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points

by Forgeties791 days ago |

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by 1 days ago|

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by booty1 days ago|

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I think we mostly DID offload basic math, for better or worse.

For software engineering I don't know the right balance.

I've used the "we mostly stopped caring about machine code generated by a compiler; maybe we should stop caring about LLM-generated code as well?" analogy myself.

But even I have to admit there's two big holes in that analogy: if I use a compiler to turn C into machine code... (a) compiler bugs are orders of magnitude rarer than LLM-generated bugs (b) my C code remains the source of truth, or at least source of intent. Whereas with LLM-generated vibecode, there's no source of truth, just an ever-evolving mudball. I (kinda?) like the ideas of "documentation as source of truth" and/or "tests as source of truth" ideas, but I don't think we're nearly at the point of viability.

TL;DR yeah I think actual understanding of what LLMs produce is gonna be important for the forseeable future

by murphyslaw19 hours ago|

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If the work can be checked by the next iteration of LLMs, does it really matter? Won't the work converge correctly?

by booty43 minutes ago|

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Like humans, LLMs also have to expand more effort when dealing with large piles of fragile spaghetti code. Spaghetti code isn't just aesthetically displeasing; there's a objective complexity increase and for large enough apps the increase is exponential. It's hard to imagine this ground truth ever changing.

Like humans, LLMs get into a place where fixing one thing breaks three others. They compensate partially with insanely big test suites, but now fixing one thing breaks three others, and 57 different specs, half of which also need to be updated.

I think roughly three outcomes are possible.

1. LLMs get fast/good/cheap enough that this just doesn't matter. Your 50M LOC monolith is a mess? Yeah, it still takes more effort for the LLM -- but this just means it costs 5 additional seconds and $0.03 instead of $0.02 to ship a new feature.

2. Stepping away from the "code as source of truth" paradigm. What if specs/docs were the vetted source of truth, and we just regenerate the whole 50M LOC monolith every time somebody makes a change, just like we rebuild binaries from C today whenever there's a change? (This probably requires some of the LLM advances from #1. Also, at this point, perhaps we should just skip the intermediate language and generate ASM -- what purpose is human readable source code serving at that point?)

3. Status quo as I see it -- human engineers overseeing projects, both guiding AI and being accelerated by it.

I think #2 is probably the... most ideal future? Though, of course, if we switch to that paradigm, the source-of-truth docs will have to be very thorough and structured, and will probably resemble a programming language of sorts themselves, except describing intents instead of operations.

by wedidthough1 days ago|

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Adults can, under most circumstances, do some limited slow arithmetic but are generally piss-poor at it, notwithstanding the occasional rainman, and only rely on it in trivial matters.

You see cashiers summing groceries? Salary calculations on paper? Tax, inventory, accounting, you name it? Nobody does any of it by hand.

We most definitely offloaded basic math.

by Forgeties791 days ago|

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I didn’t say we were universally good at it but in many countries we are (more or less) all exposed to it and taught it in school. There is a baseline even if we are far from mastery, and frankly a cynical hand wave of “well everyone’s bad at it” is not a real argument. In the US it is very clear that people are at least exposed to it and if we weren’t we would be operating very differently. I went to dinner last night, everyone did the tips in their head right there at the table. The average person can do some simple multiplication and division in their head. It’s not a mysterious script done on a box that they repeat the output of. Most people even if they’re bad at it understand the fundamental concept and, gun to their head, could probably do a series of very basic math problems with pencil and paper.

I imagine you and most of your peers can calculate a tip or at least approximate it without pulling out their phones yes?

by xscott19 hours ago|

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Analogies can be good when you're explaining something you know, but they kinda fall apart when making arguments or decisions.

How many of your friends and extended family can write hello-world or fizzbuzz in any programming language at all? Should they be allowed to vibe code apps for themselves? If they get good at vibe coding, should an employer be allowed to pay them for it?