5 ms·

Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

by drtz 4mo ago

pizlonator 4mo ago
That goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding? If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation
- brokencode 4mo ago
  Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year? The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much can be accomplished in 10 years. If we get to 2030 and still people are wondering where the breakthrough is, then I think I’d be agreeing with your skepticism. But I just think it’s too early to judge that yet.
  - pizlonator 4mo ago
    Yeah, this is a good point. But the clock is ticking.
    - Quarrelsome 4mo ago
      on what? Who the fuck would go full transparency of what's in their black box in this hostile culture of AI hatred? None of us can put a number on what code we've used in our services that was written by humans and long may it last.
      - jachee 4mo ago
        They literally can’t go full-transparency. I know a high-level insider, and the fact is that even the folks implementing things don’t actually know how it works, only that it does, and how to get it to generally behave.
- AussieWog93 4mo ago
  N=1, but Claude etc. have made a huge difference to my life personally. Built a bunch of software tools to streamline my small ecommerce business - while also running it - and things have turned around from "losing money and ready to pull the plug" to "looking at our best financial year on record" in the span of about 8 months. I could imagine it wouldn't make a huge difference to the life of someone deeply entrenched in a traditional tech role, trying to get an extra 9 of reliability in a service or roll out a new carefully planned and QA'd feature. But for tech-adjacent people, it gives us something "good enough", instantly, and basically for free. That doesn't include the other things I've got it to do (gave Claude SSH access and got it to successfully debug a hang on my Ubuntu server, chucked Codex in a folder full of financial data and got it to find every piece of misclassified payroll transaction data) Genuinely the biggest breakthrough for "casual" tech users since Excel.
  - bombcar 4mo ago
    The joke used to be “be nice or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” - Claude lets you actually get those scripts written which often aren’t replacing anyone but are automating away part of the daily hassles.
- therealdrag0 4mo ago
  What is your bar even? automated coding has changed the game already.
- jimbokun 4mo ago
  What would qualify as a breakthrough for you?
fdsajfkldsfklds 4mo ago
Strictly speaking, it's modifying itself. Although it would be an interesting challenge - can an llm create a new llm from scratch?
- arm32 4mo ago
  No, it probably can't during our lifetime at least—but it can sure modify itself to avoid antivirus detection, which is _just swell_.
  - why_only_15 4mo ago
    why do you think so? they provide some evidence of this in the article, but there have been several improvements in e.g. nanogpt-speedrun or openai parameter golf made by AIs
maplethorpe 4mo ago
It's pretty crazy that a company like Anthropic no longer needs to hire Software Engineers, because their software engineers itself. If that's not a break through I don't know what is! edit: it looks like I was wrong and they're still hiring many software engineers. Not completely sure why that is just yet.
brazukadev 4mo ago
Which is funny because people have been using LISP for that since 1960.
- wild_egg 4mo ago
  Which is what makes putting an LLM inside a lisp so much fun

Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

by drtz 4mo ago

Maybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.

pizlonator 4mo ago

That goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding? If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation

brokencode 4mo ago
Probably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year? The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much can be accomplished in 10 years. If we get to 2030 and still people are wondering where the breakthrough is, then I think I’d be agreeing with your skepticism. But I just think it’s too early to judge that yet.
- pizlonator 4mo ago
  Yeah, this is a good point. But the clock is ticking.
  - Quarrelsome 4mo ago
    on what? Who the fuck would go full transparency of what's in their black box in this hostile culture of AI hatred? None of us can put a number on what code we've used in our services that was written by humans and long may it last.
    - jachee 4mo ago
      They literally can’t go full-transparency. I know a high-level insider, and the fact is that even the folks implementing things don’t actually know how it works, only that it does, and how to get it to generally behave.
AussieWog93 4mo ago
N=1, but Claude etc. have made a huge difference to my life personally. Built a bunch of software tools to streamline my small ecommerce business - while also running it - and things have turned around from "losing money and ready to pull the plug" to "looking at our best financial year on record" in the span of about 8 months. I could imagine it wouldn't make a huge difference to the life of someone deeply entrenched in a traditional tech role, trying to get an extra 9 of reliability in a service or roll out a new carefully planned and QA'd feature. But for tech-adjacent people, it gives us something "good enough", instantly, and basically for free. That doesn't include the other things I've got it to do (gave Claude SSH access and got it to successfully debug a hang on my Ubuntu server, chucked Codex in a folder full of financial data and got it to find every piece of misclassified payroll transaction data) Genuinely the biggest breakthrough for "casual" tech users since Excel.
- bombcar 4mo ago
  The joke used to be “be nice or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” - Claude lets you actually get those scripts written which often aren’t replacing anyone but are automating away part of the daily hassles.
therealdrag0 4mo ago
What is your bar even? automated coding has changed the game already.
jimbokun 4mo ago
What would qualify as a breakthrough for you?

fdsajfkldsfklds 4mo ago

Strictly speaking, it's modifying itself. Although it would be an interesting challenge - can an llm create a new llm from scratch?

arm32 4mo ago
No, it probably can't during our lifetime at least—but it can sure modify itself to avoid antivirus detection, which is _just swell_.
- why_only_15 4mo ago
  why do you think so? they provide some evidence of this in the article, but there have been several improvements in e.g. nanogpt-speedrun or openai parameter golf made by AIs

maplethorpe 4mo ago

It's pretty crazy that a company like Anthropic no longer needs to hire Software Engineers, because their software engineers itself. If that's not a break through I don't know what is! edit: it looks like I was wrong and they're still hiring many software engineers. Not completely sure why that is just yet.

brazukadev 4mo ago

Which is funny because people have been using LISP for that since 1960.

wild_egg 4mo ago
Which is what makes putting an LLM inside a lisp so much fun