That said, on that topic, the essay overlooks one key point and line of reasoning about debugging, one derived from Kernighan's Law. (Kernighan as in the K in AWK + K&R C...)
The law states: "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."
If Kernighan's law is "true" in some rough sense (as I have long agreed with), then we have a potential solution to the "AI debugging" problem... ask the LLM to make the code four times simpler than it needs to or write code with a 4x dumber model. Then a smarter model (or us) can debug it. Right?
my crazy thoughts, which I am open to being wrong about:
this is still the old way of thinking. generative AI is a probability function—the results exist in a probability space. we expect to find a result at a specific point in that space, but we don't know the inputs to achieve it until it is solved. catch 22.
instead, we must embrace the chaos by building attractors in the system, and pruning results that stray too far from the boundaries we set. we should focus only on macro-level results, not the code. multiple solutions existing at any given time. if anything is "debugging", it is a generative AI agent.
Step 1: determine how to quantify cleverness
Great article. I recently finished my second reading of TMM and how/to what extent our current era of generative code affects the ideas of the book was top of mind.
if so how much do we need to maintain to keep that kind of system up an running.