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Comment by lxdlam | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree.

The software development is absolutely a fractal. In 1960s we were solving the complexity by using high level language that compile to machine code to enable more people write simple code. This has happened again and again and again.

But different generations face different problems, which requires another level of thinking, abstraction, and push both boundaries until we reach the next generation. All of this is not solved by a single solution, but the combination based on basic principles that never changes, and these things, at least for now, only human can do.

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Interestingly it seems like we are investing many more magnitudes of capital for smaller and smaller gains.

For example, the jump in productivity from adding an operating system to a computer is orders of magnitude larger than adding an LLM to a web development process despite the LLM requiring infrastructure that cost tens of billions to create.

It seems that while tools are getting more and more sophisticated, they aren’t really resulting in much greater productivity. It all still seems to be resulting in software that solves the same problems as before. Whereas when html came around it opened up use cases that has never been seen before despite being a very simple abstraction layer by today’s standards.

Perhaps the opportunities are greatest when you are abstracting the layer that the fewest understand when LLMs seem to assume the opposite.

My favorite example of this is grep vs method references in IDEs. Method references are more exact, but grep is much simpler (to implement and to understand for the user).

I think you're also right about LLMs. I think path forward in programming is embracing more formal tools. Incidentally, search for method references is more formal than grepping - and that's probably why people prefer it.

You mentioned a great point that LLMs are hitting the edge of a marginal gain decreasing point, at least I think so. Many applications are struggling to provide real benefits instead of just entertaining people.

Another funny thing is that we are using LLM to replace creative professionals, but the real creativity is from human experience, perception and our connections, which are exactly missing from LLM.

Yes, as I saw someone say - I wanted robots to do my dishes, laundry, and clean up my house so I can spend more time on art.

Not a robot to do my art so I can spend more time on dishes, laundry and cleaning.

Don't worry, those robots are coming!

https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0

Software moves faster than hardware

As someone is not an artist I want ai to do art so I can restore my antique tractor. Of course we all have diffeent hobbies but there are also hobbies we don't want to get into but may nee.

Why?

What important problem do you have for which "AI generated art" is the answer?

You seriously want to claim you don't already have enough "content" to waste your free time consuming?

Exactly

Content creation is not the problem

Content curation is

AI generated art/music/etc is the answer to people having creative vision and lacking technical expertise or resources to execute it. There are lots of stories waiting to be told if only the teller had technical ability/time/equipment to tell it. AI will help those stories be told in a palatable way.

Curation of content is also a problem, but if we can come up with better solutions there, generative AI will absolutely result in more and better content for everyone while enabling a new generation of creators.

For every good story, told well, filmed well, edited well.. theres 1000s that fail to tick one/some/all of those boxes.

AI is more likely to contribute to the 1000s.

There is unlimited content online, that doesn't mean theres 100 movies worth watching in any given year. Maybe not even 10.

I think the parent comment mean "art" as "having fun", like playing a guitar, definitely no fun to see the robot playing it and not letting you even touch it.

Yes, and this even applies to code to a degree.

Would you rather write some code, or constantly code-review verbose, sneakily wrong junior level code?

I am unsure how ai-generated art gives you additional time to restore your tractor?

If it can create some decal close enough where nobody know the original other than fragmets that remain that helps. For common tractors we know but I'm interested in thing where exactly one is known to exist in the world.

The AI will also take over your work of restoring antique tractors, much faster and cheaper. It won't be historically accurate, and it may end up with the fuel pump connected to the radio but it'll look mostly Good Enough. The price of broken tractors will temporarily surge as they need them for training data.

I see it very differently. We are just at the very dawn of how to apply LLMs to change how we work.

Writing dumb scripts that can call out to sophisticated LLMs to automate parts of processes is utterly game changing. I saved at least 200 hours of mundane work this week and it was trivial.

The real gains in software are still to be had by aggressively destroying incidental complexity. Most of the gunk in a web app doesn't absolutely need to exist, but we write it anyway. (Look at fasthtml for an alternate vision of building web apps.)

The issue with LLMs is they enshrine the status quo. I don't want ossified crappy software that's hard to work with. Frameworks and libraries should have to fight to justify their existence in the marketplace of ideas. Subverting this mechanism is how you ruin software construction.

The falling rate of profit...

> The software development is absolutely a fractal.

I think this analogy is more apt than you may realize. Just like a fractal, the iterated patterns get repeated on a much smaller scale. The jump to higher-level languages was probably a greater leap then the the rest of software innovation will provide. And with each iterative gain we approach some asymptote, but never get there. And this frustration of never reaching our desired outcome results in ever louder hype cycles.

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