Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of what Richard Dawkins had to say about the Bicameral Mind book: "either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!"

This website is really rough, the writing is dense and the first rule of video club is don't get one of the founders to narrate the video unless your CTO is Morgan Freeman. That said, I think this is just so unbelievably audacious that it's worth a look anyway.

The concept seems to be to take hardware's supply chain model and use it for software development. So instead of having one company figure out your requirements, plan the project and build everything, you use a marketplace. Each part is put up for bidding by any supplier, meaning you get specialisation and competition.

Oh, and the suppliers are actually software agents. And "parts" includes everything from requirements gathering to opcode generation. In essence they want to build their own industrial revolution for software development, from scratch, using (basically) DAOs.

Is that possible? I have no idea. My first instinct (and second, and third) is no. But if it is, it could blow up the entire industry. Rubbish or genius, nothing in between.

The blog ( https://codevalley.com/blog ) is ... really something.

> All layers of abstraction are encapsulated into a single scalable system. Since there are no codebases and thus far fewer unintended consequences, Code Valley neatly sidesteps the software complexity trap. We don’t need to search for silver bullets anymore — the Werewolf has been retired to a harmless cottage, no longer able to bother the were-proof residents of the Valley.

I ... can't see how the top level 'pilot' operations don't effectively count as a codebase, just a really weird one.

I really wonder how software verification works in the case of Code Valley, e.g. if you order List.append a b, how do you know it won't return List.append b a?

This could perhaps be a great application for Idris-Style dependent types. For example, you could create an RFP for "List.append" with a few constraints, `len(append(a+b)) == len(a) + len(b)` and so on and then know that the market will create something you can automatically verify to a certain degree.

Hi, I'm one part of the Code Valley team. Happy to answer questions.

Any developer can vet suppliers before they automate an agent to contract them. For example, you could contract the agent you're looking to vet, hit 'build' and be returned a small program to carry out List.append a b. If the program works as you expect, you have then verified (in that instant of time) that the supplier is sound, and can proceed to building your own agent to contract it.

Sounds like absolute rubbish to me..

("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!")

I've been waiting to be automated out of my job for a while now. I also think this is rubbish but great that they are trying. I'm sure it will deliver some value to someone.

Cheers - thanks for giving us the benefit of the doubt. The technology still has a long way to go before it can cater to the end-users of the world, but it is at least at the stage where other developers can join and build their own agents in preparation.

so, basically you're looking for free labor to make your product viable?

Hell no! Any agent a developer builds is owned and managed by them, and collects a payment for that developer every time it is contracted.

"Either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between!"

It's very kind of you, but this is clearly the former.

Can some try to have built a simple 'online calculator' - you know, with buttons, square-roots, logs. etc.

Anybody?

No?

A practical demo?

We (the Code Valley team and the emergent coding community) are still hard at work building the UI-designing agents, but you can build a 'Fibonacci calculator' right this moment, if you like.

You can build it to run on Linux (https://marketplace.codevalley.com/pilot.html#linux-fibonacc...), or to run in a browser (https://marketplace.codevalley.com/pilot.html#browser-fibona...). You will need to pay a few satoshis (to the agents you will be contracting), and if you don't have a bitcoin wallet, just shoot me an email (julie@codevalley.com) and I'll foot the 50c for you :).

edit: added clarification

it's a bit disingenuous as a founder to claim you're a member of the community.

Apologies, that was not my intention. I have clarified the comment.

Only related because you mentioned it, but...I found the bicameral mind book to be an amazing read. I often found myself sitting and thinking for a long time after reading certain paragraphs.

some interesting quotes I found: http://i.imgur.com/K90ovG6.png

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