3 ms·

It seems like you're doing a lot of work to miss the actual point. Focusing on the minutiae of the analogy is a distraction from the over arching and obvious p

by tux1968 8mo ago

It seems like you're doing a lot of work to miss the actual point. Focusing on the minutiae of the analogy is a distraction from the over arching and obvious point. It has nothing to do with how you feel, it has to do with how you will compete in a world with others who feel differently. There were carpenters who refused to use power tools, some still do. They are probably happy -- and that's great, all the power to them. But they're statistically irrelevant, just as artisanal hand-crafted computer coding will be. There was a time when coders rejected high level languages, because the only way they felt good about their code is if they handcrafted the binary codes, and keyed them directly into the computer without an assembler. Times change.

cmiles74 8mo ago
In my opinion, it is far too early to claim that developers developing like it was maybe three years ago are statistically irrelevant. Microsoft has gone in on AI tooling in a big way and they just nominated a "software quality czar".
- tux1968 8mo ago
  I used the future tense. Maybe it will be one hundred years from now, who knows; but the main point still stands. It would just be nice to move the conversation beyond "but I enjoy coding!".
andyfilms1 8mo ago
I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.
- tux1968 8mo ago
  People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is just cope, not a principled argument.
  - andyfilms1 8mo ago
    I feel like we're both in similar minds of opposite sides, so perhaps you can answer me this: How is a deterministic AI any different from a search engine? In other words, if you and me always get the same results back for the same prompt (definition of determinism,) isn't that just really, really power hungry Google?
    - tux1968 8mo ago
      I'm not sure pure determinism is actually a desirable goal. I mean, if you ask the best programmer in the world the same question every day, you're likely to eventually get a new answer at some point. But if you ask him, or I ask him, hopefully he gives the same good answer, to us both. In any case, he's not just a power hungry Google, because he can contextualize our question, and understand us when we ask in very obscured ways; maybe without us even understanding what we're actually looking for.
  - runarberg 8mo ago
    So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1. I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.
    - tux1968 8mo ago
      I think the distinction without a difference is a tool being deterministic or not. Fundamentally, its nature doesn't matter, if in actual practice it outperforms everything else.
blks 8mo ago
I don’t think it’s correct to claim that AI generated code is just next level of abstraction. All previously mentioned levels produce deterministic results. Same input, same output. AI-generation is not deterministic. It’s not even predictable. And example of big software companies clearly show what mass adoption of AI tools will look like in terms of software quality. I dread if using AI will ever be an expectation, this will be level of enshittification never before imagined.
- tux1968 8mo ago
  You're not wrong. But your same objection was made against compilers. That they are opaque, have differences from one to another, and can introduce bugs, they're not actually deterministic if you upgrade the compiler, etc. They separate the programmer from the code the computer eventually executes. In any case, clinging to the fact that this technology is different in some ways, continues to ignore the many ways it's exactly the same. People continue to cling to what they know, and find ways to argue against what's new. But the writing is plainly on the wall, regardless of how much we struggle to emotionally separate ourselves from it.
  - igravious 8mo ago
    They may not be wrong per se but that argument is essentially a strawman argument. If these tools are non-deterministic then how did someone at Anthropic spend the equivalent of $20,000 of Anthropic compute and end up with a C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel (one of the largest bodies of C code out there). There is clearly something that completely missies the point about the but-muh-non-determinism argument. See my direct response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936586 You'll notice this objection comes up each time a "OpenClaw changed my life" or conversely "Agentic Coding ain't it fam" article swings by.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - blks 8mo ago

by tux1968 8mo ago

cmiles74 8mo ago

In my opinion, it is far too early to claim that developers developing like it was maybe three years ago are statistically irrelevant. Microsoft has gone in on AI tooling in a big way and they just nominated a "software quality czar".

tux1968 8mo ago
I used the future tense. Maybe it will be one hundred years from now, who knows; but the main point still stands. It would just be nice to move the conversation beyond "but I enjoy coding!".

andyfilms1 8mo ago

I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool. An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.

tux1968 8mo ago
People keep trotting this argument out. But a band saw is not deterministic either, it can snap in the middle of a cut and destroy what you're working on. The point is, we only treat it like it's deterministic, because most of the time it's reliable enough that it just does what we want. AI technology will definitely get to the same level eventually. Clinging on to the fact that it isn't yet at that level today, is just cope, not a principled argument.
- andyfilms1 8mo ago
  I feel like we're both in similar minds of opposite sides, so perhaps you can answer me this: How is a deterministic AI any different from a search engine? In other words, if you and me always get the same results back for the same prompt (definition of determinism,) isn't that just really, really power hungry Google?
  - tux1968 8mo ago
    I'm not sure pure determinism is actually a desirable goal. I mean, if you ask the best programmer in the world the same question every day, you're likely to eventually get a new answer at some point. But if you ask him, or I ask him, hopefully he gives the same good answer, to us both. In any case, he's not just a power hungry Google, because he can contextualize our question, and understand us when we ask in very obscured ways; maybe without us even understanding what we're actually looking for.
- runarberg 8mo ago
  So instead of determinism being a binary you consider it a binomial distribution with p extremely close but not strictly equal to 1. I think this is a distinction without a difference, we all know what we mean when way say deterministic here.
  - tux1968 8mo ago
    I think the distinction without a difference is a tool being deterministic or not. Fundamentally, its nature doesn't matter, if in actual practice it outperforms everything else.

blks 8mo ago

I don’t think it’s correct to claim that AI generated code is just next level of abstraction. All previously mentioned levels produce deterministic results. Same input, same output. AI-generation is not deterministic. It’s not even predictable. And example of big software companies clearly show what mass adoption of AI tools will look like in terms of software quality. I dread if using AI will ever be an expectation, this will be level of enshittification never before imagined.

tux1968 8mo ago
You're not wrong. But your same objection was made against compilers. That they are opaque, have differences from one to another, and can introduce bugs, they're not actually deterministic if you upgrade the compiler, etc. They separate the programmer from the code the computer eventually executes. In any case, clinging to the fact that this technology is different in some ways, continues to ignore the many ways it's exactly the same. People continue to cling to what they know, and find ways to argue against what's new. But the writing is plainly on the wall, regardless of how much we struggle to emotionally separate ourselves from it.
- igravious 8mo ago
  They may not be wrong per se but that argument is essentially a strawman argument. If these tools are non-deterministic then how did someone at Anthropic spend the equivalent of $20,000 of Anthropic compute and end up with a C compiler that can compile the Linux kernel (one of the largest bodies of C code out there). There is clearly something that completely missies the point about the but-muh-non-determinism argument. See my direct response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46936586 You'll notice this objection comes up each time a "OpenClaw changed my life" or conversely "Agentic Coding ain't it fam" article swings by.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - blks 8mo ago