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Okay, so you observed one team that had an issue with AI code quality. What's your point?

In 1998, I'm sure there were newspaper companies who failed at transitioning online, didn't get any web traffic, had unreliable servers crashed, etc. This says very little about what life would be like for the newspaper industry in 1999, 2000, 2005, 2010, and beyond.

by vlovich1232 hours ago|

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Im arguing that code quality very much still matters and will only continue to matter.

AI will get better at making good maintainable and explainable code because that’s what it takes to actually solve problems tractably. But saying “code quality doesn’t matter because AI” is definitely not true both experientially and as a prediction. Will AI do a better job in the future? Sure. But because their code quality improves not because it’s less important.

by layer84 hours ago|

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It seems that your opinion is based on expectations for the future then, which is notoriously difficult to predict.

by csallen4 hours ago|

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It's not that hard to predict that obviously useful new technology is going to improve over time.

Guns, wheels, cars, ships, batteries, televisions, the internet, smartphones, airplanes, refrigeration, electric lighting, semiconductors, GPS, solar panels, antibiotics, printing presses, steam engines, radio, etc. The pattern is obvious, the forces are clear and well-studied.

If there is (1) a big gap between current capabilities and theoretical limits, (2) huge incentives for those who to improve things, (3) no alternative tech that will replace or outcompete it, (4) broad social acceptance and adoption, and (5) no chance of the tech being lost or forgotten, then technological improvement is basically a guarantee.

These are all obviously true of AI coding.

by ThrowawayR230 minutes ago|

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That list cherry picks all the successful cases where the technology improved while ignoring the many, many others where it didn't and the technology improved no further. That's dishonest.

It isn't even a good job of cherry picking: we never got mainstream supersonic passenger aircraft after the Concorde because aerospace technology hasn't advanced far enough to make it economically viable and the decrease in progress and massively increasing costs in semiconductors for cutting edge processes is very well known.

by atomicnumber34 hours ago|

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There's almost no point in arguing about this anymore. Neither you nor the other person are going to be convinced. We just have to wait and see if a new crop of 100x productivity AI believer companies come along and unseat all the incumbents.

by mnsc4 hours ago|

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But hindsight is 20/20 as they say. In 2020 people predicted that Facebook Horizon would only go one direction, always improve and become as pervasive as the internet. So when you predict that the design and architecture capabilities of models will continue to improve, thus making code quality irrelevant, you sound very confident. And if in five years you are right, you will brag about it here. If not, well I for one will not track you down and rub it in your face. Peace out.

by csallen4 hours ago|

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You're confusing betting on a company/product vs betting on technological improvement in general.

It is absolutely the case that virtual reality technology will only get better over time. Maybe it'll take 5, or 10, or 20, or 40 years, but it's almost a certainty that we'll eventually see better AR/VR tech in the future than we have in the past.

Would you bet against that? You'd be crazy to imo.

by slfnflctd3 hours ago|

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There's a kid outside the window of the place I'm staying who's been in the yard playing and talking with people online through his VR headset for like 2+ hours. He's living in the future. Whatever happens, he and his friends are going to continue to be interested in more of this.

Whether what they're using in 20 years is produced by the company formerly known as Facebook or not is a whole different question.