pron

31 ms·

361.
by pron 7mo ago
They don't work really well even on relatively small things and even with a virtually impractical upfront engineering: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47752626 They just make a lot of mistakes that compound and th
362.
by pron 7mo ago
It isn't. Anthropic tried building a fairly simple piece of software (a C compiler) with a full spec, thousands of human-written tests, and a reference implementation - all of which were made available to the agent and the model tr
363.
by pron 7mo ago
> A lot of that can be overcome by including the need to be able to put more floors on top as part of the spec I wish it could, but in practice, today's agents just can't do that. About once a week I reach some architectural bi
364.
by pron 7mo ago
First, it's not "can occur" but does occur 100% of the time. Second, sure, it does mean something is missing, but how do you test for "this codebase can withstand at least two years of evolution"?
365.
by pron 7mo ago
> A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around People who say that haven't used today's agents enough or haven't looked closely at what they produce. The code they write isn&#x27
366.
by pron 7mo ago
I'll grant you that Go is extremely opinionated; that's its shtick. But it's an old language that started out with a 1970s design as a statement by its creators against modern programming languages. From its langnauge design,
367.
by pron 7mo ago
These are all the options that have ever existed, including options that are or were available only in debug builds used during development and diagnostic options. There are still a few hundred non-diagnostic "product" flags at an
368.
by pron 7mo ago
First, as others have pointed out, it's always been like that up to a point. But that's not the problem with X. I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, e
369.
by pron 7mo ago
"Code quality" here isn't referring to some aesthetic value. Coding agents write code that doesn't converge, meaning code that they cannot evolve after a while. They get to the point where fixing one bug causes another,
370.
by pron 7mo ago
Oh, I agree. Anthropic themselves proved that even with a full spec and thousands of human-crafted tests, unsupervised agents couldn't produce even something as relatively simple as a workable C compiler, even when the model was traine
371.
by pron 7mo ago
1. "Vibe coding" is a spectrum of how much human supervision (and/or scaffolding in the form of human-written tests and/or specs) is involved. 2. The problem with "bad code" has nothing to do with the short-t
372.
by pron 7mo ago
> science still relies on p-values, isn't it a flawed methodology? one can do better than that, there are widely known methods Not generally, no. When there are better methods, of course they are used. > You can do better sometim
373.
by pron 7mo ago
> I mentioned Judea Pearl before, he describes how epistemological methodology of Science prevented it for years... Yes, but you're making the same argument. Science is flawed, but it is the least flawed methodology . It means tha
374.
by pron 7mo ago
First, science is what we call the best epistemological methodology. Of course it makes mistake, but what makes it unique is that it makes fewer mistakes than any other methodology. Second, I'm all for using your brain to get as close
375.
by pron 7mo ago
> Pity no one tried to troll Scott with these, it would be interesting to watch. I would assume that's because people who generally try to learn things from sources that communicate acquired knowledge aren't Scott Alexander&#x2
376.
by pron 7mo ago
> And what do expert way about crime? There have been numerous studies on crime perception and fear of crime in the last 50 years. Here's just a small touch of what an internet search brought up in ten minutes: * https://
377.
by pron 7mo ago
> We can't be experts in everything, so in most cases we are go by Danning-Kruger Dilettantism. Or care enough to find out what the experts say? Surely that's the best way to start understanding the world around us. And if the
378.
by pron 7mo ago
My main problem with Scott Alexander is this: To draw correct conclusions from data, a necessary (though insufficient) condition is to be an expert in the field from which the data is drawn and/or to which the data applies. Otherwise,
379.
by pron 7mo ago
It's not completely wrong if you're interested in a throwaway codebase. It is completely wrong if what you want is a codebase you'll evolve over years. Agents are nowhere close to offering that (yet) unless a human is watchin
380.
by pron 7mo ago
Yes, and I think there's a fundamental problem here. The big reason the "AI thought leadership" claim that AI should do well at coding is because there are mechanical success metrics like tests. Except that's not true. T
381.
by pron 7mo ago
Agents just can't currently do that well. When you run into a problem when evolving the code to add a new feature or fix a bug, you need to decide whether the change belongs in the architecture or should be done locally. Agents are abo
382.
by pron 7mo ago
> A maintainer has a full-time job: to develop software. A maintainer who is also a defender has two full-time jobs, I don't think so. This is already the situation. Maintainers already fix vulnerabilities when they know about them.
383.
by pron 7mo ago
> Agents don't really know the whole codebase when they're writing the code Neither do people, yet people manage to write software that they can evolve over a long time, and agents have yet to do that. I think it's because
384.
by pron 7mo ago
Right, except even when the invariants are documented agents get into trouble. Virtually every week I see the agent write strange code with multiple paths. It knows that the invariant _should_ hold, but it still writes a workaround for case
385.
by pron 7mo ago
> Are you assuming every piece of software has a dedicated defender team? Strikes me as unlikely. No, I'm assuming it has maintainers (they play the role of defenders). > engineers who work on software are simply not that great a
386.
by pron 7mo ago
I generally fall into the first camp, too, but the code that AI produces is problematic because it's code that will stop working in an unrecoverable way after some number of changes. That's what happened in the Anthropic C compi
387.
by pron 7mo ago
> exploiting software is someone’s full-time job, whereas the engineers already have one—building it. But the attackers needs to spread their attack over many products, while the engineers only need to defend one. > The newer factor i
388.
by pron 7mo ago
Right, the article makes it seem that the attackers have the advantage in that they can try to attack everything at once, but the defenders have the advantage in that they each need to defend only one product. But it is true that if attacke
389.
by pron 7mo ago
Except they don't converge. You see that if you use agents to evolve a codebase. We also saw exactly that in the failed Anthropic experiment to create a C compiler.
390.
by pron 7mo ago
I wasn't trying to suggest how individuals should behave nor claim that language has a large impact on social dynamics in general. I'm merely saying that in the context of cultural criticism the thing that is sometimes referred to

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