I think that’s a myth! What tends to happen in mature software is there are unfixable tradeoffs that can be made that favor one use case or another. And of course people will keep adding features too
If your spacebar heater relies on such behaviour Rust can and will break it. If you're in the crater group you'll be notified and urged to upgrade it.
Yes, that’s an incomplete and tenuous belief, but that’s where the irony is. If you’re omniscient you don’t get to experience irony.
I'm firmly in the "AI is incredibly powerful and useful" camp myself, but there's no question that currently, without good human oversight and feedback, AI output can have many issues which can be described as slop.
But yes, improved type systems are one of the ways this can be managed, and essentially help bootstrap more reliable systems.
There's a minor irony in imperfect system being used to help build more perfect systems, but you could say the same thing about human developers.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHhGa3iQBQcdSifFL/a-critical...
I used to compare this hype to crypto hype, but its so much worse. Can we just try not to shove llms into every single conversation.
Is there a hackernews type space where the word is banned? Even lobste.rs has this problem. I need some sort or way to just hide all content on certain sites where LLMs/AI are mentioned.
Like it or not, programming will become largely LLMs. And the comment you're replying to is actually making a pretty good case for where the use of LLMs is good: generating code to be formally verified.
Programming will never be dead.
1. Because the situation you describe is fantasy.
2. Even if it is a reality and all software can be verified (it cant), I will still be programming and so will millions of others because its fun, programming and sex are really damn close to things I cant live without. Not everyone got into engineering for the money. I legitimately love this activity, it is my actual passion. I would rather be poor than give it up.
Its like im being told everyday all day, non stop that the thing I love is not worth loving.
I'm not talking about mission critical software, but bespoke business applications that are produced by software engineering sweatshops and where the actual users are inured to incomplete features with sharp edges, arcane bugs, and incomprehensibly long intervals between bug report and fix.
Even in mission critical software we will likely see a lot of LLM tool usage. Even if the copyright plug is pulled and all vibecoded applications are regarded as copyright violations, its uses to analyze existing code and give advice will remain. In this world, writing applications entirely by hand will become an artisanal discipline.
Nothing is stopping you from enjoying the sort of programming that you like. But I think it's healthy to accept that that style will soon not be mainstream. It will be like knitting your own clothes, and that's okay.
Regarding formal verification, it's not needed, as LLMs already make on average about as many errors as the average human programmer.
For me, 90% of programming is just a tool to get the job done. It's like a machine in a factory that spits out 50 spoons a minute, and it doesn't need to be any more beautiful than that. If you enjoy woodcarving and want to spend an hour making your own spoon, do that and don't let the existence of the machine make you feel that hobby is any less worth loving.
The truth is LLMs is what you need to be optimising around as they will become the standard.
Maybe tech isn’t for you if you don’t like trying to stay on top of it.
Anyways, I probably know more about llms than you, I probably use them more than you. I just dont want to turn every conversation into a discussion about them.
I would argue the smartphone is 1000x more impactful than LLMs, along with many other inventions since the internet. I'm not really sure what contribution llms have had that are actually THAT impactful for peoples lives. Its possibly (but unlikely) a net negative, time will tell. Most people using them are not getting smarter, thats concerning. Most are just making more money for their bosses who are itching to replace them with an llm.
If we didn't let people live off the work of others, as the capitalists do, then we could all rejoice in that we've found yet another way of reducing the labor required to produce stuff.
Yet, in the real world, it seems as despite the progress of technology, the labor of the everyman is constant, and only the richest get more and more shiny jets and yachts.
This 2022 article [0] says it generates binaries that run about 7% slower than what GCC produces with -O1.
[0] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6120/2022sp/blog/compce...