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It’s difficult to have spent a long time learning something, only for that thing to suddenly become accessible to anyone; something that was once scarce and val
by level87 2mo ago
It’s difficult to have spent a long time learning something, only for that thing to suddenly become accessible to anyone; something that was once scarce and valuable is now abundant and cheap.
There are still machinists doing things by hand, but for real production or prototyping, most will now use a 5-axis CNC machine. It still requires an operator of sorts, but much of the work that once required skilled manual machining is now done by CNC.
I think the same thing is happening here; it’s just that the transition is messy.
Give it five years, and how we get to the end result will not matter nearly as much as it does now. A messy codebase will be irrelevant, as it will be something managed and controlled by the LLM, written in a way optimised for itself, not for you or I.
- Chance-Device 2mo agoThis is exactly right, thank you for saying it. Nice example with the CNC machine too.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago> it will be something managed and controlled by the LLM, written in a way optimised for itself, not for you or I. At that point we might as well invent an LLM-optimized language to use.
- solomonb 2mo agoBut CNC machining still requires a ton of physical skills. Its true that you maybe aren't planning out and executing every single tool pass by hand but there is still a tremendous amount of knowledge and physical skill that goes into setting up, indicating parts, etc.
- spaqin 2mo agoI never found a competent metaphor for LLMs taking over. Any tool brought up before still required skill and thought, and deep knowledge of its intricacies.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago> how we get to the end result will not matter nearly as much as it does now Sure, just wait for the poors to stop rebelling. It will all be over soon.
- edot 2mo agoMy understanding of manual machining in the modern day is that only really big or really specialty jobs (as in, just a weird process that there isn’t a good CNC machine for) are done manually anymore. But specialty and low volume, which is exactly where LLMs are nice because I can spec it exactly how I want. I wonder what the software equivalent of “big” is. Like, you need a part made on a lathe with a 3 foot diameter throat, only one guy in a 500 mile radius has a machine that big, from 1962, so he’s your guy. That guy can stay in business with manual machining. But standard, high volume parts need to be on CNC to be competitive.
- DC-3 2mo agoThe equivalent is probably weird, proprietary DSLs / standard libraries that AI has not been able to ingest so it performs poorly on. But maybe these days LLMs don't even really struggle with these sorts of domains.
- edot 2mo agoYeah I’d have to imagine that as long as you have the same fundamental ideas (variables, functions, loops, arrays, etc.) the syntax doesn’t matter at all. Plus it can just try, see and error, and read the error. I doubt there’s a language out there that they haven’t a) ingested and b) can’t handle. I think perhaps the equivalent would be “this environment quite literally can’t support having an LLM attached to it”, as in say some totally airgapped AND low-performance things (industrial computing, PLCs, military stuff, etc.).