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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

My first job in the industry was cleaning up a large codebase created overseas by indian developers. Maybe the new kids today will break into the industry by cleaning up messes that have been generated by AI.

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the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.

Now, now, not with this mindset. You have to ask the Ai to fix the mess, and if it doesn't, try again!

AIUI one should be sure to include a grandmother dying if that div doesn't get centered

As if the person struggling with the mess will have the requisite skill levels to even recognise a mess!

Ooh but don't you know we just need an extra language with abstractions that can be compiled into prompting statements. Maybe something like sql.

Recognizing a mess is much easier and takes less skill than fixing it.

Nah, the magic/promise of AI is that it has positive chance of getting there, so you can keep feeding it dollars until it eventually gets you the thing you want, and that it's still cheaper than having people do it the old-school way.

We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years.

(Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and hopefully maybe arrive at a trivial program solving a small algorithmic problem.)

And full self driving is always just 5 years away.

I wouldn't bet against it. Self-driving tech benefits directly from the outputs of sudden and continued growth of R&D in AI, fueled by hype-driven investments.

Maybe just like with self-driving cars, trying to hook mechanical precision up to messy human society is going to be fraught and lead to blowback. Meaning that once planes start falling out of the sky from vibe coding Boeing contractors there will be PR and regulatory panics that soften the hype somewhat. Or, the next time Equifax gets mass leaked and they blame their security setup on generative AI. You can’t vibe code your way out of human stupidity and the consequences of production environments.

Maybe, but the same thing could be said about JavaScript and webshit and the world is still there. We can just continue to not use YOLO technologies and culture in safety-critical applications.

Full self driving is here. (Waymo). LIDAR is required imho.

5 years? I could swear that I took a ride yesterday in SF with Waymo.

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