It'll probably look like the code version of this, an image run through a LLM 101 times with the directive to create a replica of the input image: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kbj71z/i_tried_th... Despite being provided with explicit instructions, well...
People are still wrongly attributing a mind to something that is essentially mindless.
Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on.
I have some healthy skepticism on this claim though. Maybe, but there will be a point of diminishing returns where these refactors introduce more problems than they solve and just cause more AI spending.
Code is always a liability. More code just means more problems. There has never been a code generating tool that was any good. If you can have a tool generate the code, it means you can write something on a higher level of abstraction that would not need that code to begin with.
AI can be used to write this better quality / higher level code. That's the interesting part to me. Not churning out massive amounts of code, that's a mistake.
I agree but want to interject that "code organization " won't matter for long.
Programming Languages were made for people. I'm old enough to have programmed in z80 and 8086 assembler. I've been through plenty of prog.langs. through my career.
But once building systems become prompting an agent to build a flow that reads these two types of excels, cleans them,filters them, merges them and outputs the result for the web (oh and make it interactive and highly available ) .
Code won't matter. You'll have other agents that check that the system is built right, you'll have agents that test the functionality and agents that ask and propose functionality and ideas.
Most likely the Programming language will become similar to the old Telegraph texts (telegrams) which were heavily optimized for word/token count. They will be optimized to be LLM grokable instead of human grokable.
My unpopular opinion is AI sucks at writing tests. Like, really sucks. It can churn out a lot of them, but they're shitty.
Actually writing good tests that exercise the behavior you want, guard against regressions, and isn't overfitted to your code is pretty difficult, really. You need to both understand the function and understand the structure to do it
Even for hobby projects, it's not great. I'm learning asyncio by writing a matrix scraper and writing good functional tests as you go is worth it to make sure you actually do understand the concepts
And what happens when these different objectives conflict or diverge ? Will it be able to figure out the appropriate trade-offs, live with the results and go meta to rethink the approach or simply delude itself ? We would definitely lose these skills if it continues like this.
ThrowawayR2|22 days ago
People are still wrongly attributing a mind to something that is essentially mindless.
therealdrag0|22 days ago
pinkgolem|22 days ago
finebalance|22 days ago
Oh, I absolutely love this lens.
skybrian|22 days ago
It's up to you what you want to prioritize.
smashed|22 days ago
Code is always a liability. More code just means more problems. There has never been a code generating tool that was any good. If you can have a tool generate the code, it means you can write something on a higher level of abstraction that would not need that code to begin with.
AI can be used to write this better quality / higher level code. That's the interesting part to me. Not churning out massive amounts of code, that's a mistake.
xtracto|22 days ago
Programming Languages were made for people. I'm old enough to have programmed in z80 and 8086 assembler. I've been through plenty of prog.langs. through my career.
But once building systems become prompting an agent to build a flow that reads these two types of excels, cleans them,filters them, merges them and outputs the result for the web (oh and make it interactive and highly available ) .
Code won't matter. You'll have other agents that check that the system is built right, you'll have agents that test the functionality and agents that ask and propose functionality and ideas.
Most likely the Programming language will become similar to the old Telegraph texts (telegrams) which were heavily optimized for word/token count. They will be optimized to be LLM grokable instead of human grokable.
Its going to be amazing.
pragmatic|22 days ago
What stakeholder is prioritizing any of those things and paying for it out of their budget?
Code improvement projects are the White Whale of software engineering - obsessed over but rarely from a business point of view worth it.
habinero|22 days ago
Actually writing good tests that exercise the behavior you want, guard against regressions, and isn't overfitted to your code is pretty difficult, really. You need to both understand the function and understand the structure to do it
Even for hobby projects, it's not great. I'm learning asyncio by writing a matrix scraper and writing good functional tests as you go is worth it to make sure you actually do understand the concepts
sifar|22 days ago