Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.

There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands.

Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though.

Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.

But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while.

Code may have to compile but that's a lowish bar and since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass.

In all areas where there's less easy ways to judge output there is going to be correspondingly more value to getting "good" people. Some AI that can produce readable reports isn't "good" - what matters is the quality of the work and the insight put into it which can only be ensured by looking at the workers reputation and past history.

> since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass

That's not obvious at all if the AI writing the tests is different than the AI writing the code being tested. Put into an adversarial and critical mode, the same model outputs very different results.

Even if its a different session it can be enough. But that said i had times where it rewrote tests "because my implementation was now different so the tests needed to be updated" so you have to prompt even that to tell it to not touch the tests.

and then verify that it obeyed the prompt!

Someone needs to build an agentic tool that does strict, enforced TDD.

IMO the reason neither of them can really write entirely trustworthy tests is that they don't have domain knowledge so they write the test based on what the code does plus what they extract from some prompts rather than based on some abstract understanding of what it should do given that it's being used e.g. in a nuclear power station or for promoting cat videos or in a hospital or whatever.

Obviously this is only partially true but it's true enough.

It takes humans quite a long time to learn the external context that lets them write good tests IMO. We have trouble feeding enough context into AIs to give them equal ability. One is often talking about companies where nobody bothers to write down more than 1/20th of what is needed to be an effective developer. So you go to some place and 5 years later you might be lucky to know 80% of the context in your limited area after 100s of meetings and talking to people and handling customer complaints etc.

Yes, some kind of spec is always needed, and if the human programmer only has the spec in their head, then that's going to be a problem, but it's a problem for teams of humans as well.

We’ve had the sycophant problem for as long as people have held power over other people, and the answer has always been “put 3-5 workers in a room and make them compete for the illusion of favor.”

I have been doing this with coding agents across LLM providers for a while now, with very successful results. Grok seems particularly happy to tell Anthropic where it’s cutting corners, but I get great insights from O3 and Gemini too.

>Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.

Except the test suite isnt just something that appears and the bugs dont necessarily get covered by the test suite.

The bugginess of a lot of the software i use has spiked in a very noticeable way, probably due to this.

>But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them.

No, not everyone. Half of them are trying to lean in to the changing social reality.

The gaslighting from the executive side, on the other hand, is nearly constant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com