8 ms·

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get score

by aidos 2mo ago

Yesterday my 8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game where it would play her a song (say Twinkle) and she had to play it back and get scored. The UI was a nice piano with visual feedback. The laptop key served as the keys until I prompted for midi support so she could use the electric piano. The whole thing took about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. It’s a funny time to live through. A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden.

m463 2mo ago
I wonder. I remember before emissions, what's underneath a car hood was relatively organized and simple. Then with emissions it became a maze of vacuum hoses and so much other nonsense. then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again. In the other places, they added a second hood to hide the mess. There is some clean code out there, like maybe the seL4 kernel: https://github.com/seL4/seL4/ https://github.com/seL4/seL4/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4 "with an explicit goal of enabling comprehensive formal verification..." (and lots more stuff) maybe we can still have niches like this.
- toasty228 2mo ago
  It was simple because it was inefficient and archaic. Reducing pollution is not "nonsense"
  - m463 2mo ago
    Not criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again. another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit
    - ssl-3 2mo ago
      PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though. I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card. Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces. A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.) I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.) It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs. It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?
      - m463 2mo ago
        > Am I missing something? lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood" And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again. but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way. started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again. in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday. maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.
- pona-a 2mo ago
  That's what happens with scale... The purpose of a car itself didn't change. But the massive inflated demand, as our city planners decided every adult must be put in a rolling metal cage to participate in society, changed the environment it was originally designed for. Now it's a matter of geopolitical stability, or even basic human habitability of these spaces, that a car converts as much of that chemical energy into movement, and releases as little toxic byproducts in the process. Whereas before, that cost, at scale, was small enough to neglect. Just like a modern CPU evolved into an incomprehensible mess, even though the basic consumer needs hadn't changed much, because the politics of computing forced them to run expanding institutional cruft at reasonable speeds, on battery-powered always-on addiction machines.
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  > then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again Those cleaner looking engine bays are usually worse to work on. Not better. When you open up the hood and immediately see lines everywhere, that also means they’re within reach. This is great. The engine bays that look nice and clean for the showroom still have those same lines. They’re just buried in there. If you need to work on them you’re going to be reaching underneath things, climbing under the car, or even removing other parts to access something simple. Also, it’s not all about emissions. A lot of those lines are for modern comforts like cruise control and improvements like features that make cold starts easier or make the engine behave better at extreme temperatures. Some of those have been superseded by electronically controlled versions which is why some of those lines are disappearing on modern cars, but the overall complexity has increased further.
  - wkjagt 2mo ago
    I have a 1981 Volvo 244 and I'm very happy none of the hoses are hidden.
- moffkalast 2mo ago
  I think the vacuum hoses are actually for the brake booster and why you don't have any regular brakes if your engine dies. But yes, smaller engine + turbo or twin turbo is definitely more complex than a simple big block. There's also an absolute shit ton more sensors on everything now.
gxs 2mo ago
Yes but it’s far better than anything anyone, let alone a small child, could make in 15 minutes On the other hand an engineer might take a couple hours and build this in a clean way with the right prompting These “got ‘em” ai criticism comments are getting so old
- ranger_danger 2mo ago
  The only reason it's a spaghetti mess is because it's not being prompted correctly by an expert.
  - gxs 2mo ago
    100% A novice writing code by hand could also write spaghetti code If you've worked in enterprise software, you might have seen that even competent professionals can write spaghetti code At this point AI really is just garbage in garbage out
    - gxs 2mo ago
      Haha it’s so comical how predictable downvotes are - which is a proxy for knowing what developers sensibilities are Wild to me that we see this even in what is a relatively more “sophisticated” forum
      - Dylan16807 2mo ago
        The downvotes are because you're just saying some devs are bad, you're not explaining how/why incorrect prompting is the only reason it's a mess. Or even the main reason.
  - bakugo 2mo ago
    Are these experts in the room with us right now? Because if even the creators of Claude seemingly can't prompt non spaghetti code (see: Claude Code leak), I'd like to know who can.
    - 2mo ago
bdcravens 2mo ago
> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".
- fsniper 2mo ago
  AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.
  - aselimov3 2mo ago
    It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.
- ssl-3 2mo ago
  And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year. When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing. In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes" That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)
  - 2mo ago
david-gpu 2mo ago
> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. That is how compiler-generated assembly looks to humans, as well. Human-produced is typically much more readable. Yet, here we are. Most programmers only know the very basics of assembly programming, but the world keeps spinning just fine.
- aselimov3 2mo ago
  Comparing LLM output to compiler output is such a stale meme by now that it's surprising to see people still saying it. Obviously a deterministic translation of a higher level programming language to machine code is different than the slop cannon.
  - david-gpu 2mo ago
    1. Compilation has typically not been deterministic. Even within the same exact compiler tool chain version. 2. Compilers and building tool chains change all the time. CI and automated testing catch any regressions. Tye same can be done with LLMs. 3. LLM code generation, with some work, can be made deterministic, if that mattered to somebody.
    - customguy 2mo ago
      Nonsense. The "weights" in "models" refer to probabilities. Even the implicit claim that they could deterministically produce "the" correct answer with 100% certainty doesn't withstand any scrutiny. Nevermind problems posed in English prose, complicated or philosophical questions. Is the correct answer to 2+2 four, or is it 1+3? When you you have 2 apples and give me one apple, how many apples do you have now; one, or half as many as before? What is the correct answer? Without a spaghetti of arbitrary axioms in the system prompt? Even if you come up with something clever about apples, it even fails at "when is your birthday". When it is today, should I say "today" or say the date? Not even God could decide that. Arguably, the specifications for a compiler is also such a mess of axioms, and you can split hairs and say "it's all random anyway", but you'll still use a seatbelt instead of silly string, so what gives? For compilers, give or take, there is a correct output for a given input (under which I'll include config, options, the targeted architecture, whatever). With LLM there is no such thing even if you do infinite mental backflips, and there won't be, because there can't be. Even if you could perfect the compilers that are needed to make the software that trains and drives LLM deterministic, you cannot make LLM fully deterministic without making them not an LLM. If you can find a way to encode what a compiler would do to programs into the weights of a model so that produces the output of a compiler that would be a cool and completely useless feat, because it would probably be bigger, slower and impossible to reason about. But it would still be cool and I would still try it out.
blargey 2mo ago
Picking over the theoretical maintainability of one-off tools and toys that were generated in minutes by what will soon be an outdated model, feels very...missing the forest for the trees, when it comes to speculating about the future impact of this stuff.
orbital-decay 2mo ago
That's the kind of thing I learned actual programming for, at the same age.
antii 2mo ago
[dead]
jpcom 2mo ago
She's 8 years old man cut her a little slack on the code aesthetics ;)
- tocs3 2mo ago
  And Claude is even younger.
  - embedding-shape 2mo ago
    Guess you depend on how you measure. As "released product to the public" then probably yes. Cumulative training hours spent actually creating and adjusting the weights during training? Probably no.
    - tocs3 2mo ago
      Maybe, I do not know how the number of neurons in a child's brain and the connections compare to Claude and its training but I would think it is comparable. Also, while a child might sleep the brain does not just switch off, there is still stuff going on that adds to the child's development. I am, here, not counting time for separate instances of Claude (so 10 instances running for a year is not 10 years). So, I think the 8yo is still older. Full disclosure, I am not a neurologist or computer scientist (although I find both interesting). I would consider fair criticism of this fair and would even like to see what those in those fields would have to say.
      - 1659447091 2mo ago
        > compare to Claude and its training [...] Also, while a child might sleep the brain does not just switch off A child doesn't get centuries of curated human knowledge and public works as its starting point
reidjs 2mo ago
In what world would this be a future burden? It's just a throwaway fun project lol
- jayd16 2mo ago
  I think the fear is that a lot of this stuff will end up being load bearing. A lot more folks now know enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what to throw away.
  - satvikpendem 2mo ago
    Load bearing, huh? I see you're becoming Claude himself.
    - jayd16 2mo ago
      You're right to push back
    - mypalmike 2mo ago
      I thought I was the only one who realized how much Claude called things “load bearing”. I’ve mentioned it to colleagues and they hadn’t noticed.
      - tough 2mo ago
        I'm pretty sure its a meme by now https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1tob6q5/that_is_loadbearing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1tob6q5/that_is_l...
    - oenton 2mo ago
      That’s a feature, not a bug.
- bonsai_bar 2mo ago
  You mean the 8 year old shouldn't be thinking about how she will maintain this code when she's 15? This generation is lost.
magic_hamster 2mo ago
The job of code like this is going to serve as a makeshift spec for future coding agents, so they extract the intended use and redo it on command. Better models will be able to improve the actual code until you hit some diminishing returns for the problem you've solved.
budsniffer952 2mo ago
[flagged]
- elbear 2mo ago
  It's not about prettiness. It's about being harder to extend thus making future adaptations harder.
  - budsniffer952 2mo ago
    You don't always need to extend or adapt. Not every piece of software is a business. Most often it's a tool to achieve something else. Besides, this all revolves around the, I believe false, premise that humans write code better than AI.
    - elbear 2mo ago
      Ok, I agree with the sentiment. You shouldn't solve for problems you don't have yet, especially since with AI it's easier to refactor.
pjmlp 2mo ago
Those of us involved in offshore projects already know the feeling.
jlarocco 2mo ago
> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. So it's on par with humans, then.
eatsyourtacos 2mo ago
>Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess I honestly think people on here are very much overstating 'spaghetti code' when AI does it... first, it works correct? The reason I say that if the AI can continue to upgrade code that might not always look 'the prettiest' (to you..) because it doesn't care about what some of us consider to look like clean code. If it can continue to manage, document, and upgrade the code successfully.. does you calling it spaghetti code actually matter? Maybe you have a hard time reading it but the AI certainly doesn't.. I think that's worth consideration. Every one of us has our own conventions and ideas of what 'clean' code looks like sometimes. And honestly 95% of the time we only thing it's clean if we wrote it ourselves.
ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
This is the finale of Close Encounters of the Third Kind And also the 1980s electronic toy, “Simon”
jasondigitized 2mo ago
Why would code be a burden when LLMs are the worse they will ever be today?
michelb 2mo ago
>A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. I don't think we'll be looking at code at all within the next few years. I know I already don't anymore. The code is not the product for me, and as long as any model, commercial or local, can maintain it (or recreate it), I'm fine. When I make a drawing in a vector drawing program I don't export to PostScript to see if they calculated the bezier curves correctly either. I'm convinced most code will be ephemeral in a few years.
- IshKebab 2mo ago
  Can they maintain it though? What's the biggest/longest running project you have where you don't look at the code?
  - michelb 2mo ago
    That is of course the big question. Longest projects I have running are about 1.5 years old now and used daily by my coworkers. The projects got a huge rewrite when Opus came out.
tcp_handshaker 2mo ago
>> Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength Well in this case, for the idea it was already in the training data. User said was out of ideas...trying to prop up the LLM smartness... https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-find-a-lost-bluetooth-device-2487669 https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-find-a-lost-bluetooth-device... https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/194584/locating-a-bluetooth-device-in-a-room https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/194584/locating-... https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-lost-my-cellphone-somewhere-in-my-house.316045/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-lost-my-cellphone-som... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3317786 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3317786? And about the code...well... - Complete Android code example specifically explains that Bluetooth RSSI can be used, cautiously, as a distance indicator. - https://mobile.fhstp.ac.at/development/rssi-messungen-von-bluetooth-auf-android/ https://mobile.fhstp.ac.at/development/rssi-messungen-von-bl... - android-Bluetooth-RSSI-Scanner - https://github.com/TimingJL/android-Bluetooth-RSSI-Scanner https://github.com/TimingJL/android-Bluetooth-RSSI-Scanner - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22914532/ble-continuous-rssi-scanning-with-a-constant-small-time-interval-for-android https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22914532/ble-continuous-... - https://github.com/alt236/Bluetooth-LE-Library---Android https://github.com/alt236/Bluetooth-LE-Library---Android These LLMs are mainly knowledge bases and compression engines.
xtiansimon 2mo ago
> “…8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game…” And we thought it would be _visual programming_ that brought children to programming. Cool. Its logic.
- disqard 2mo ago
  Yeah, Scratch helped bootstrap so many folks, but that was a generation ago -- I can't imagine exhorting children to learn to code with Scratch (or any other Visual Programming Language) in good faith today. If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding, well then just use an AI coding assistant. OTOH, if you (for some reason) want to learn a textual programming language, then write code in that language yourself.
  - xtiansimon 2mo ago
    > “If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding…” Coding is a solution waiting for a problem kids don’t have yet. The answer is always “try a game”. But llm and logic can help children engage with the actual problems they have and what is flying around their little imaginations. Syntax and other code _constraints_ should not be the cost of entry.

by aidos 2mo ago

m463 2mo ago

I wonder. I remember before emissions, what's underneath a car hood was relatively organized and simple. Then with emissions it became a maze of vacuum hoses and so much other nonsense. then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again. In the other places, they added a second hood to hide the mess. There is some clean code out there, like maybe the seL4 kernel: https://github.com/seL4/seL4/ https://github.com/seL4/seL4/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeL4 "with an explicit goal of enabling comprehensive formal verification..." (and lots more stuff) maybe we can still have niches like this.

toasty228 2mo ago
It was simple because it was inefficient and archaic. Reducing pollution is not "nonsense"
- m463 2mo ago
  Not criticizing function, criticizing elegance of the solution. Eventually with time elegance was achieved again. another analogy would be opening some computers to add memory/ssd/hd, as judged by ifixit
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    PC accessories have been easy during the era of ifixit, though. I remember installing seventy-two individual DIP chips onto an Everex 2-megabyte 8-bit ISA EMS expansion card and downloading software to make it work in MS-DOS from Intel's dial-up BBS. I remember chains of MFM drives being made to work by keying obscure commands into debug to run programs that were built into the hard drive controller card. Oh, so many fun evenings working out which devices could share IRQs and configuring software to work around the corner cases that developed. Serial mice, PS/2 mice, plus bus mice of several different varieties. XT, AT, and PS/2 keyboards. The veritable plethora of mutually-incompatible CD-ROM interfaces. A clock card: A whole friggin' card with a clock chip and a battery, just to keep track of wall time. (And the software to make it work.) I even remember SCSI, which was famously renowned for the number of goat sacrifices that were required to to make it work. (Except, I remember SCSI very fondly. CD burner, reader, 7-disc Nakamichi changer, flatbed scanner, DDS tape, and a few IBM Ultrastar 9ES hard drives all sharing the same bus? Sure, why not? It worked. But it took some care to get there.) It's simple today. Want more storage? SATA is easy (and everyone will make fun of you, but USB 3 works great for a hard drive in a desktop rig). m.2 is compact, and only has a couple of variations. Video cards -- even multiples of them -- just slot right into motherboards and they don't even have jumbers to configure. Sound cards are forgotten. RAM comes in standard forms that only change once every decade or so. Input devices, basic NICs, and video capture stuff can just plug in with USB. The USB ports themselves can be multiplied using hubs. It's pretty good today, isn't it? Am I missing something?
    - m463 2mo ago
      > Am I missing something? lol. the original statement was that AI written code is a mess "under the hood" And I tried to say - cars were "simple/fixable under the hood", then emissions made them a mess then some (specific) cars became simple/fixable again. but my analogy wasn't clear, so I tried saying that computers went the same way. started out with simple s-100 bus/pc with slots... but at some point they became no-user-servicable-parts-inside (per ifixit) but some have gotten servicable again. in summary - I think AI can make a mess, but maybe AI can make clean/maintainable code someday. maybe there will need to be an AIfixit.com to rate models.
pona-a 2mo ago
That's what happens with scale... The purpose of a car itself didn't change. But the massive inflated demand, as our city planners decided every adult must be put in a rolling metal cage to participate in society, changed the environment it was originally designed for. Now it's a matter of geopolitical stability, or even basic human habitability of these spaces, that a car converts as much of that chemical energy into movement, and releases as little toxic byproducts in the process. Whereas before, that cost, at scale, was small enough to neglect. Just like a modern CPU evolved into an incomprehensible mess, even though the basic consumer needs hadn't changed much, because the politics of computing forced them to run expanding institutional cruft at reasonable speeds, on battery-powered always-on addiction machines.
Aurornis 2mo ago
> then ... in some places (maybe cars that people care about working on) it became cleaner again Those cleaner looking engine bays are usually worse to work on. Not better. When you open up the hood and immediately see lines everywhere, that also means they’re within reach. This is great. The engine bays that look nice and clean for the showroom still have those same lines. They’re just buried in there. If you need to work on them you’re going to be reaching underneath things, climbing under the car, or even removing other parts to access something simple. Also, it’s not all about emissions. A lot of those lines are for modern comforts like cruise control and improvements like features that make cold starts easier or make the engine behave better at extreme temperatures. Some of those have been superseded by electronically controlled versions which is why some of those lines are disappearing on modern cars, but the overall complexity has increased further.
- wkjagt 2mo ago
  I have a 1981 Volvo 244 and I'm very happy none of the hoses are hidden.
moffkalast 2mo ago
I think the vacuum hoses are actually for the brake booster and why you don't have any regular brakes if your engine dies. But yes, smaller engine + turbo or twin turbo is definitely more complex than a simple big block. There's also an absolute shit ton more sensors on everything now.

gxs 2mo ago

Yes but it’s far better than anything anyone, let alone a small child, could make in 15 minutes On the other hand an engineer might take a couple hours and build this in a clean way with the right prompting These “got ‘em” ai criticism comments are getting so old

ranger_danger 2mo ago
The only reason it's a spaghetti mess is because it's not being prompted correctly by an expert.
- gxs 2mo ago
  100% A novice writing code by hand could also write spaghetti code If you've worked in enterprise software, you might have seen that even competent professionals can write spaghetti code At this point AI really is just garbage in garbage out
  - gxs 2mo ago
    Haha it’s so comical how predictable downvotes are - which is a proxy for knowing what developers sensibilities are Wild to me that we see this even in what is a relatively more “sophisticated” forum
    - Dylan16807 2mo ago
      The downvotes are because you're just saying some devs are bad, you're not explaining how/why incorrect prompting is the only reason it's a mess. Or even the main reason.
- bakugo 2mo ago
  Are these experts in the room with us right now? Because if even the creators of Claude seemingly can't prompt non spaghetti code (see: Claude Code leak), I'd like to know who can.
  - 2mo ago

bdcravens 2mo ago

> A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. This assumes that the models of the future won't find it easier to just throw the code away and rebuild it This also assumes that the same application build by humans wouldn't become a "spaghetti mess".

fsniper 2mo ago
AI writes faster, so the rate it incurs tech debt is proportionally higher. However it's ability to have large context kept on memory compared to humans is also a key component fighting against it. These are occasionally forgotten when code quality of AI for large code bases are discussed. So Yes I think humans also build spaghetti, but as they write slower they get to the same place a lot later. However humans can't correct it, or can't correct it fast enough. AI can.
- aselimov3 2mo ago
  It does somewhat depend on the application size. Seems to me that for regular software projects (that aren't enterprise SaaS) a good programmer will create better software than Claude. Maybe the dehumanizing way to say it is that humans have more efficient/improved retrieval. The amount of time I see repeat code for no reason, or code/context that has been obviously missed is absurd.
ssl-3 2mo ago
And the models of the future will surely be better than they are today. This stuff is still a very long way from maturity. Sometimes it seems like they're moving very slowly. That makes sense: It's easy to get used to how they work today and it is also easy to forget how much worse they were last year. When we look back and realize that just 4 years ago these tools didn't really exist at all, it becomes clear that the rate of progress is rather amazing. In 4 years, we've gone from "hah, good luck with that crap!" to "little kids writing music-learning games on their own in a few minutes" That's pretty friggin' awesome, and it's not finished yet. :)
- 2mo ago

david-gpu 2mo ago

> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. That is how compiler-generated assembly looks to humans, as well. Human-produced is typically much more readable. Yet, here we are. Most programmers only know the very basics of assembly programming, but the world keeps spinning just fine.

aselimov3 2mo ago
Comparing LLM output to compiler output is such a stale meme by now that it's surprising to see people still saying it. Obviously a deterministic translation of a higher level programming language to machine code is different than the slop cannon.
- david-gpu 2mo ago
  1. Compilation has typically not been deterministic. Even within the same exact compiler tool chain version. 2. Compilers and building tool chains change all the time. CI and automated testing catch any regressions. Tye same can be done with LLMs. 3. LLM code generation, with some work, can be made deterministic, if that mattered to somebody.
  - customguy 2mo ago
    Nonsense. The "weights" in "models" refer to probabilities. Even the implicit claim that they could deterministically produce "the" correct answer with 100% certainty doesn't withstand any scrutiny. Nevermind problems posed in English prose, complicated or philosophical questions. Is the correct answer to 2+2 four, or is it 1+3? When you you have 2 apples and give me one apple, how many apples do you have now; one, or half as many as before? What is the correct answer? Without a spaghetti of arbitrary axioms in the system prompt? Even if you come up with something clever about apples, it even fails at "when is your birthday". When it is today, should I say "today" or say the date? Not even God could decide that. Arguably, the specifications for a compiler is also such a mess of axioms, and you can split hairs and say "it's all random anyway", but you'll still use a seatbelt instead of silly string, so what gives? For compilers, give or take, there is a correct output for a given input (under which I'll include config, options, the targeted architecture, whatever). With LLM there is no such thing even if you do infinite mental backflips, and there won't be, because there can't be. Even if you could perfect the compilers that are needed to make the software that trains and drives LLM deterministic, you cannot make LLM fully deterministic without making them not an LLM. If you can find a way to encode what a compiler would do to programs into the weights of a model so that produces the output of a compiler that would be a cool and completely useless feat, because it would probably be bigger, slower and impossible to reason about. But it would still be cool and I would still try it out.

blargey 2mo ago

Picking over the theoretical maintainability of one-off tools and toys that were generated in minutes by what will soon be an outdated model, feels very...missing the forest for the trees, when it comes to speculating about the future impact of this stuff.

orbital-decay 2mo ago

That's the kind of thing I learned actual programming for, at the same age.

antii 2mo ago

[dead]

jpcom 2mo ago

She's 8 years old man cut her a little slack on the code aesthetics ;)

tocs3 2mo ago
And Claude is even younger.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  Guess you depend on how you measure. As "released product to the public" then probably yes. Cumulative training hours spent actually creating and adjusting the weights during training? Probably no.
  - tocs3 2mo ago
    Maybe, I do not know how the number of neurons in a child's brain and the connections compare to Claude and its training but I would think it is comparable. Also, while a child might sleep the brain does not just switch off, there is still stuff going on that adds to the child's development. I am, here, not counting time for separate instances of Claude (so 10 instances running for a year is not 10 years). So, I think the 8yo is still older. Full disclosure, I am not a neurologist or computer scientist (although I find both interesting). I would consider fair criticism of this fair and would even like to see what those in those fields would have to say.
    - 1659447091 2mo ago
      > compare to Claude and its training [...] Also, while a child might sleep the brain does not just switch off A child doesn't get centuries of curated human knowledge and public works as its starting point

reidjs 2mo ago

In what world would this be a future burden? It's just a throwaway fun project lol

jayd16 2mo ago
I think the fear is that a lot of this stuff will end up being load bearing. A lot more folks now know enough to be dangerous but not enough to know what to throw away.
- satvikpendem 2mo ago
  Load bearing, huh? I see you're becoming Claude himself.
  - jayd16 2mo ago
    You're right to push back
  - mypalmike 2mo ago
    I thought I was the only one who realized how much Claude called things “load bearing”. I’ve mentioned it to colleagues and they hadn’t noticed.
    - tough 2mo ago
      I'm pretty sure its a meme by now https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1tob6q5/that_is_loadbearing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1tob6q5/that_is_l...
  - oenton 2mo ago
    That’s a feature, not a bug.
bonsai_bar 2mo ago
You mean the 8 year old shouldn't be thinking about how she will maintain this code when she's 15? This generation is lost.

magic_hamster 2mo ago

The job of code like this is going to serve as a makeshift spec for future coding agents, so they extract the intended use and redo it on command. Better models will be able to improve the actual code until you hit some diminishing returns for the problem you've solved.

budsniffer952 2mo ago

[flagged]

elbear 2mo ago
It's not about prettiness. It's about being harder to extend thus making future adaptations harder.
- budsniffer952 2mo ago
  You don't always need to extend or adapt. Not every piece of software is a business. Most often it's a tool to achieve something else. Besides, this all revolves around the, I believe false, premise that humans write code better than AI.
  - elbear 2mo ago
    Ok, I agree with the sentiment. You shouldn't solve for problems you don't have yet, especially since with AI it's easier to refactor.

pjmlp 2mo ago

Those of us involved in offshore projects already know the feeling.

jlarocco 2mo ago

> Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess. So it's on par with humans, then.

eatsyourtacos 2mo ago

>Meanwhile, one peak at the code and you can already see the state starting to become a bit of a spaghetti mess I honestly think people on here are very much overstating 'spaghetti code' when AI does it... first, it works correct? The reason I say that if the AI can continue to upgrade code that might not always look 'the prettiest' (to you..) because it doesn't care about what some of us consider to look like clean code. If it can continue to manage, document, and upgrade the code successfully.. does you calling it spaghetti code actually matter? Maybe you have a hard time reading it but the AI certainly doesn't.. I think that's worth consideration. Every one of us has our own conventions and ideas of what 'clean' code looks like sometimes. And honestly 95% of the time we only thing it's clean if we wrote it ourselves.

ButlerianJihad 2mo ago

This is the finale of Close Encounters of the Third Kind And also the 1980s electronic toy, “Simon”

jasondigitized 2mo ago

Why would code be a burden when LLMs are the worse they will ever be today?

michelb 2mo ago

>A lot of code is being written and a lot of it is going to be a real future burden. I don't think we'll be looking at code at all within the next few years. I know I already don't anymore. The code is not the product for me, and as long as any model, commercial or local, can maintain it (or recreate it), I'm fine. When I make a drawing in a vector drawing program I don't export to PostScript to see if they calculated the bezier curves correctly either. I'm convinced most code will be ephemeral in a few years.

IshKebab 2mo ago
Can they maintain it though? What's the biggest/longest running project you have where you don't look at the code?
- michelb 2mo ago
  That is of course the big question. Longest projects I have running are about 1.5 years old now and used daily by my coworkers. The projects got a huge rewrite when Opus came out.

tcp_handshaker 2mo ago

>> Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength Well in this case, for the idea it was already in the training data. User said was out of ideas...trying to prop up the LLM smartness... https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-find-a-lost-bluetooth-device-2487669 https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-find-a-lost-bluetooth-device... https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/194584/locating-a-bluetooth-device-in-a-room https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/194584/locating-... https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-lost-my-cellphone-somewhere-in-my-house.316045/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-lost-my-cellphone-som... https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3317786 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3317786? And about the code...well... - Complete Android code example specifically explains that Bluetooth RSSI can be used, cautiously, as a distance indicator. - https://mobile.fhstp.ac.at/development/rssi-messungen-von-bluetooth-auf-android/ https://mobile.fhstp.ac.at/development/rssi-messungen-von-bl... - android-Bluetooth-RSSI-Scanner - https://github.com/TimingJL/android-Bluetooth-RSSI-Scanner https://github.com/TimingJL/android-Bluetooth-RSSI-Scanner - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22914532/ble-continuous-rssi-scanning-with-a-constant-small-time-interval-for-android https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22914532/ble-continuous-... - https://github.com/alt236/Bluetooth-LE-Library---Android https://github.com/alt236/Bluetooth-LE-Library---Android These LLMs are mainly knowledge bases and compression engines.

xtiansimon 2mo ago

> “…8yo prompted (using voice recognition) Claude to make a game…” And we thought it would be _visual programming_ that brought children to programming. Cool. Its logic.

disqard 2mo ago
Yeah, Scratch helped bootstrap so many folks, but that was a generation ago -- I can't imagine exhorting children to learn to code with Scratch (or any other Visual Programming Language) in good faith today. If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding, well then just use an AI coding assistant. OTOH, if you (for some reason) want to learn a textual programming language, then write code in that language yourself.
- xtiansimon 2mo ago
  > “If you're trying to get away from the burden of syntax or other onerous aspects of coding…” Coding is a solution waiting for a problem kids don’t have yet. The answer is always “try a game”. But llm and logic can help children engage with the actual problems they have and what is flying around their little imaginations. Syntax and other code _constraints_ should not be the cost of entry.