4 ms·
AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is betting on race horses.
by m00x 7mo ago
AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is betting on race horses.
- bazmattaz 7mo agoDam this is so accurate. As a project manager turned product manager this is so true. You need to estimate a project based on the “pedigree” of your engineers
- SkyPuncher 7mo agoOnly if your AI coding approach is the slot machine approach. I've ended up with a process that produces very, very high quality outputs. Often needing little to no correct from me. I think of it like an Age of Empires map. If you go into battle surrounded by undiscovered parts of the map, you're in for a rude surprise. Winning a battle means having clarity on both the battle itself and risks next to the battle.
- murkt 7mo agoGood analogy! Would be interesting to read more details about how you’re getting very high quality outputs
- SkyPuncher 7mo agoIt's basically (1) don't make decisions for the LLM - force it to think (2) make it explore extensively (3) make it pressure test it's own thinking.
- Obscurity4340 7mo agoWould you mind sharing some of your findings?
- input_sh 7mo agoUntil it produces predictable output, it's gambling. But it can't produce predictable output because it's a non-deterministic tool. What you're describing is increasing your odds while gambling, not that it's not gambling. Card counting also increases your odds while gambling, but it doesn't make it not gambling.
- darkhorse222 7mo agoSimilar to quantum computing, a probabilistic model when condensed to sufficiently narrow ranges can be treated as discrete.
- IanCal 7mo agoThis is a pretty wild comparison in my opinion, it counts almost everything as gambling which means it has almost no use as a definition. The most obvious issue is it’d class working with humans as gambling. Fine if you want to make that as your definition but it seems unhelpful to the discussion.
- RhythmFox 7mo agoHow does it 'count almost everything as gambling'? They just said 'non-deterministic' output is gambling-like, that is not 'almost everything'. Most computation that you use on a day-to-day basis (depending on how much you use AI now I suppose) is in all ways deterministic. Using probabilistic algorithms is not new, but it your point is not clicking...
- organsnyder 7mo agoWorking with humans is decidedly not deterministic, though. And the discussion here is comparing AI coding agents and humans.
- RhythmFox 7mo agoThat starts to get into a very philosophical space talking about human action as deterministic or not. I think keeping to the fact that the artifacts (ie code) we are working off will have deterministic effects (unless we want it not to) is exactly the point. That is what lets chaotic human brains communicate with machines at all. Adding more chaos to the system doesn't strike me as obviously an improvement.
- IanCal 7mo agoAlmost everything is non deterministic to some degree. Huge amounts of machine learning, most things that have some timing element to them in distributed systems, anything that might fail, anything involving humans, actual running computation given that bitflips can happen. At what point does labelling everything that has some random element “gambling” become pointless? At best it’ll be entirely different to how others use the term.
- edu 7mo agoGreat analogy, I’m saving it!
- cko 7mo agoWhat is it with you guys and stallions?
- deadbabe 7mo agoThere is a long history of managers just wanting to work their developers like horses.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- munk-a 7mo agoWould it make us uncomfortable to reword the above example to > AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is gambling on the stock market. Because I feel like that is a much more apt analogy.