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Comment by chickensong | Hacker News Reader

You probably don't care about the ingredients or engineering of asphalt, only if the road does its job well or is filled with potholes. Outside of the software industry, nobody gives a shit about code or databases.

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> You probably don't care about the ingredients or engineering of asphalt

Everyone does. You don’t think about it everyday because we’ve delegated it to experts which don’t come up with a new composition of Asphalt every time you press “generate”. It’s rigorously battle tested and short of intentional negligence, it’s consistent. I’m amazed how people are forgetting how the world actually works.

Exactly - the normalization of craft (?) is interesting

You've missed the point.

The point doesn’t seem to have been thought through.

The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials, and to you it felt like driving on the same road, with the same wear and tear and potholes, you wouldn't even notice.

If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour, no-one outside of software engineers will know or care.

> The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials,

They do those in labs, and then studies are made to prove that it can replace the current composition. They do not invent those on the spot and let the drivers QA the road.

> If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour

It’s on you to prove that this big “if” can be realized. A -> B only matters when A is true.

> It’s on you to prove that this big “if” can be realized. A -> B only matters when A is true

Not really. This is a discussion about what code looks like if AI can write applications that are as good, stable, correct as humans.

I think they can, better than most programmers at the moment, with the correct guardrails and supervision. But in time, I think we may not need to review the code at all, but instead verify correctness and performance only. The AI can write the code however it likes.

Obviously I don't have a proof for this, but based on the progress I've seen so far, if someone forced me to bet one way or the other, this is what I'd bet on.

But they don't. LLMs can't understand messy code much better than humans can. Maybe a little, but not enough to compensate for the code they create being messy.

I agree. But if I'm paying for the road (even as a taxpayer) I get angry that after a year it's full of potholes and that there are unnecessary signs warning about penguin crossing, making it cost 2 times more than it should have (and dont get me started why this road is really a highway leading to my house). I'd want certain qualities. And this article is basically = you will get a road, built quickly

But yes, you are right - I don't build roads and don't know what is a price to build a road and how to determine the quality of correctly built one, nor I will ever care or learn.

> And this article is basically = you will get a road, built quickly

That's not how I am reading it. You will get a road built exactly to your spec, quickly. So no penguin crossings unless you ask for them.

I am also not entirely sure how the pothole argument translates.

The road will be built to some specs, including features nobody asked for. If the corpus was trained for roads built in Arctic, you will get penguin crossings.

Sure, but if there's a trillion dollar company saying that it's going to replace all our road workers or engineers - I'd want to listen to the opinion of an expert. Some reporter from CNN driving over it like "yeah seems good to me, good this" has approximately zero persuasive power to me.

The ingredients and composition of the tarmac is the difference between having the road full of pot holes after a week of use

I care that the engineer followed industry standard best practices and used high quality asphalt. How could i not care about that? How do you think potholes aren't related to the engineering of asphalt?

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