4 ms·

This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here. Going back and for

This rings true and reminds me of the classic blog post “Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail”[0] that occasionally gets reposted here. Going back and forth on the detail in requirements and mapping it to the details of technical implementation (and then dealing with the endless emergent details of actually running the thing in production on real hardware on the real internet with real messy users actually using it) is 90% of what’s hard about professional software engineering. It’s also what separates professional engineering from things like the toy leetcode problems on a whiteboard that many of us love to hate. Those are hard in a different way, but LLMs can do them on their own better than humans now. Not so for the other stuff. [0] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

fragmede 9mo ago
Can you give an example of an "other stuff"?
- christophilus 9mo ago
  I once wrote software that had to manage the traffic coming into a major shipping terminal- OCR, gate arms, signage, cameras for inspecting chassis and containers, SIP audio comms, RFID readers, all of which needed to be reasoned about in a state machine, none of which were reliable. It required a lot of on the ground testing and observation and tweaking along with human interventions when things went wrong. I’d guess LLMs would have been good at subsets of that project, but the entire thing would still require a team of humans to build again today.
  - yunohn 9mo ago
    Don’t you understand? That’s why all these AI companies are praying for humanoid robots to /just work/ - so we can replace humans mentally and physically ASAP!
    - godelski 9mo ago
      I'm sure those will help. But that doesn't solve the problem the parent stated. Those robots can't solve those real world problems until they can reason, till they can hypothesize, till they can experiment, till they can abstract all on their own. The problem is you can't replace the humans (unilaterally) until you can create AGI. But that has problem of its own, as you now have to contend with previously creating a slave class of artificial life forms.
      - yunohn 9mo ago
        I completely agree - my comment was sarcastic and in jest.
        godelski 9mo ago
        My bad. Getting hard to tell these days lol
        yunohn 9mo ago
        No worries - you’ve added useful context for those who may be misguided by these greedy corporations looking to replace us all. Maybe it helps them reconsider their point of view!
      - andrekandre 9mo ago
        > until they can reason, till they can hypothesize, till they can experiment, till they can abstract all on their own at that point we will have to let them vote...
  - cudgy 9mo ago
    But you admit that fewer humans would be needed as “LLMs would have been good at subsets of that project”, so some impact already and these AI tools only get better.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      If that is the only thing that you took out of that conversation, then I don't really believe that that job might've been suitable for you in the first place. Now I don't know which language they used for the project (could be python or could be C/C++ or could be rust) but its like "python would have been good at subsets of that project", so some impact already and these python tools only get better Did python remove the jobs? No. Each project has their own use case and in some LLM's might be useful, in others not. In their project, LLM's might be useful for some parts but their majority of the work was doing completely new things with a human in feedback. You are also forgetting trust factor, yes lets have your traffic lights system be written by a LLM, surely. Oops, the traffic lights glitched and all waymos (another AI) went beserk and oops accidents/crash happened which might cost millions. Personally I wouldn't trust even a subset of LLM code and much rather have my country/state/city to pay to real developers that can be accountable & good quality control checks for such critical points to the point that no LLM in this context should be a must For context, if LLM use can even impact 1 life every year. The value of 1 person is 7.5-13 million$ Over a period of 10 years in this really really small glitch of LLM, you end up in 10 years losing 75 million$ Yup go ahead save a few thousand dollars right now by not paying people enough in the first case to use LLM to then lose 75 million $ (on the least case scenario)
      - cudgy 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        I went back because of course I could've just pointed out one picture but still wanted to give the whole picture. my conclusion is rather the fact that this is a very high stakes project (both emotionally and mentally and economically) and AI are still black boxes with chances of being much more error prone (atleast in this context) and chances of it missing something to cause the -75 million and deaths of many is more likely and also that in such a high stakes project, LLM's shouldn't be used and having more engineers in the team might be worth it. > I doubt you have a clue regarding my suitability for any project, so I’ll ignore the passive l-aggressive ad hominem. Aside from the snark presented at me. I agree. And this is why you don't see me in a project regarding such high stakes project and neither should you see an LLM at any costs in this context. These should be reserved to the caliber of people who have both experience in the industry and are made of flesh.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    Sir your experience is unique and thanks for answering this. That being said, someone took the idea of you saying LLM's might be good at subsets of projects to consider we should use LLMs for that subset as well But I digress because (I provided more in depth reasoning in other comment as well) because if there is an even minute bug which might slip up past LLM and code review for subset of that and for millions of cars travelling through points, we assume that one single bug in it somewhere might increase the traffic/fatality traffic rate by 1 person per year. Firstly it shouldn't be used because of the inherent value of human life itself but even from monetary sense as well so there's really not much reason I can see in using it That alone over a span of 10 years would cost 75 million-130Million$ (the value of life in US for a normal perosn ranges from 7.5 million - 13 million$) Sir I just feel like if the point of LLM is to have less humans or less giving them income, this feels so short sighted because I (if I were the state and I think everyone will agree after the cost analysis) would much rather pay a few hundred thousand dollars to even a few million$ right now to save 75-130 Million$ (on the smallest scale mind you, it can get exponentially more expensive) I am not exactly sure how we can detect the rate of deaths due to LLM use itself (the 1 number) but I took the most conservative number. And that is also the fact that we won't know if LLM's might save a life but I am 99.9% sure that might not be the case and once again it wouldn't be verifiable itself so we are shooting things in the dark And we can have a much more sensitive job with better context (you know what you are working at and you know how valuable it is/can save lives and everything) whereas no amount of words can convey that danger to LLM's To put it simply, the LLM might not know the difference between this life or death situation machine's code at times or a sloppy website created by it. I just don't think its worth it especially in this context at all even a single % of LLM code might not be worth it here.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      > we won't know if LLM's might save a life I had friend who was in crisis while the rest of us were asleep. Talking with ChatGPT kept her alive. So we know the number is at least one. If you go to the Dr ChatGPT thread, you'll find multiple reports of people who figured out debilitating medical conditions via ChatGPT in conjunction with a licensed human doctor, so we can be sure the numbers greater than zero. It doesn't make headlines the same way Adam's suicide does, and not just because OpenAI can't be the ones to say it.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    I've had good luck when giving the AI its own feedback loop. On software projects, it's letting the AI take screenshots and read log files, so it can iterate on errors without human input. On hardware projects, it's a combination of solenoids, relays, a pi and pizerow, and a webcam. I'm not claiming that an AI could do the above mentioned project, just that (some) hardware projects can also get humans out of the loop.
lkuty 9mo ago
"(...) maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were." Haha this is funny. Interesting reading.
godelski 9mo ago
> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need to be addressed. This repeats over and over. There are no big problems, there are only a bunch of little problems that accumulate. As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. And again, we only solve them to the good enough level, as perfection doesn't exist. The problems we solve never were a single problem, but many many smaller ones. I think the problem is we want to avoid depth. It's difficult! It's frustrating. It would be great if depth were never needed. But everything is simple until you actually have to deal with it.
- echelon 9mo ago
  I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or two. The very best move here might be to start working for yourself and delete the dependency on your employer. These models might enable more startups.
  - mattgreenrocks 9mo ago
    Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs. By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.
bryanrasmussen 9mo ago
Is the surprising amount of detail an indicator that we do not live in a simulation, or is it instead that we have to be living inside a simulation because it doesn't need all this detail for Reality, indicating an algorithmic function run amuck?
CPLX 9mo ago
While this is absolutely true and I've read this before, I don't think you can make this an open and shut case. Here's my perspective as an old guy. The first thing that comes to mind when I see this as a counterargument is that I've quite successfully built enormous amounts of completely functional digital products without ever mastering any of the details that I figured I would have to master when I started creating my first programs in the late 80s or early 90s. When I first started, it was a lot about procedural thinking, like BASIC goto X, looping, if-then statements, and that kind of thing. That seemed like an abstraction compared to just assembly code, which, if you were into video games, was what real video game people were doing. At the time, we weren't that many layers away from the ones and zeros. It's been a long march since then. What I do now is still sort of shockingly "easy" to me sometimes when I think about that context. I remember being in a band and spending a few weeks trying to build a website that sold CDs via credit card, and trying to unravel how cgi-bin worked using a 300 page book I had bought and all that. Today a problem like that is so trivial as to be a joke. Reality hasn't gotten any less detailed. I just don't have to deal with it any more. Of course, the standards have gone up. And that's likely what's gonna happen here. The standards are going to go way up. You used to be able to make a living just launching a website to sell something on the internet that people weren't selling on the internet yet. Around 1999 or so I remember friend of mine built a website to sell stereo stuff. He would just go down to the store in New York, buy it, and mail it to whoever bought it. Made a killing for a while. It was ridiculously easy if you knew how to do it. But most people didn't know how to do it. Now you can make a living pretty "easily" selling a SaaS service that connects one business process to another, or integrates some workflow. What's going to happen to those companies now is left as an exercise for the reader. I don't think there's any question that there will still be people building software, making judgment calls, and grappling with all the complexity and detail. But the standards are going to be unrecognizable.
calenti 9mo ago
Reality is infintely analog and therefore digital will only ever be an approximation.

fragmede 9mo ago

Can you give an example of an "other stuff"?

christophilus 9mo ago
I once wrote software that had to manage the traffic coming into a major shipping terminal- OCR, gate arms, signage, cameras for inspecting chassis and containers, SIP audio comms, RFID readers, all of which needed to be reasoned about in a state machine, none of which were reliable. It required a lot of on the ground testing and observation and tweaking along with human interventions when things went wrong. I’d guess LLMs would have been good at subsets of that project, but the entire thing would still require a team of humans to build again today.
- yunohn 9mo ago
  Don’t you understand? That’s why all these AI companies are praying for humanoid robots to /just work/ - so we can replace humans mentally and physically ASAP!
  - godelski 9mo ago
    I'm sure those will help. But that doesn't solve the problem the parent stated. Those robots can't solve those real world problems until they can reason, till they can hypothesize, till they can experiment, till they can abstract all on their own. The problem is you can't replace the humans (unilaterally) until you can create AGI. But that has problem of its own, as you now have to contend with previously creating a slave class of artificial life forms.
    - yunohn 9mo ago
      I completely agree - my comment was sarcastic and in jest.
      - godelski 9mo ago
        My bad. Getting hard to tell these days lol
        yunohn 9mo ago
        No worries - you’ve added useful context for those who may be misguided by these greedy corporations looking to replace us all. Maybe it helps them reconsider their point of view!
    - andrekandre 9mo ago
      > until they can reason, till they can hypothesize, till they can experiment, till they can abstract all on their own at that point we will have to let them vote...
- cudgy 9mo ago
  But you admit that fewer humans would be needed as “LLMs would have been good at subsets of that project”, so some impact already and these AI tools only get better.
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    If that is the only thing that you took out of that conversation, then I don't really believe that that job might've been suitable for you in the first place. Now I don't know which language they used for the project (could be python or could be C/C++ or could be rust) but its like "python would have been good at subsets of that project", so some impact already and these python tools only get better Did python remove the jobs? No. Each project has their own use case and in some LLM's might be useful, in others not. In their project, LLM's might be useful for some parts but their majority of the work was doing completely new things with a human in feedback. You are also forgetting trust factor, yes lets have your traffic lights system be written by a LLM, surely. Oops, the traffic lights glitched and all waymos (another AI) went beserk and oops accidents/crash happened which might cost millions. Personally I wouldn't trust even a subset of LLM code and much rather have my country/state/city to pay to real developers that can be accountable & good quality control checks for such critical points to the point that no LLM in this context should be a must For context, if LLM use can even impact 1 life every year. The value of 1 person is 7.5-13 million$ Over a period of 10 years in this really really small glitch of LLM, you end up in 10 years losing 75 million$ Yup go ahead save a few thousand dollars right now by not paying people enough in the first case to use LLM to then lose 75 million $ (on the least case scenario)
    - cudgy 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        I went back because of course I could've just pointed out one picture but still wanted to give the whole picture. my conclusion is rather the fact that this is a very high stakes project (both emotionally and mentally and economically) and AI are still black boxes with chances of being much more error prone (atleast in this context) and chances of it missing something to cause the -75 million and deaths of many is more likely and also that in such a high stakes project, LLM's shouldn't be used and having more engineers in the team might be worth it. > I doubt you have a clue regarding my suitability for any project, so I’ll ignore the passive l-aggressive ad hominem. Aside from the snark presented at me. I agree. And this is why you don't see me in a project regarding such high stakes project and neither should you see an LLM at any costs in this context. These should be reserved to the caliber of people who have both experience in the industry and are made of flesh.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  Sir your experience is unique and thanks for answering this. That being said, someone took the idea of you saying LLM's might be good at subsets of projects to consider we should use LLMs for that subset as well But I digress because (I provided more in depth reasoning in other comment as well) because if there is an even minute bug which might slip up past LLM and code review for subset of that and for millions of cars travelling through points, we assume that one single bug in it somewhere might increase the traffic/fatality traffic rate by 1 person per year. Firstly it shouldn't be used because of the inherent value of human life itself but even from monetary sense as well so there's really not much reason I can see in using it That alone over a span of 10 years would cost 75 million-130Million$ (the value of life in US for a normal perosn ranges from 7.5 million - 13 million$) Sir I just feel like if the point of LLM is to have less humans or less giving them income, this feels so short sighted because I (if I were the state and I think everyone will agree after the cost analysis) would much rather pay a few hundred thousand dollars to even a few million$ right now to save 75-130 Million$ (on the smallest scale mind you, it can get exponentially more expensive) I am not exactly sure how we can detect the rate of deaths due to LLM use itself (the 1 number) but I took the most conservative number. And that is also the fact that we won't know if LLM's might save a life but I am 99.9% sure that might not be the case and once again it wouldn't be verifiable itself so we are shooting things in the dark And we can have a much more sensitive job with better context (you know what you are working at and you know how valuable it is/can save lives and everything) whereas no amount of words can convey that danger to LLM's To put it simply, the LLM might not know the difference between this life or death situation machine's code at times or a sloppy website created by it. I just don't think its worth it especially in this context at all even a single % of LLM code might not be worth it here.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    > we won't know if LLM's might save a life I had friend who was in crisis while the rest of us were asleep. Talking with ChatGPT kept her alive. So we know the number is at least one. If you go to the Dr ChatGPT thread, you'll find multiple reports of people who figured out debilitating medical conditions via ChatGPT in conjunction with a licensed human doctor, so we can be sure the numbers greater than zero. It doesn't make headlines the same way Adam's suicide does, and not just because OpenAI can't be the ones to say it.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  I've had good luck when giving the AI its own feedback loop. On software projects, it's letting the AI take screenshots and read log files, so it can iterate on errors without human input. On hardware projects, it's a combination of solenoids, relays, a pi and pizerow, and a webcam. I'm not claiming that an AI could do the above mentioned project, just that (some) hardware projects can also get humans out of the loop.

lkuty 9mo ago

"(...) maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were." Haha this is funny. Interesting reading.

godelski 9mo ago

> Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail Every time we make progress complexity increases and it becomes more difficult to make progress. I'm not sure why this is surprising to many. We always do things to "good enough", not to perfection. Not that perfection even exists... "Good enough" means we tabled some things and triaged, addressing the most important things. But now to improve those little things now need to be addressed. This repeats over and over. There are no big problems, there are only a bunch of little problems that accumulate. As engineers, scientists, researchers, etc our literal job is to break down problems into many smaller problems and then solve them one at a time. And again, we only solve them to the good enough level, as perfection doesn't exist. The problems we solve never were a single problem, but many many smaller ones. I think the problem is we want to avoid depth. It's difficult! It's frustrating. It would be great if depth were never needed. But everything is simple until you actually have to deal with it.

echelon 9mo ago
I think we're all coping a bit here. This time, it really is different. The fact is, one developer with Claude code can now do the work of at least two developers. If that developer doesn't have ADHD, maybe that number is even higher. I don't think the amount of work to do increases. I think the number of developers or the salary of developers decreases. In any case, we'll see this in salaries over the next year or two. The very best move here might be to start working for yourself and delete the dependency on your employer. These models might enable more startups.
- mattgreenrocks 9mo ago
  Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs. By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.

bryanrasmussen 9mo ago

Is the surprising amount of detail an indicator that we do not live in a simulation, or is it instead that we have to be living inside a simulation because it doesn't need all this detail for Reality, indicating an algorithmic function run amuck?

CPLX 9mo ago

While this is absolutely true and I've read this before, I don't think you can make this an open and shut case. Here's my perspective as an old guy. The first thing that comes to mind when I see this as a counterargument is that I've quite successfully built enormous amounts of completely functional digital products without ever mastering any of the details that I figured I would have to master when I started creating my first programs in the late 80s or early 90s. When I first started, it was a lot about procedural thinking, like BASIC goto X, looping, if-then statements, and that kind of thing. That seemed like an abstraction compared to just assembly code, which, if you were into video games, was what real video game people were doing. At the time, we weren't that many layers away from the ones and zeros. It's been a long march since then. What I do now is still sort of shockingly "easy" to me sometimes when I think about that context. I remember being in a band and spending a few weeks trying to build a website that sold CDs via credit card, and trying to unravel how cgi-bin worked using a 300 page book I had bought and all that. Today a problem like that is so trivial as to be a joke. Reality hasn't gotten any less detailed. I just don't have to deal with it any more. Of course, the standards have gone up. And that's likely what's gonna happen here. The standards are going to go way up. You used to be able to make a living just launching a website to sell something on the internet that people weren't selling on the internet yet. Around 1999 or so I remember friend of mine built a website to sell stereo stuff. He would just go down to the store in New York, buy it, and mail it to whoever bought it. Made a killing for a while. It was ridiculously easy if you knew how to do it. But most people didn't know how to do it. Now you can make a living pretty "easily" selling a SaaS service that connects one business process to another, or integrates some workflow. What's going to happen to those companies now is left as an exercise for the reader. I don't think there's any question that there will still be people building software, making judgment calls, and grappling with all the complexity and detail. But the standards are going to be unrecognizable.

calenti 9mo ago

Reality is infintely analog and therefore digital will only ever be an approximation.