[smashed]

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.

[Applejinx]

Microsoft will be an excellent real-world experiment on whether this is any good. We so easily forget that giant platform owners are staking everything on all this working exactly as advertised.

Some of my calculations going forward will continue to be along the lines of 'what do I do in the event that EVERYTHING breaks and cannot be fixed'. Some of my day job includes retro coding for retro platforms, though it's cumbersome. That means I'll be able to supply useful things for survivors of an informational apocalypse, though I'm hoping we don't all experience one.

[skybrian]

"What can we do to reduce the size of the codebase" seems like an interesting prompt to try.

[NitpickLawyer]

There's an interesting phenomenon I noticed with the "skeptics". They're constantly using what-ifs (aka goalpost moving), but the interesting thing is that those exact same what-ifs were "solved" earlier, but dismissed as "not good enough".

This exact thing about optimisation has been shown years ago. "Here's a function, make it faster". With "glue" to test the function, and it kinda worked even with GPT4 era models. Then came alphaevolve where google found improvements in real algorithms (both theoretical i.e. packing squares and practical i.e. ML kernels). And yet these were dismissed as "yeah, but that's just optimisation, that's easyyyy. Wake me up when they write software from 0 to 1 and it works".

Well, here we are. We now have a compiler that can compile and boot linux! And people are complaining that the code is unmaintainable and that it's slow / unoptimised. We've gone full circle, but forgot that optimisation was easyyyy. Now it's something to complain about. Oh well...

[habinero]

I vigorously agree with all of this.

It doesn't really matter for hobby projects or demos or whatever, but there's this whole group who thinks they can yell at the computer and have a business fall out and no.