Comment by LogicFailsMe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LogicFailsMe | Hacker News Reader

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Superhuman coding has not happened.

I work with Codex and Claude daily. They're fantastic for script coding, config issues, and simple projects. They lose the plot on bigger things to this day. Just last night, Astra decided to cheat to present the illusion of progress until I called its BS. And I was so looking forward to finally working with the AGI. Humans remain the muse, the common sense, and the manager of making these things productive. And as much as I agree with Carmack's suggestion to not become the out of touch Kung Fu Master:

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095

working with them on projects daily gives me a pretty tactical read on what they can and cannot do IMO.

That's how I reconcile it.

But let's say it had. That's just 1 of 20 events that have to happen in sequence to hit the jackpot here.

We understand "superhuman coding" to mean very different things, and I think it's a me problem that I can't figure out where you're coming from, because it doesn't sound like our practical experience differs. I'm going to have to think on this.

Define it. I haven't seen anything yet from a coding agent I couldn't write myself and usually write better. But I don't have to gold plate every line of code, just the 5% or so that eats 90+% of the cycles. And this is where the agents are weakest. This does get to one of the reasons I don't believe AI cures death or builds von Neumann replicators any time soon because that requires out of sample breakthroughs. And that's not their strong point.

Just like AlphaFold 2 genuinely increased the weak sequence but strong structural homology detection of proteins, but it did far less for out of sample domains and it provides no intel into the kinetics of folding. Details matter. And nobody likes to hear about them.

Is there a retrospective on AlphaFold you’d recommend? Maybe that’s the insight I’m missing, I didn’t realize it had broad identifiable gaps like that.

Here's one: https://www.orbion.life/blog/alphafold-s-limitations-what-it...

I see similar conceptual gaps in coding agents when I work with them, even Astra and Fable, so maybe this a is decent proxy to describe the gap between hype and reality.

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