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Comment by mixdup | Hacker News Reader

We've been on this train of not caring about the details for so long but AI just amps it up. Non-deterministic software working on things that have extremely precise requirements is going to have a bad outcome

A company may be OK with an AI chatbot being so bad it results in 5-20% of customers getting pissed off and not having a 5-star experience. The SEC and DOJ (and shareholders) are not going to be happy when the books are off by 20% or when a bridge is 5 inches too short to reach the other side

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Human accountants are notoriously non-deterministic too, and any sufficiently complex accounting process contains inaccuracies. The question then is always "are these inaccuracies material". I'm actually very impressed by TFA and it seems to me that if we get another order of magnitude improvement, it'll be around the accuracy of human accountants.

Yes but you have: 1. specific explicit training and certifications 2. someone to yell at and who can be fired for non-performance

You can still do that with AI. You hire 1 accountant to use AI to do the work of 20, require them to sign off on all of the work, and yell at them, before firing them, and then hiring an even less experienced one to manage the work of 50.

humans can operate in dynamical systems (where your actions can change the underlying system). LLMs are not trained to do that and have shown to be terrible at it

If the "extremely precise requirements" can be cheaply and automatically validated, it's much easier to have the AI generate spam on a loop until it passes all the tests.

You're saying P=NP, I think.

Not to agree with GP, but I think it’s more accurate to say they’re saying “if validation is quick (to code), who cares how long a solution takes an AI because computation is cheap.”

They’re not really making any claims about how quickly the AI can solve relative to the validation, which is what P vs NP is about.

This.

Yes, Cline generates a bunch of junk very quickly and makes dumb mistakes. If I can filter out those dumb mistakes automatically, I don't have to supervise it. It might burn 20¢ on fixing a mistake no human developer would make, but I don't have to pay a human developer.

Yes, if we solve the problem the problem will be solved!

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