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As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations. Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI

by tyre 9mo ago

As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations. Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt. That would have been completely unbelievable! Absurd! No one would take it seriously. And now look at where we are.

AstroBen 9mo ago
You're right. It's been pretty incredible. It's also frustrating as hell though when people extrapolate from this progress Just because we're here doesn't mean we're getting to AGI or software developers begging for jobs at Starbucks
- simianwords 9mo ago
  Sure then make your prediction? It’s always easy to hand wave and dismiss other people’s predictions. But make yours: what do you think llms can do in 2 years?
  - AstroBen 9mo ago
    You're asking me to do the thing I just said was frustrating haha. I have no idea. It's a new technology and we have nothing to draw from to make predictions. But for the sake of fun.. New code generation / modification I think we're hitting a point of diminishing returns and they're not going to improve much here The limitation is fundamentally that they can only be as good as the detail in the specs given, or the test harnesses provided to them. Any detail left out they're going to make up, and hopefully it's what you want (often it's not!). If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today Code optimization I think they'll get quite a bit better. If you give them GCC it's probable they'll be able to improve upon it
    - simianwords 9mo ago
      Hmm. It’s not clear what specific task it can’t handle. Can you come up with a concrete example?
      - AstroBen 9mo ago
        Are you saying you've never had them fail at a task? I wanted to refactor a bunch of tests in a TypeScript project the other day into a format similar to table driven tests that are common in Golang, but seemingly not so much in TypeScript. Vitest has specific syntax affordances for it, though It utterly failed at the task. Tried many times with increasing specificity in my prompt, did one myself and used it as an example. I ended up giving up and just doing it manually
        simianwords 9mo ago
        I see. Did you use Claude code? With access to compiling and running.
        AstroBen 9mo ago
        Codex on high, yeah it had access to compiling/running
        simianwords 9mo ago
        thanks for the data point
    - codethief 9mo ago
      > If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today This was my opinion for a very long time. Having build a few applications from scratch using AI, though, nowadays I think: Sometimes not everything needs to be spelled out. Like in math papers some details can be left to the ~~reader~~LLM and it'll be fine. I mean, in many cases it doesn't really matter what exactly the code looks like, as long as it ends up doing the right thing. For a given Turing machine, the equivalence class of equivalent implementations is infinite. If a short spec written in English leads the LLM to identify the correct equivalence class, that's all we need and, in fact, a very impressive compression result.
  - kmaitreys 9mo ago
    Something that looks and sounds impressive but in the end not of much substance. This will be true for next 2 years, 4 years, next decade, few decades. Until the state of the art ML paradigm remains language models.
jbjbjbjb 9mo ago
> a simple English prompt And that’s where my suspicion stems from. An equivalent original human piece of work from an expert level programmer wouldn’t be able to do this without all the context. By that I mean all the all the shared insights, discussion and design that happened when making the compiler. So to do this without any of that context is likely just very elaborate copy pasta.
orangecoffee 9mo ago
Indeed, it's the Overton window that has moved. Which is why I secretly think the pro-AI side is more right than the anti-AI side. Makes me sad.
mawadev 9mo ago
Now consider how much of the original C compiler's source code it was trained on and still managed to output a worse result?
- fc417fc802 9mo ago
  Proof of just how lossy the compression is.
suddenlybananas 9mo ago
Wasn't there a fair amount of human intervention in the AI agents? My understanding is, the author didn't just write "make me a c compiler in rust" but had to intervene at several points, even if he didn't touch the code directly.
IshKebab 9mo ago
I totally agree, but I think a lot of the push-back is that this is presented as better than it actually is.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
player1234 9mo ago
[dead]
skydhash 9mo ago
> Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt. You’re very conveniently ignoring the billions in training and that it has practically the whole internet as input.

by tyre 9mo ago

AstroBen 9mo ago

You're right. It's been pretty incredible. It's also frustrating as hell though when people extrapolate from this progress Just because we're here doesn't mean we're getting to AGI or software developers begging for jobs at Starbucks

simianwords 9mo ago
Sure then make your prediction? It’s always easy to hand wave and dismiss other people’s predictions. But make yours: what do you think llms can do in 2 years?
- AstroBen 9mo ago
  You're asking me to do the thing I just said was frustrating haha. I have no idea. It's a new technology and we have nothing to draw from to make predictions. But for the sake of fun.. New code generation / modification I think we're hitting a point of diminishing returns and they're not going to improve much here The limitation is fundamentally that they can only be as good as the detail in the specs given, or the test harnesses provided to them. Any detail left out they're going to make up, and hopefully it's what you want (often it's not!). If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today Code optimization I think they'll get quite a bit better. If you give them GCC it's probable they'll be able to improve upon it
  - simianwords 9mo ago
    Hmm. It’s not clear what specific task it can’t handle. Can you come up with a concrete example?
    - AstroBen 9mo ago
      Are you saying you've never had them fail at a task? I wanted to refactor a bunch of tests in a TypeScript project the other day into a format similar to table driven tests that are common in Golang, but seemingly not so much in TypeScript. Vitest has specific syntax affordances for it, though It utterly failed at the task. Tried many times with increasing specificity in my prompt, did one myself and used it as an example. I ended up giving up and just doing it manually
      - simianwords 9mo ago
        I see. Did you use Claude code? With access to compiling and running.
        AstroBen 9mo ago
        Codex on high, yeah it had access to compiling/running
        simianwords 9mo ago
        thanks for the data point
  - codethief 9mo ago
    > If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today This was my opinion for a very long time. Having build a few applications from scratch using AI, though, nowadays I think: Sometimes not everything needs to be spelled out. Like in math papers some details can be left to the ~~reader~~LLM and it'll be fine. I mean, in many cases it doesn't really matter what exactly the code looks like, as long as it ends up doing the right thing. For a given Turing machine, the equivalence class of equivalent implementations is infinite. If a short spec written in English leads the LLM to identify the correct equivalence class, that's all we need and, in fact, a very impressive compression result.
- kmaitreys 9mo ago
  Something that looks and sounds impressive but in the end not of much substance. This will be true for next 2 years, 4 years, next decade, few decades. Until the state of the art ML paradigm remains language models.

jbjbjbjb 9mo ago

> a simple English prompt And that’s where my suspicion stems from. An equivalent original human piece of work from an expert level programmer wouldn’t be able to do this without all the context. By that I mean all the all the shared insights, discussion and design that happened when making the compiler. So to do this without any of that context is likely just very elaborate copy pasta.

orangecoffee 9mo ago

Indeed, it's the Overton window that has moved. Which is why I secretly think the pro-AI side is more right than the anti-AI side. Makes me sad.

mawadev 9mo ago

Now consider how much of the original C compiler's source code it was trained on and still managed to output a worse result?

fc417fc802 9mo ago
Proof of just how lossy the compression is.

suddenlybananas 9mo ago

Wasn't there a fair amount of human intervention in the AI agents? My understanding is, the author didn't just write "make me a c compiler in rust" but had to intervene at several points, even if he didn't touch the code directly.

IshKebab 9mo ago

I totally agree, but I think a lot of the push-back is that this is presented as better than it actually is.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

player1234 9mo ago

[dead]

skydhash 9mo ago

> Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt. You’re very conveniently ignoring the billions in training and that it has practically the whole internet as input.