understanding the value of AI here, consider that you are akin to an assembly language programmer in the 1970s or 80s who couldn't understand why people are so gung-ho about these compilers that just output worse code than they could write by hand. In retrospect, compilers only got better and better, and familiarity with programming languages and compilation toolchains became a valuable productivity skill and the market for assembly language programming either stagnated, or shrank. Doesn't it seem plausible to you that, whatever the ratio of bugs in AI-generated code today, that bug count is only going to really go down? Doesn't it then seem reasonable to say that programmers should start familiarizing themselves with these new tools, where the pitfalls are and how to avoid them?
- bogzz 10mo ago
  compilers aren't probabilistic models though
  - mwigdahl 10mo ago
    True. The question is whether that's relevant to the trajectory described or not.
  - naasking 10mo ago
    Successful compiler optimizations are probabilistic though, from the programmer's point of view. LLMs are internally deterministic too.
    - miningape 10mo ago
      What? Do you even know how compilers work?
      - naasking 10mo ago
        Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed? They are applied deterministically inside a compiler, but often based on heuristics, and the complex interplay of optimizations in complex programs means that sometimes they will not do what you expect them to do. Sometimes they work better than expected, and sometimes worse. Sounds familiar...
        miningape 10mo ago
        > Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed? Yes, because: > They are applied deterministically inside a compiler Sorry, but an LLM randomly generating the next token isn't even comparable. Deterministic complexity =/= randomness.
        naasking 10mo ago
        > Yes, because: Unless you wrote the compiler, you are 100% full of it. Even as the compiler writer you'd be wrong sometimes. > Deterministic complexity =/= randomness. LLMs are also deterministically complex, not random.
        miningape 10mo ago
        > Unless you wrote the compiler, you are 100% full of it. Even then you'd be wrong sometimes You can check the source code? What's hard to understand? If you find it compiled something wrong, you can walk backwards through the code, if you want to find out what it'll do walk forwards. LLMs have no such capability. Sure maybe you're limited by your personal knowledge on the compiler chain, but again complexity =/= randomness. For the same source code, and compiler version (+ flags) you get the exact same output every time. The same cannot be said of LLMs, because they use randomness (temperature). > LLMs are also deterministically complex, not random What exactly is the temperature setting in your LLM doing then? If you'd like to argue pseudorandom generators our computers are using aren't random - fine, I agree. But for all practical purposes they're random, especially when you don't control the seed.
- elktown 10mo ago
  If I have a horse and plow and you show up with a tractor, I will no doubt get a tractor asap. But if you show up with novel amphetamines for you and your horse and scream "Look how productive I am! We'll figure out the long-term downsides, don't you worry! Just more amphetamines probably!", I'm happy to be a late adopter.
  - naasking 10mo ago
    A tractor based on a Model T wouldn't have been very compelling either at the time. Not many horse-drawn plows these days though.
    - elktown 10mo ago
      I understand that you've convinced yourself that progress is inevitable. I'll ponder over it on my commute to Mars. Oh wait, that was still on the tele.
- azemetre 10mo ago
  No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people. The two core groups software developers should never trust. Maybe if this LLM craze was being pushed by democratic groups where citizens are allowed to state their objections to such system, where such objections are taken seriously, but what we currently have are business magnates that just want to get richer with no democratic controls.
  - naasking 10mo ago
    > No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people. This is not correct, plenty of programmers are seeing value in these systems and use them regularly. I'm not really sure what's undemocratic about what's going on, but that seems beside the point, we're presumably mostly programmers here talking about the technical merits and downsides of an emerging tech.
    - dingnuts 10mo ago
      [dead]
  - NeutralCrane 10mo ago
    This seems like an overly reductive worldview. Do you really think there isn't genuine interest in LLM tools among developers? I absolutely agree there are people pushing AI in places where it is unneeded, but I have not found software development to be one of those areas. There are lots of people experimenting and hacking with LLMs because of genuine interest and perceived value. At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't). The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.
- gldrk 10mo ago
  High-level languages were absolutely indispensable at a time when every hardware vendor had its own bespoke instruction set. If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.
  - naasking 10mo ago
    > I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience. I'm skeptical, but do you think that you'd see no productivity gains for Python, Java or Haskell?
    - gldrk 10mo ago
      Those are garbage-collected environments. I have some experience with a garbage-collected 'assembly' (.NET CIL). It is a delight to read and write compared to most C code.
      - naasking 10mo ago
        Agree to disagree then! I've done plenty of CIL reading and writing. It's fine, but not what I'd call pleasant, not even compared to C.
  - saulpw 10mo ago
    Type checking, even that as trivial as C's, is a boon to productivity, especially on large teams but also when coding solo if you have anything else in your brain.
- acituan 10mo ago
  > compilers only got better and better At no point compilers produced stochastic output. The intent user expressed was translated down with a much much higher fidelity, repeatability and explainability. Most important of all, it completely removed the need for the developer to meddle with that output. If anything it became a verification tool for the developer‘s own input. If LLMs are that good, I dare you skip the programming language and have it code in machine directly next time. And it is exactly how it is going to feel like if we treat them as valuable as compilers.
  - naasking 10mo ago
    > At no point compilers produced stochastic output. [...] Most important of all, it completely removed the need for the developer to meddle with that output. Yes, once the optimizations became sophisticated enough and reliable enough that people no longer needed to think about it or go down to assembly to get the performance they needed. Do you get the analogy now?
    - acituan 10mo ago
      I don't know why you'd think your analogy wasn't clear in the first place. But your analogy can't support you on the assertion that optimizations will be sophisticated and reliable enough to completely forget about the programming language underneath. If you have any first principles thinking on why this is more likely than not, I am all ears. My epistemic bet is that it is not going to happen, or somehow if we end up there the language we will have to use to instruct them is not going to be different than any other high level programming language that the point will be moot.
      - naasking 10mo ago
        > But your analogy can't support you on the assertion that optimizations will be sophisticated and reliable enough to completely forget about the programming language underneath. Where did I make that assertion?
        10mo ago
NeutralCrane 10mo ago
> It seems like critical thinking, nuance, and just basic caution have been turned off like a light-switch for far too many people. Ironically, this response contains no critical thinking or nuance.
- elktown 10mo ago
  Such a typical HN "gotcha!".
  - NeutralCrane 10mo ago
    I recommend engaging with ideas next time, rather than making reductive, ad-hominem, thought-terminating statements.
    - elktown 10mo ago
      Thanks! I recommend not reading all comments literally. We have a significant hype bubble atm and I'm not exactly alone in thinking how crazy it is. I think you can draw a connection from my exasperated statement to that if you really wanted to.
      - cthalupa 10mo ago
        You intentionally made disparaging remarks about someone and attempted to tie them having an opinion about a technology to that of people who have a vested financial interest in said technology. You didn't engage at all on the substance of their comment - that they find AI useful for doing code reviews - and instead made a comment that was nothing but condescension. All of that is separate from whether or not AI is overhyped or anything else - it being valuable for PRs could be true while it is also overhyped. If true, that could be some of the nuance you seem to be so concerned about us lacking.
        elktown 10mo ago
        1. No, I haven't suggested financial interest. There are plenty of non-financial ones on this forum. 2. True, I challenged the person's bias considering extraordinary historical comments lacking extraordinary evidence.
GoatInGrey 10mo ago
My operating assumption, for everyone acting the way you described, is that it's predicated on the belief of "I have an opportunity to make money from this." It is exceedingly rare to find an instance of someone using the tech purely for the love of the game who isn't also tying it back to income generation in some way.
- seanw444 10mo ago
  I use it as an accelerated search engine to learn about things quicker than I otherwise would. But that's it. I ask it a question, it tells me an answer, and I work from there myself. Slapping it into your editor to write the code for you sounds disastrous to me. And also incredibly boring.
asdfdfd 10mo ago
it's called a love of money
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

by elktown 10mo ago

naasking 10mo ago

Our industry never exhibited an abundance of caution, but if you have trouble understanding the value of AI here, consider that you are akin to an assembly language programmer in the 1970s or 80s who couldn't understand why people are so gung-ho about these compilers that just output worse code than they could write by hand. In retrospect, compilers only got better and better, and familiarity with programming languages and compilation toolchains became a valuable productivity skill and the market for assembly language programming either stagnated, or shrank. Doesn't it seem plausible to you that, whatever the ratio of bugs in AI-generated code today, that bug count is only going to really go down? Doesn't it then seem reasonable to say that programmers should start familiarizing themselves with these new tools, where the pitfalls are and how to avoid them?

bogzz 10mo ago
compilers aren't probabilistic models though
- mwigdahl 10mo ago
  True. The question is whether that's relevant to the trajectory described or not.
- naasking 10mo ago
  Successful compiler optimizations are probabilistic though, from the programmer's point of view. LLMs are internally deterministic too.
  - miningape 10mo ago
    What? Do you even know how compilers work?
    - naasking 10mo ago
      Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed? They are applied deterministically inside a compiler, but often based on heuristics, and the complex interplay of optimizations in complex programs means that sometimes they will not do what you expect them to do. Sometimes they work better than expected, and sometimes worse. Sounds familiar...
      - miningape 10mo ago
        > Are you able to predict with 100% accuracy when a loop will successfully unroll, or various interprocedural or intraprocedural analyses will succeed? Yes, because: > They are applied deterministically inside a compiler Sorry, but an LLM randomly generating the next token isn't even comparable. Deterministic complexity =/= randomness.
        naasking 10mo ago
        > Yes, because: Unless you wrote the compiler, you are 100% full of it. Even as the compiler writer you'd be wrong sometimes. > Deterministic complexity =/= randomness. LLMs are also deterministically complex, not random.
        miningape 10mo ago
        > Unless you wrote the compiler, you are 100% full of it. Even then you'd be wrong sometimes You can check the source code? What's hard to understand? If you find it compiled something wrong, you can walk backwards through the code, if you want to find out what it'll do walk forwards. LLMs have no such capability. Sure maybe you're limited by your personal knowledge on the compiler chain, but again complexity =/= randomness. For the same source code, and compiler version (+ flags) you get the exact same output every time. The same cannot be said of LLMs, because they use randomness (temperature). > LLMs are also deterministically complex, not random What exactly is the temperature setting in your LLM doing then? If you'd like to argue pseudorandom generators our computers are using aren't random - fine, I agree. But for all practical purposes they're random, especially when you don't control the seed.
elktown 10mo ago
If I have a horse and plow and you show up with a tractor, I will no doubt get a tractor asap. But if you show up with novel amphetamines for you and your horse and scream "Look how productive I am! We'll figure out the long-term downsides, don't you worry! Just more amphetamines probably!", I'm happy to be a late adopter.
- naasking 10mo ago
  A tractor based on a Model T wouldn't have been very compelling either at the time. Not many horse-drawn plows these days though.
  - elktown 10mo ago
    I understand that you've convinced yourself that progress is inevitable. I'll ponder over it on my commute to Mars. Oh wait, that was still on the tele.
azemetre 10mo ago
No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people. The two core groups software developers should never trust. Maybe if this LLM craze was being pushed by democratic groups where citizens are allowed to state their objections to such system, where such objections are taken seriously, but what we currently have are business magnates that just want to get richer with no democratic controls.
- naasking 10mo ago
  > No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people. This is not correct, plenty of programmers are seeing value in these systems and use them regularly. I'm not really sure what's undemocratic about what's going on, but that seems beside the point, we're presumably mostly programmers here talking about the technical merits and downsides of an emerging tech.
  - dingnuts 10mo ago
    [dead]
- NeutralCrane 10mo ago
  This seems like an overly reductive worldview. Do you really think there isn't genuine interest in LLM tools among developers? I absolutely agree there are people pushing AI in places where it is unneeded, but I have not found software development to be one of those areas. There are lots of people experimenting and hacking with LLMs because of genuine interest and perceived value. At my company, there is absolutely no mandate for use of AI tooling, but we have a very large number of engineers who are using AI tools enthusiastically simply because they want to. In my anecdotal experience those who do tend to be much better engineers than the ones who are most skeptical or anti-AI (though its very hard to separate how much of this is the AI tooling, and how much is that naturally curious engineers looking for new ways to improve inevitably become better engineers who don't). The broader point is, I think you are limiting yourself when you immediately reduce AI to snake oil being sold by "business magnates". There is surely a lot of hype that will die out eventually, but there is also a lot of potential there that you guarantee you will miss out on when you dismiss it out of hand.
gldrk 10mo ago
High-level languages were absolutely indispensable at a time when every hardware vendor had its own bespoke instruction set. If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.
- naasking 10mo ago
  > I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience. I'm skeptical, but do you think that you'd see no productivity gains for Python, Java or Haskell?
  - gldrk 10mo ago
    Those are garbage-collected environments. I have some experience with a garbage-collected 'assembly' (.NET CIL). It is a delight to read and write compared to most C code.
    - naasking 10mo ago
      Agree to disagree then! I've done plenty of CIL reading and writing. It's fine, but not what I'd call pleasant, not even compared to C.
- saulpw 10mo ago
  Type checking, even that as trivial as C's, is a boon to productivity, especially on large teams but also when coding solo if you have anything else in your brain.
acituan 10mo ago
> compilers only got better and better At no point compilers produced stochastic output. The intent user expressed was translated down with a much much higher fidelity, repeatability and explainability. Most important of all, it completely removed the need for the developer to meddle with that output. If anything it became a verification tool for the developer‘s own input. If LLMs are that good, I dare you skip the programming language and have it code in machine directly next time. And it is exactly how it is going to feel like if we treat them as valuable as compilers.
- naasking 10mo ago
  > At no point compilers produced stochastic output. [...] Most important of all, it completely removed the need for the developer to meddle with that output. Yes, once the optimizations became sophisticated enough and reliable enough that people no longer needed to think about it or go down to assembly to get the performance they needed. Do you get the analogy now?
  - acituan 10mo ago
    I don't know why you'd think your analogy wasn't clear in the first place. But your analogy can't support you on the assertion that optimizations will be sophisticated and reliable enough to completely forget about the programming language underneath. If you have any first principles thinking on why this is more likely than not, I am all ears. My epistemic bet is that it is not going to happen, or somehow if we end up there the language we will have to use to instruct them is not going to be different than any other high level programming language that the point will be moot.
    - naasking 10mo ago
      > But your analogy can't support you on the assertion that optimizations will be sophisticated and reliable enough to completely forget about the programming language underneath. Where did I make that assertion?
      - 10mo ago

NeutralCrane 10mo ago

> It seems like critical thinking, nuance, and just basic caution have been turned off like a light-switch for far too many people. Ironically, this response contains no critical thinking or nuance.

elktown 10mo ago
Such a typical HN "gotcha!".
- NeutralCrane 10mo ago
  I recommend engaging with ideas next time, rather than making reductive, ad-hominem, thought-terminating statements.
  - elktown 10mo ago
    Thanks! I recommend not reading all comments literally. We have a significant hype bubble atm and I'm not exactly alone in thinking how crazy it is. I think you can draw a connection from my exasperated statement to that if you really wanted to.
    - cthalupa 10mo ago
      You intentionally made disparaging remarks about someone and attempted to tie them having an opinion about a technology to that of people who have a vested financial interest in said technology. You didn't engage at all on the substance of their comment - that they find AI useful for doing code reviews - and instead made a comment that was nothing but condescension. All of that is separate from whether or not AI is overhyped or anything else - it being valuable for PRs could be true while it is also overhyped. If true, that could be some of the nuance you seem to be so concerned about us lacking.
      - elktown 10mo ago
        1. No, I haven't suggested financial interest. There are plenty of non-financial ones on this forum. 2. True, I challenged the person's bias considering extraordinary historical comments lacking extraordinary evidence.

GoatInGrey 10mo ago

My operating assumption, for everyone acting the way you described, is that it's predicated on the belief of "I have an opportunity to make money from this." It is exceedingly rare to find an instance of someone using the tech purely for the love of the game who isn't also tying it back to income generation in some way.

seanw444 10mo ago
I use it as an accelerated search engine to learn about things quicker than I otherwise would. But that's it. I ask it a question, it tells me an answer, and I work from there myself. Slapping it into your editor to write the code for you sounds disastrous to me. And also incredibly boring.

asdfdfd 10mo ago

it's called a love of money

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]