[blueappconfig]

from the original tweet linked in the post "ceiling is being raised. cursor's copilot helped us write "superhuman code" for a critical feature. We can read this code, but VERY few engineers out there could write it from scratch."

I don't really agree that code is superhuman if VERY few is able to understand it haha..! Code should complex but easy to follow to make it brilliant in my opinion

[Octoth0rpe]

I think Kernighan said something along the lines of "Because debugging code is twice as hard as writing it, only write code half as smart as you are or you'll never be able to fix it later". AI-assisted code generators seems to make this problem much worse as I can now write code 2x, or 3x as smart as I am. What hope will there ever be in debugging this?

A more optimistic take is that maybe such tools will let us write competent code in languages we do NOT specialize in, and in the future either a more competent version of ourselves or some actual expert can fix it if it breaks? That doesn't sound a whole lot better :/

[hobs]

The optimistic take is a feedback loop that makes them both better and more capable, writing code you can't debug is bad, but it could help you understand and build your own skills to a point that you can.

The pessimistic and more likely outcome is that people just want shit done and so they will slap any half working garbo together as they have done for the last 20 years I have been in the industry.

[AnimalMuppet]

And AI-assisted code is almost certainly code that AI can't debug...

[ozim]

What if I told you that one can write code again from scratch instead of fixing broken one?

Writing replaceable code instead of maintainable code seems to be already working for a lot of projects. With LLMs and all that fast computing we have it seems it will be more of replaceable code in the future.

Of course there are always projects where it will never work.

It already works for infrastructure as nowadays servers are not fixed and treated like important things but you spin up fresh one.

[jameshart]

That’s not the claim. It’s well commented and formatted so actually quite readable. The claim is that very few could write it.

Though I would say that ‘very few’ is a larger group than they think - there are plenty of people doing metatype programming in TS; I’ve dabbled enough that given the problem I could probably tackle it and I know I learned from seeing others do it (because I am far from a typescript professional). So it’s not ‘superhuman’ if many of the humans who have found themselves wanting to work with the typescript type derivation model could have written it.

These capabilities - type ternaries and inferred type parameters - were put into TypeScript with a view that humans would use them.

The danger here is kidding yourself that this sort of code is beyond human.

[UncleMeat]

I don't think that this is well commented. It explains what each line does, but it does not explain the overall technique being applied here and what it achieves. "Ah, if the parameter is optional I include undefined" is not useful. Instead what this wants is a block comment at the top explaining what this type achieves, how it should be used, and the strategy employed to construct this type.

[michaelt]

> It’s well commented and formatted so actually quite readable.

Are you looking at the same code I'm looking at? The first block of code from the article?

I've seen more readable code in Perl Golf competitions.

[awkward]

TS type formatting is an unpleasant language to write in, but it’s touring complete and not that different from C++ type formatting. Writing complex statements in it is just like complex statements in any language - break it down to understandable parts and build those up.

[zarzavat]

Even an average programmer can understand it if they bothered to read the TypeScript documentation. “Superhuman” in this case means “has read the manual”.

[frou_dh]

That's also how you become an extreme outlier at Bash. Actually read the manual.

[blueappconfig]

No average person would be happy if they saw that mess

[nertirs]

Seems like the tweet is another AI hype pr piece. Since Devin was making outlandish statements, CoPilot can't fall far behind.

[janikvonrotz]

I agree! This is not superhuman code, this is machine code.

[shiandow]

Technically they're saying they can read it but wouldn't be able to come up with it on their own.

Which is impressive, generally reading code is considered harder than reading it so in that sense it is inhuman.