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by MattRix 9mo ago
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- skydhash 9mo agoWhy do people assume negative critique is ignorance?
- dmd 9mo agoPeople denied that bicycles could possibly balance even as others happily pedaled by. This is the same thing.
- measurablefunc 9mo agoBicycles don't balance, the human on the bicycle is the one doing the balancing.
- moralestapia 9mo ago[flagged]
- dmd 9mo agoYes, that is the analogy I am making. People argued that bicycles (a tool for humans to use) could not possibly work - even as people were successfully using them.
- measurablefunc 9mo agoPeople use drugs as well but I'm not sure I'd call that successful use of chemical compounds without further context. There are many analogies one can apply here that would be equally valid.
- duchef 9mo agoBicycles (without a rider) do balance at sufficient speed via a self steering and correction mechanism of the front axle..
- measurablefunc 9mo agoSo does a tire rolling down a hill.
- skydhash 9mo agoPlease tell me which one of the headings is not about increased usage o LLMs and derived tools and is about some improvement in the axes of reliability or or any kind of usefulness. Here is the changelog for OpenBSD 7.8: https://www.openbsd.org/78.html https://www.openbsd.org/78.html There's nothing here that says: We make it easier to use it more of it. It's about using it better and fixing underlying problems.
- simonw 9mo agoThe coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs. Mistakes and hallucinations matter a whole lot less if a reasoning LLM can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem.
- walt_grata 9mo agoIf it actually does that without an argument. I can't believe I have to say that about a computer program
- skydhash 9mo ago> The coding agent heading. Claude Code and tools like it represent a huge improvement in what you can usefully get done with LLMs. Does it? It's all prompt manipulation. Shell script are powerful yes, but not really huge improvement over having a shell (REPL interface) to the system. And even then a lot of programs just use syscalls or wrapper libraries. > can try the code, see that it doesn't work and fix the problem. Can you really say that does happens reliably?
- simonw 9mo agoDepends on what you mean by "reliably". If you mean 100% correct all of the time then no. If you mean correct often enough that you can expect it to be a productive assistant that helps solve all sorts of problems faster than you could solve them without it, and which makes mistakes infrequently enough that you waste less time fixing them than you would doing everything by yourself then yes, it's plenty reliable enough now.
- tehnub 9mo agoPeople did?
- rhubarbtree 9mo agoIt’s possible this is correct. It’s also possible that people more experienced, knowledgable and skilled than you can see fundamental flaws in using LLMs for software engineering that you cannot. I am not including myself in that category. I’m personally honestly undecided. I’ve been coding for over 30 years and know something like 25 languages. I’ve taught programming to postgrad level, and built prototype AI systems that foreshadowed LLMs, I’ve written everything from embedded systems to enterprise, web, mainframes, real time, physics simulation and research software. I would consider myself an 7/10 or 8/10 coder. A lot of folks I know are better coders. To put my experience into context: one guy in my year at uni wrote one of the world’s most famous crypto systems; another wrote large portions of some of the most successful games of the last few decades. So I’ve grown up surrounded by geniuses, basically, and whilst I’ve been lectured by true greats I’m humble enough to recognise I don’t bleed code like they do. I’m just a dabbler. But it irks me that a lot of folks using AI profess it’s the future but don’t really know anything about coding compared to these folks. Not to be a Luddite - they are the first people to adopt new languages and techniques, but they also are super sceptical about anything that smells remotely like bullshit. One of the most wise insights in coding is the aphorism“beware the enthusiasm of the recently converted.” And I see that so much with AI. I’ve seen it with compilers, with IDEs, paradigms, and languages. I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI, and I’ve found it fantastic for comprehending poor code written by others. I’ve also found it great for bouncing ideas. And the code it writes, beyond boiler plate, is hot garbage. It doesn’t properly reason, it can’t design architecture, it can’t write code that is comprehensible to other programmers, and treating it as a “black box to be manipulated by AI” just leads to dead ends that can’t be escaped, terrible decisions that will take huge amounts of expert coding time to undo, subtle bugs that AI can’t fix and are super hard to spot, and often you can’t understand their code enough to fix them, and security nightmares. Testing is insufficient for good code. Humans write code in a way that is designed for general correctness. AI does not, at least not yet. I do think these problems can be solved. I think we probably need automated reasoning systems, or else vastly improved LLMs that border on automated reasoning much like humans do. Could be a year. Could be a decade. But right now these tools don’t work well. Great for vibe coding, prototyping, analysis, review, bouncing ideas.
- CamperBob2 9mo ago
- blibble 9mo agopeople also said that selling jpegs of monkeys for millions of dollars was a pump and dump scam, and would collapse they were right
- sothatsit 9mo agoJPEGs with no value other than fake scarcity is very different to coding agents that people actively use to ship real code.
- kakapo5672 9mo agoWhenever someone tells me that AI is worthless, does nothing, scam/slop etc, I ask them about their own AI usage, and their general knowledge about what's going on. Invariably they've never used AI, or at most very rarely. (If they used AI beyond that, this would be admission that it was useful at some level). Therefore it's reasonable to assume that you are in that boat. Now that might not be true in your case, who knows, but it's definitely true on average.
- snigsnog 9mo agoIt's not worthless, it's just not worldchanging as is even in the fields where it's most useful, like programming. If the trajectory changes and we reach AGI then this changes too but right now it's just a way to - fart out demos that you don't plan on maintaining, or want to use as a starting place - generate first-draft unit tests/documentation - generate boilerplate without too much functionality - refactor in a very well covered codebase It's very useful for all of the above! But it doesn't even replace a junior dev at my company in its current state. It's too agreeable, makes subtle mistakes that it can't permanently correct (GEMINI.md isn't a magic bullet, telling it to not do something does not guarantee that it won't do it again), and you as the developer submitting LLM-generated code for review need to review it closely before even putting it up (unless you feel like offloading this to your team) to the point that it's not that much faster than having written it yourself.
- LewisVerstappen 9mo ago[flagged]
- sothatsit 9mo agoYou did not make a negative critique. You completely dismissed the value of coding agents on the basis that the results are not predictable, which is both obvious and doesn’t matter in practice. Anyone who has given these tools a chance will quickly realise that 1) they are actually quite predictable in doing what you ask them to, and 2) them being non-deterministic does not at all negate their value. This is why people can immediately tell you haven’t used these tools, because your argument as to why they’re useless is so elementary.
- dang 9mo agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html