4 ms·

So we are reduced to code monkeys mindlessly re-typing what an LLM wrote to increase potential understanding... Whatever this approaches, it is not a state of

• 20k 2mo ago
  heaven forbid we use our meat to actually completely understand it in the first place
• colordrops 2mo ago
  I think some sort of visual paradigm is where we will end up. Something like Star Trek, where the system architecture and modules are visually represented in 3D space, and you see how the organization changes with realtime low-latency animation representing the changes as they are made. So you are still in control but just at a higher level. I see some prototypes and weak implementations of this sort of thing but surprised at how little is out there.
  • nharada 2mo ago
    Agreed I want an IDE but only architecture. I suspect it’ll get superseded though eventually too.
  • andsoitis 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • noduerme 2mo ago
    The problem with all existing GUI coding system is that they make it really hard to make anything other than the types of things they were designed to make. You could do it, but you have to leave the path and get into the weeds of how the system works, which usually has several layers of opinionated code structures on top of the underlying language it's compiling to. An AI visual/GUI coding system might be able to address that at a more modular level, but it would still come at the cost of transparency and reproducibility.
    • colordrops 2mo ago
      I'm not suggesting the visual system would driving the coding at all. I'm saying that it would be a visualization of your current code base as built by the LLM.
  • saint-evan 2mo ago
    I kno you're not suggesting the visual system would drive coding at all or that it'd be a way to visually code (see: scratch). You seem to mean it as a visualization of the current code base. I'm hoping Google's code wiki is the first step in this direction. One thing I always thought was a problem with visual systems like this was understanding the codebase's architectural design at a level yu can't programmatically get out via a syntax tree analysis. Google's code wiki seems to be using an LLM to figure out the high-level structure of the code and then building the flowchart and diagrams from that understanding. Obviously there's gonna be issues and misunderstanding but I think that's the first step in the direction you're talking about. First it's text, mermaid diagrams and 2d. Next it's a 3d visual world of your codebase. AWESOME stuff. Someone @ Google.
• throwaway120381 2mo ago
  Don't worry. No one will want human code in just a few years. This bizarre fixation that humans are decent at coding is a myth. Retype what the machine tells you? I would rather garden or move rocks around.
  • dingocat 2mo ago
    I used to like listening to music and reading books. Now my AI agent does it for me and it's so much faster at it than I used to be.
    • eythian 2mo ago
      “The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately” ― Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
  • quikoa 2mo ago
    > This bizarre fixation that humans are decent at coding is a myth. I wonder where the LLMs got their training data from.
• sublinear 2mo ago
  It's the state of junior devs who shouldn't have been hired over someone better qualified for the role. I can easily see a ton of cases of nepotism and EEOC violations being brought to court when the AI is taken away.
• prohobo 2mo ago
  Well it's a transitional methodology during the early stages of a major shift in software engineering. Just look at what almost everyone is complaining about with AI coding, and then the inadequacy of their proposed solutions - this is just begging for new tooling that we'll probably consider obvious in a few years.
• frumiousirc 2mo ago
  I think this characterization misses the feedback loop that exists. The OP is not sitting in a one-way flow of info: LLM->human->code but rather a the center of a feedback loop: LLM<-->human<-->code. Human-is-the-loop, not human-in-the-loop. Each iteration of that loop is fully driven by the human. Human creativity is involved in both directions. I'd argue that anytime we drive an LLM through more than one turn (and/or more than one session) we are really doing a human-is-the-loop thing. The OP's extreme case of begin the only thing editing code is on a spectrum with the other extreme being vibe coding (never looking at output code, but still interacting with that output in some way). Off the spectrum is what I call LLM-vomit. A human one-shots something and puts it out for others to see, suffer and clean up or ignore. This is code that is encountered literally out of context and can only be further improved (if that is even attempted) by approaching it from first principles. Such code is akin to people using LLM to generate an answer delivered to another human. Both flavors (sorry) of LLM-vomit are bad. I can prompt my own LLM to do that, don't do it for me.