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We might not even need libraries after all, since APIs, libraries and abstractions in general exist for humans to grasp complexities. Abstractions have their me
by groestl 1mo ago
We might not even need libraries after all, since APIs, libraries and abstractions in general exist for humans to grasp complexities. Abstractions have their merits, but they have downsides too, and AI might be a way to solve them. The interesting part for me is where that ends, because it's systems all the way down, and even on a higher level abstractions exist to allow humans to make sense of the world. Services, products, companies, political parties, what if in the future we don't need any of it anymore because the abstraction is obsolete?
- sgt 1mo agoWhere we're going, we won't even need programming languages or libraries at all. AI's will just generate pure binaries full of magic, right? /s
- asdf88990 1mo agoI mean, you already can, the AI will just do “natural language” to a programming language, and then call a compiler for the next step. Done.
- alecbz 1mo ago> we won't even need programming languages > just do “natural language” to a programming language
- jensgk 1mo agoI am pretty sure that is where we are going. No /s
- sgt 1mo agoBut how do you debug that?
- Brian_K_White 1mo agoAn ai decompiles a binary to a human representation. Not even to a traditional programming language but just to an md file or infographic. Probably terribly but probably good enough for some people to love it, and probably getting better over time. Although I'm not sure who the user is when the world has been turned into power plants and chip fabs by then and there aren't any humans left since they need things like farms.
- sgt 1mo agoI suppose you could decompile it to math (very broadly speaking).
- varjag 1mo agoIt can already do that, give it a try. (just asked Sol Max Fast to write a Tic Tac Toe ELF directly. 4m 28s, 912 byte executable)
- sgt 1mo agoThat's pretty insane.
- sgt 1mo agoBtw, interestingly, I tried getting Ox Alpha to make Tic Tac Toe directly as a Linux ELF executable. It came up with assembly code (NASM syntax) and it just timed out when I asked for pure machine code.
- varjag 1mo agoHave no experience with Ox Alpha but Sol went to code it down in a .hex file that it then converted into an ELF executable. The exact prompt was Create a simplest terminal based tic tac toe game. Generate executable ELF binary right away, without using existing or impromptu compilers.
- HPsquared 1mo agoThey also help AI to manage complexity, in just the same way.
- tmnvix 1mo agoWhat about readability? Are people going to give up on reading and understanding the code? Maybe the abstractions aren't only necessary for writing the code?
- turblety 1mo agoI think the answer to this is yes, it'll be just like "reading and understanding your assembly". We just don't check what instructions your code compiles down to anymore, and I think the same will be for code.
- Turskarama 1mo agoLibraries do a LOT more than that. Abstractions also make LLMs more efficient, and lets some problems be handed off to much cheaper algorithms. They also mean that the way data is handled can be standardized which means you don't have to design an entire protocol from scratch every time you want to send data somewhere. Every advantage libraries have given us still exists in the world of AI.
- groestl 1mo agoThe efficiency argument I accept, it's surely one main driver why systems tend to form and centralize and one important factor in the balance. Still, one can observe the weird things humans and AIs do when trying to dance around the gaps in leaky abstractions. So there's a tradeoff between (the effort spent on) that, and dropping the abstraction completely, as soon as the abstraction stops being a necessary constraint (due to the limited capacity of a human brain).
- DrScientist 1mo agoIndeed. Perhaps we will go from: framework X -> avoid writing boiler plate to AI -> avoid writing boiler plate And AI may generate the more explicit boiler plate more reliably directly, than the higher level framrwork with leaky abstractions.
- sumitkumar 1mo agoThe libraries are there for avoiding repetition. It is useful on its own without other benefits like implicit/explicit boundaries, readability by humans etc. If all lego(base unit software) pieces were unique shaped it might fit your requirements more efficiently but the cost of building those unique shaped legos explodes with the size of the lego piece required. LLMs compress the known shapes well and fit them to solve for a problem but they are still not good enough to build from scratch a large new lego piece which fits a full problem perfectly. And such a large lego piece might not be the most efficient solution either and might be difficult to prove so.
- groestl 1mo ago> the cost of building those unique shaped legos explodes with the size of the lego piece required. The cost of plastic injection molding is almost entirely due to the cost of creating the steel mold. My argument is: with LLMs we are entering a world which makes it cost effective to build many more things from scratch, which is akin to going from building things out of pre-fabricated lego pieces to 3D printing (agreeably not cost effective for everything, but for many things).
- Klonoar 1mo agoLibraries contribute to the humans being able to review things well, so no, they may still have their use cases. An AI might be able to create everything “from scratch”, sure - but I ain’t sitting there reviewing every bespoke thing it shits out. I want that offloaded to make it maintainable.