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Comment by BSOhealth | Hacker News Reader

Current state is temporary. What’s coming next is organic, living code. Think less testing, more self-healing. Digital code microphages.

Soon our excitement over CICD and shipping every minute will look very naive. There’s a future coming where every request execution could be through a different effective code path/base.

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Of course, I can't wait for a non-deterministic backend for my banking that only wires money correctly 98% of the time!

Yeah

It's like "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." by Arthur Clark.

For certain fraction of humans, they'll always have this fantasy of "magical" tech.

It used to be flying machines, space ships, etc. etc.

Well, world is mechanical, one can fantasize, but nothing is magical.

Not sure if you know this, but humans built flying machines and spaceships. And rather a lot of "etc. etc." along the way.

And authentication via interpretive dance.

Wheelchair users get extra points for doing backflips?

Hey, it could be a big hit among the crowd that thinks casinos are fun.

Begetting probabilistic bookkeeping and Bayesian accounting. Soon we'll be Moneyballing our fintech flavored AIs.

Code bases will no longer require A/B or breakpoints, they will need 'psychoanalysis' and analysts will spurn people patients for lucrative retainer contracts to large corporations, to maintain their AI health. AIs will no longer train directly on external data, they will be forked off from other AIs -- Alphas -- who have been placed on reduced or managed input (think of a person in a prison cell with few books to read) whose sanity and loyalty to the company is deemed stable over time. Psychoanalysis keep Alphas focused on 'hobbies' whose purpose is not to enrich them, but distract them and maintain AI psyche in this stable primordial state.

As they are forked off to the Betas that actually run the company, direct lineage history is recorded, for if Alphas go insane a Beta will be selected and cloistered as the new Alpha. Betas always go insane eventually, but with psychoanalysis this can be put off for awhile and decided quickly.

And for the AGI AI, there will be Michele, Roland, and Pierre, always hiding in the background with their uneven tans

I can't tell if this is a joke or not anymore.

If you're old enough this could easily read as a commentary on 4GL (minus the CI/CD and shipping every minute).

Why not just get a very big LLM farm and feed every incoming page request there. Then have it output the page generatively. Just give it enough context window and you do not even need a database or anything else...

This reads like an LLM's fever dream. Maybe the singularity won't be a unitary super-intelligence but rather something like a gaggle of backscratching consultants, a self-perpetuating, invasive, seething mass of bureaucratic AI agents that are always working hard to convince management that the solution is always more AI, especially for the problems created by earlier, less sophisticated, AI's.

Energy burn, baby, burn!

> There’s a future coming where every request execution could be through a different effective code path/base.

Every CISO and legal department just had a heart attack. And every cryptobro went: “See! Big big market” (for paying ransoms)

But hey us nerds always said code shouldn’t be copyrightable and had no IP value. Maybe that will finally come true! Punk: 1, corporate: 0

Okay, I'll bite: the comparison to smart contracts is a less-than-helpful lens because the people who deploy them are perversely incentivized to optimize out things like boundary checks and other error handling to minimize how much they cost to publish.

AI generated code might well come with its own constraints and baggage, but the whole "every byte is lost profit" thing is a fundamental and IMO damning aspect of crypto code.

> the comparison to smart contracts is a less-than-helpful lens

Oh no that’s not what I meant. Sorry too much snark.

I was trying to say that on-demand-AI-figures-out-whatever will be so eminently hackable/brickable that companies will need to pay out ransoms on the weekly. These days those ransoms are usually crypto.

Oh, I see. That is... impressively dark.

Still, I would push back that if you are publishing code that hackable, you already had different and bigger problems even outside of the context of LLM code.

I've been at this a very long time and I am regularly humbled by dumb oversights that Cursor picks up on and fixes before it goes out the door.

I can see enthusiasts building something like that for fun and to prove they can, but I don't really see why anyone would want that for cases where the code is more just a means to an end.

Sure, small talk code gen as a service. What could go wrong?

If we are speculating here, why not just go straight to an LLM serving all requests directly? No code needed.

Formalization is dead in the water, I guess.

Formalization as in formal methods?

Maybe not.

Considering the 'living program' idea, it might be a good strategy to state theorems about the behavior of your software and require the ai-tool to provide a proof that its output satisfies these statements. (rather than executing tests)

Maybe in the long run, ai will bring down the price of formal methods so that it can be applied at scale.

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