munksbeer

Sort of. Hopefully the trend continues and we continue to get advances in the cheaper and open source models, but by all accounts, inside the frontier labs, they get to use much better models that they haven't released.

My main worry is that we get to a point where they have something much, much smarter than anything public and access is gated by extraordinarily high costs.

That probably can't happen though right? Inference is surprisingly cheap compared to the training.

Those seem reasonable apart from this one:

> - releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review

I'm not an academic but I've heard enough stories about how this can very much act as gatekeeping that I don't think it is a good request.

I use a combination of prompting and hand crafting my code. Sometimes I'll sketch out the design in code, without details, other times I'll delete and change what the LLM has done. I'm still reviewing everything it does, because:

1. Other humans also review my code and I know they won't approve until they're ok with it anyway.

2. I don't trust that the verifications we have at the moment are good enough to catch the errors LLMs still make.

So trust me, I'm not a "vibe coder"

But I can see the writing on the wall. We're not really maximising the potential of these things by doing it this way. In my particular industry, we're in an arms race for clients who can easily move to a competitor. So we need to be continually improving. How I predict this unfolding is that we'll need to get much better at verification of correctness (functional and non-functional) and once that is satisfied, humans will stop manually writing and reviewing code, otherwise you'll just lose to your competitors. At least in my industry, maybe not all.

Visit /r/science

Their own rules forbid low effort posts:

  "No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes"

And yet every single topic is filled with exactly that any time I go to read anything. It can't be beyond their wit to get rid of that stuff.

Ok. I completely disagree.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying? To keep it simple, how much code do you expect will be written by humans in say, two years time?

> I agree, I think this false dichotomy between using LLMs and caring about quality/reliability needs to stop

You're not going to get people to stop doing that by arguing on the internet, but in the end it won't matter, because it will stop, naturally.

In the future, you'll just get left behind and not hired if you're building code by hand, it's that simple. Even traditional code reviews are going to go away. It'll be more about the scope and then verifying correctness.

Look up Constraint-Driven Design or Declarative Engineering

It is inevitable. We (coders) already did it to other engineering disciplines where machines do most of the work, no human could possibly review or understand the actual details, and only verification ensures it is correct.

Why do you think coding is immune to this?

What part is not true?

You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha? Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.

The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.

You're saying this as if it is some kind of gotcha?

Don't you hope, not so secretly, that a peace deal can be brokered and we don't have to send our young men to war? I know I do, and I hope most people do. It would be weird if you don't.

The reality is, despite Trump being a gigantic arsehole, the US is still, by a huge margin, the worlds premier military. Realistically, they have the best chance of exerting pressure for a peace deal. I just wish Trump would live up to his promises for once.

I honestly have no expert knowledge about this stuff. What I say is based only on intuition.

  - China is heavily, heavily incentivised to enhance their own chip making
  - Looking at the rate Chinas has expanded into just about every single other
    space, and from quantity to quality, I just think it is impossible that they
    don't compete on equal grounds pretty soon.
  - I don't buy the insurmountable moat of TSMC

I do not think you're going to get your wish.

Software engineering as we knew it is not coming back, except maybe for very niche fields and your own crafting.

Many other engineering fields have experienced this change long ago, where the majority of the "craft" is done by algorithms. Think chip design, aerospace, automotive, structural engineering, material design.

Their engineering is now focused on higher level design (and even that, less in some cases), and verification.

Programmers are not a special species, immune from this trend. Heck, we are the ones who did it to the other fields, and so it is quite amusing that we're not crying when it is our turn.

That doesn't sound completely correct to me. How many people out of a million US citizens would intentionally order a strike on a school filled with children? I like to think the answer is at or near enough to zero.

I don't really find it plausible that there are enough samples in the powerful people to uncover a chain of command that all agree to intentionally murder school children.

The most likely explanation is this was a mistake. But that doesn't absolve anyone from punishment in my view. It should be almost impossible to make a mistake of this magnitude when you're dealing with weapons of mass death, and you should be culpable for the ones you do make.

What I mean is verification through testing, and perhaps other more formal means. This has happened to other engineering domains, yet us programmers have so much hubris that we think it can't happen to us. And everyone is throwing their toys out the cot because it looks like it is actually going to happen.

Code reviews may not even happen, or if they do, it'll be all automated, and the verification will be the key.

Ask anyone in the semiconductor industry when last they understood the design of those things.

It depends on what you mean by smart.

I can read the room. Coding is going to go the way of some other disciplines where machines do most of the detail work and and we know stuff works by verification. There are other fields like this.

Do I like it or not? That doesn't really matter. I need a job, so I'm going to get good at the new way to ensure I continue to have a job. I consider this to be a smart thing to do for myself and my family.

Unfortunately, a lot of previous PR reviews already were just gatekeeping, or "presenteeism". People would leave comments about class names or method names, like they couldn't understand what an `apply` method, the only method, meant on a class with that was already named appropriately and did one thing only (to give an oop example). No, the method needed to be renamed `PriceChecks.applyPriceChecksWithTimeConstraints`.

Lots of review comments about various conditions that wouldn't feasibly happen (same shit with claude now).

But then I'd see these same reviewers approving PRs where the bigger design was just fundamentally broken. Oh, we're adding a blocking call on our hot path, but at least the method name makes it very clear that it is blocking.

In general I agree that the current AI reviews are creating too much noise and it is masking these bigger design issues.

>Then we can look at Europe, you have this demilitarized continent that is doing things like seizing Russian ships because they are confident that the US will step and fight a war with Russia on their behalf. Well, they are going to learn that reality has changed and the US no longer has the power projection capability it once did. And what will they do? My guess is that at least one European state will nuclearize.

I was nodding along to your post until this point. Where are you from? Russia is not an innocent party in all of this, which is what your post is implying. Secondly, there are already two European states (who are not Russia) with nuclear weapons.

Please, lets revisit in the next few years. I think one of us is blinded by bias, and I think it is you, and I think the only way to judge is evidence, since arguments obviously don't make any difference.

Here is a prediction for you.

AI coding is only going to increase. Eventually coding is going to join several other fields where it is much more about verification than the building of the code. I predict that eventually most programmers are not going to be looking deeply at the internals of the code, but are going to be spending most of their time on the verification.

This was the exact line I heard during the brexit debate here in the UK. I am not from the UK. I'm not from the EU. I don't know whether than makes my view biased or not, but I hope that I was as unbiased as I could be during that referendum.

It seemed to consist of a bunch of unconstrained and disjointed lies, and whenever the other side tried to point out they were lies, they were told they just weren't listening.

You were right about one thing though, it was increasingly frustrating.

Never use analogies when arguing online. It only ever results in exactly this, people nitpicking the metaphor. You've essentially given them a way to "be correct", about something irrelevant.

You're not an outlier. The anti-AI stance is likely to be vocal online. They're quite incentivised to talk about it. Most programmers have adopted AI assisted programming (my own assertion) and most will feel like you and I, that it is useful. I know of a few programmers personally who hate it, but even they use it. There is no going back.

It is pretty obvious that when you come into a large incomprehensible codebase (which most are), AI will be able to reason about it more quickly and guide you through it.

I switched away from my work for a few minutes, but at the very moment I'm using AI to summarise some spaghetti code in a particular area in our codebase, so I can refactor it.

And that is my style of working at the moment. AI coding is useful, sometimes amazing, but sometimes irritating, and from experience I think just telling it to refactor this area would result in something I'm not happy with. So instead I'm getting a handle on it, I'll form the design I want, then tell it to do it. I have a feeling a lot of complaints are from people who won't bother to do that.

That depends on how you see it. I started off studying physics, but transitioned to CS. I found I was good at CS and loved tinkering, but the tinkering was always for the exploration of problems. That was always the point, not typing characters on a screen.

I admit, there is/was a certain element of enjoying the zone during development sessions. But mostly, it was the problems, not the tool.

I happened to become good at coding, and good at doing it in a corporate setting, so I adapted my habits, learned to write the best sort of code that keeps a production system solid and fast. But as I say, typing the characters was never really the point. Now a very fast assistant helps me type the characters. I guide it very closely. A lot of the time I have to correct it. Often if I know it is going to probably take a wrong direction I'll write the skeleton of the code I want, write the skeleton of the tests to prove it, and give it this as a "spec". This gets fantastic results.

I haven't lost my trade at all.

I don't really think about it too much, it works fine. We don't use Optionals, I'm not sure why you brought that up. I'm not a dogmatic person in this respect, rather pragmatic. I'm sure Kotlin is great, and I'd enjoy writing it, but for now, the vast majority of the finance world runs on Java, so it's what we use. I find it easy to work with, which counts for a lot.

We have a java monorepo of relatively large size and sophistication, driving our entire fintech, and I haven't seen a NPE for years.

Use NullAway and it basically makes the problem go away. Our application won't build if it detects a potential NPE.

I can't remember when I started reading HN. Possibly as late as around 2017/18. I lost one account I had when I changed company, and this is my latest account. Obviously you can't tell for sure, but I know that I am not a bot and I know that every single developer in my company (only a few hundred) have agents writing almost all of their code. I'm in the fintech industry (trading side). I have a lot of connections from my long career in the industry. Everyone else is using coding agents too.

I don't think I could find a job in my industry if I tried that didn't want me to write code using coding agents.

Obviously I can't prove any of this, so try emailing a recruiter and test it for yourself.

From what I can tell, a lot of newly registered users are equally as vehemently against AI as there are those that are pro. I guess we see things through our own personal filter.

If they don't have the required knowledge before coding, how are they going to have the required knowledge if you skip the design and just hand them the finished code?

Vibe code, maybe.

But a lot of developers use AI as a pair programmer, and I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference.