Hacker News Reader

Comment by AreShoesFeet000 | Hacker News Reader

There’s also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of meat, but it can only be useful as it’s harnessed properly with a nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back eventually. Not as an accelerator of what’s already been done in the Industry, but as the actual revolution.

And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.

View on HN

As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or IntelliJ.

I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?

Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.

Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.

This is an interesting idea! I searched around and it looks like there's [ast-grep](https://ast-grep.github.io/), an AST-aware CLI that can search and refactor code -- and you can expose it to your AI agent using a skill (https://github.com/ast-grep/agent-skill).

Not exactly symbolic AI, but pretty cool nonetheless.

> especially with AI

Yeah, the middle path sounds promising.

"Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.

This isn't exactly the same application of a "code mode" as before, but in my view it's a broad philosophy. AI for building machines, instead of doing the work directly. It also allows for easier updates/retries too. https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204 https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47089505

Reply on news.ycombinator.com