4 ms·

Did you actually learn C? Be thankful nothing like this existed in 1997. A machine generating code you don't understand is not the way to learn a programming l

by imiric 9mo ago

Did you actually learn C? Be thankful nothing like this existed in 1997. A machine generating code you don't understand is not the way to learn a programming language. It's a way to create software without programming. These tools can be used as learning assistants, but the vast majority of people don't use them as such. This will lead to a collective degradation of knowledge and skills, and the proliferation of shoddily built software with more issues than anyone relying on these tools will know how to fix. At least people who can actually program will be in demand to fix this mess for years to come.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
metaltyphoon 9mo ago
I don't understand how OP thinks that being oblivious how anything work underneath is a good thing. There is a threshold of abstraction to which you must know how it works to effectively fix it when it breaks.
- jedberg 9mo ago
  You can be a super productive Python coder without any clue how assembly works. Vibe coding is just one more level of abstraction. Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python and Golang programmers for things that need to be more efficient than what was vibe coded. But do you really need your $whatever to be super efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?
  - kshri24 9mo ago
    One is deterministic the other is not. I leave it to you to determine which is which in this scenario.
    - afro88 9mo ago
      Humans writing code are also non deterministic. When you vibe code you're basically a product owner / manager. Vibe coding isn't a higher level programming language, it's an abstraction over a software engineer / engineering team.
      - kshri24 9mo ago
        > Humans writing code are also non deterministic That's not what determinism means though. A human coding something, irrespective of whether the code is right or wrong, is deterministic. We have a well defined cause and effect pathway. If I write bad code, I will have a bug - deterministic. If I write good code, my code compiles - still deterministic. If the coder is sick, he can't write code - deterministic again. You can determine the cause from the effect. Every behavior in the physical World has a cause and effect chain. On the other hand, you cannot determine why a LLM hallucinated. There is no way to retrace the path taken from input parameters to generated output. At least as of now. Maybe it will change in the future where we have tools that can retrace the path taken.
        afro88 9mo ago
        You misunderstand. A coder will write different code for the same problem each time unless they have the solution 100% memorised. And even then a huge number of factors can influence them not being able to remember 100% of the memorised code, or opt for different variations. People are inherently nondeterministic. The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically.
        bdangubic 9mo ago
        > The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically. very rarely :)
        kshri24 9mo ago
        > A coder will write... or opt for different variations. Agreed. > People are inherently nondeterministic. We are getting into the realm of philosophy here. I, for one, believe in the idea of living organisms having no free will (or limited will to be more precise. but can also go so far as to say "dependent will"). So one can philosophically explain that people are deterministic, via concepts of Karma and rebirth. Of course none of this can be proven. So your argument can be true too. > The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically. Yes. Execution is deterministic. I am however talking only about determinism in terms of being able to know the entire path: input to output. Not just the outputs characteristic (which is always going to be deterministic). It is the path from input to output that is not deterministic due to presence of a black box - the model.
  - pqtyw 9mo ago
    Perhaps there is no need to actually understand assembly, but if you don't understand certain basic concepts actually deploying any software you wrote to production would be a lottery with some rather poor prizes. Regardless of how "productive" you were.
    - ben_w 9mo ago
      Somebody needs to understand, to the standard of "well enough". The investors who paid for the CEO who hired your project manager to hire you to figure that out, didn't. I think in this analogy, vibe coders are project managers, who may indeed still benefit from understanding computers, but when they don't the odds aren't anywhere near as poor as a lottery. Ignorance still blows up in people's faces. I'd say the analogy here with humans would be a stereotypical PHB who can't tell what support the dev needs to do their job and then puts them on a PIP the moment any unclear requirement blows up in anyone's face.
- hdgvhicv 9mo ago
  I’m vaguely aware that transistors are like electronic switches and if I serve my memory I could build and and/or/not gate I have no idea how an i386 works, let alone a modern cpu. Sure there are registers and different levels of cache before you get to memory. My lack of knowledge of all this doesn’t prevent me from creating useful programs using higher abstraction layers like c.
neilwilson 9mo ago
That’s what a C compiler does when generating a binary. There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable. In the early days of g++, there was no guarantee the object code worked as intended. But it was fun working that out and filing the bug reports. This new tool is just a different sort of transpiler and optimiser. Treat it as such.
- imiric 9mo ago
  If you don't see a difference between a compiler and a probabilistic token generator, I don't know what to tell you. And, yes, I'm aware that most compilers are not entirely deterministic either, but LLMs are inherently nondeterministic. And I'm also aware that you can tweak LLMs to be more deterministic, but in practice they're never deployed like that. Besides, creating software via natural language is an entirely different exercise than using a structured language purposely built for that. We're talking about two entirely different ways of creating software, and any comparison between them is completely absurd.
  - anthk 9mo ago
    People negating down your comment are just "engineers" doomed to fail sooner or later. Meanwhile, 9front users have read at least the plan9 intro and know about nm, 1-9c, 1-9l and the like. Wibe coders will be put on their place sooner or later. It´s just a matter of time.
  - Closi 9mo ago
    They are 100% different and yet kind-of-the-same. They can function kind-of-the-same in the sense that they can both change things written in a higher level language into a lower level language. 100% different in every other way, but for coding in some circumstances if we treat it as a black box, LLMs can turn higher level pseudocode into lower level code (inaccurately), or even transpile. Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
    - imiric 9mo ago
Workaccount2 9mo ago
It's just another layer. Assembly programmers from years gone by would likley be equally dismissive of the self-aggrandizing code block stitchers of today. (on topic, RCT was coded entirely in assembly, quite the achievement)
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
It would’ve been nice to have a system that I could just ask questions to teach me how it works instead of having to pour through the few books that existed on C that was actually accessible to a teenager learning on their own Going to arcane websites, forum full of neckbeards to expect you to already understand everything isn’t exactly a great way to learn The early Internet was unbelievably hostile to people trying to learn genuinely
- rabf 9mo ago
  I had the books (from the library) but never managed to get a compiler for many years! Was quite confusing trying to understand all the unix references when my only experience with a computer was the Atari ST.
- hrldcpr 9mo ago
  *pore through (not a judgment, just mentioning in case the distinction is interesting to anyone)

by imiric 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

metaltyphoon 9mo ago

I don't understand how OP thinks that being oblivious how anything work underneath is a good thing. There is a threshold of abstraction to which you must know how it works to effectively fix it when it breaks.

jedberg 9mo ago
You can be a super productive Python coder without any clue how assembly works. Vibe coding is just one more level of abstraction. Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python and Golang programmers for things that need to be more efficient than what was vibe coded. But do you really need your $whatever to be super efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?
- kshri24 9mo ago
  One is deterministic the other is not. I leave it to you to determine which is which in this scenario.
  - afro88 9mo ago
    Humans writing code are also non deterministic. When you vibe code you're basically a product owner / manager. Vibe coding isn't a higher level programming language, it's an abstraction over a software engineer / engineering team.
    - kshri24 9mo ago
      > Humans writing code are also non deterministic That's not what determinism means though. A human coding something, irrespective of whether the code is right or wrong, is deterministic. We have a well defined cause and effect pathway. If I write bad code, I will have a bug - deterministic. If I write good code, my code compiles - still deterministic. If the coder is sick, he can't write code - deterministic again. You can determine the cause from the effect. Every behavior in the physical World has a cause and effect chain. On the other hand, you cannot determine why a LLM hallucinated. There is no way to retrace the path taken from input parameters to generated output. At least as of now. Maybe it will change in the future where we have tools that can retrace the path taken.
      - afro88 9mo ago
        You misunderstand. A coder will write different code for the same problem each time unless they have the solution 100% memorised. And even then a huge number of factors can influence them not being able to remember 100% of the memorised code, or opt for different variations. People are inherently nondeterministic. The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically.
        bdangubic 9mo ago
        > The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically. very rarely :)
        kshri24 9mo ago
        > A coder will write... or opt for different variations. Agreed. > People are inherently nondeterministic. We are getting into the realm of philosophy here. I, for one, believe in the idea of living organisms having no free will (or limited will to be more precise. but can also go so far as to say "dependent will"). So one can philosophically explain that people are deterministic, via concepts of Karma and rebirth. Of course none of this can be proven. So your argument can be true too. > The code they (and AI) writes, once written, executes deterministically. Yes. Execution is deterministic. I am however talking only about determinism in terms of being able to know the entire path: input to output. Not just the outputs characteristic (which is always going to be deterministic). It is the path from input to output that is not deterministic due to presence of a black box - the model.
- pqtyw 9mo ago
  Perhaps there is no need to actually understand assembly, but if you don't understand certain basic concepts actually deploying any software you wrote to production would be a lottery with some rather poor prizes. Regardless of how "productive" you were.
  - ben_w 9mo ago
    Somebody needs to understand, to the standard of "well enough". The investors who paid for the CEO who hired your project manager to hire you to figure that out, didn't. I think in this analogy, vibe coders are project managers, who may indeed still benefit from understanding computers, but when they don't the odds aren't anywhere near as poor as a lottery. Ignorance still blows up in people's faces. I'd say the analogy here with humans would be a stereotypical PHB who can't tell what support the dev needs to do their job and then puts them on a PIP the moment any unclear requirement blows up in anyone's face.
hdgvhicv 9mo ago
I’m vaguely aware that transistors are like electronic switches and if I serve my memory I could build and and/or/not gate I have no idea how an i386 works, let alone a modern cpu. Sure there are registers and different levels of cache before you get to memory. My lack of knowledge of all this doesn’t prevent me from creating useful programs using higher abstraction layers like c.

neilwilson 9mo ago

That’s what a C compiler does when generating a binary. There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable. In the early days of g++, there was no guarantee the object code worked as intended. But it was fun working that out and filing the bug reports. This new tool is just a different sort of transpiler and optimiser. Treat it as such.

imiric 9mo ago
If you don't see a difference between a compiler and a probabilistic token generator, I don't know what to tell you. And, yes, I'm aware that most compilers are not entirely deterministic either, but LLMs are inherently nondeterministic. And I'm also aware that you can tweak LLMs to be more deterministic, but in practice they're never deployed like that. Besides, creating software via natural language is an entirely different exercise than using a structured language purposely built for that. We're talking about two entirely different ways of creating software, and any comparison between them is completely absurd.
- anthk 9mo ago
  People negating down your comment are just "engineers" doomed to fail sooner or later. Meanwhile, 9front users have read at least the plan9 intro and know about nm, 1-9c, 1-9l and the like. Wibe coders will be put on their place sooner or later. It´s just a matter of time.
- Closi 9mo ago
  They are 100% different and yet kind-of-the-same. They can function kind-of-the-same in the sense that they can both change things written in a higher level language into a lower level language. 100% different in every other way, but for coding in some circumstances if we treat it as a black box, LLMs can turn higher level pseudocode into lower level code (inaccurately), or even transpile. Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
  - imiric 9mo ago

Workaccount2 9mo ago

It's just another layer. Assembly programmers from years gone by would likley be equally dismissive of the self-aggrandizing code block stitchers of today. (on topic, RCT was coded entirely in assembly, quite the achievement)

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

It would’ve been nice to have a system that I could just ask questions to teach me how it works instead of having to pour through the few books that existed on C that was actually accessible to a teenager learning on their own Going to arcane websites, forum full of neckbeards to expect you to already understand everything isn’t exactly a great way to learn The early Internet was unbelievably hostile to people trying to learn genuinely

rabf 9mo ago
I had the books (from the library) but never managed to get a compiler for many years! Was quite confusing trying to understand all the unix references when my only experience with a computer was the Atari ST.
hrldcpr 9mo ago
*pore through (not a judgment, just mentioning in case the distinction is interesting to anyone)