LLMs aren't remotely like compilers or power tools(blainehansen.me) |
LLMs aren't remotely like compilers or power tools(blainehansen.me) |
He just shrugged and said "oh i just use ai".
What takes me one keystroke takes him a full minute. And he didn't even consider the use of actual tools
People said stuff like that in the 90s. I was there.
Oh wait - that's an anachronism. The older generation of IDEs, like VS and Eclipse, had toolbars. VSCode doesn't have one.
No human being is going to genuinely suggest to glue cheese onto a pizza to stop it sliding off.
These things aren't people. Stop anthropomorphizing a computer program. They'll make all the mistakes humans can make, as well as a new class of mistakes because they're just fancy next word prediction with no lived experience.
Just to add - I’m working on something very novel and LLM’s are absolutely useless at them. It’s actually comical to see the outputs - when you work on novel stuff you quickly see what these models actually are.
That mistake was made more than two years ago by whatever experimental version of Google's AI overview (which has strict performance requirement- i.e. needs to answer within a split-second) was up at the time. In other words, it was a very small and primitive system specialised in spitting answers as quickly as possible without a second thought. I hope you realise that basing your assessment of what LLMs can or can't do on that example is not much better than suggesting to put glue on pizza. A mistake that, if we were to adopt your reasoning, would in turn set a hard limit to the analytic skills of all humanity.
For example, the article says "Natural language is the interface of last resort."
But, is that actually true? Isn't the AI boom happening because N/L is truly available as an interface?
Anyway, please keep writing and asking tough questions.
The AI boom is happening because people what to believe that natural language is precise. Not because it’s actually an effective way to interface with everything.
I wonder why he decided to express this thought in natural language though. Should have tried formalising it.
And actually using power tools in the real world is pretty uncertain, try running a straight starting cut with a multitool against wood grain and then come back and talk to me.
Formal languages are called 'formal' because they have rigorously defined semantics. The 'undefined' parts, if anything, reveal that most of the expressible sentences have clearly defined semantics, rather than lack of them.
In addition, the semantics of 'undefined' behaviors is not 'non-deterministic' in the literal sense, since it is, well, undefined.
I especially liked table saws and backhoes as examples of _automation_.
Of course, the content returned is non-deterministic.
That doesn't mean the response is correct though. You've just hard-locked the model to one possible response selection.
If you and I do this but we use different seeds, we still have no way to tell whose response will be better for every question or even a class of questions.
There will be responses where the model is outright wrong and we want to change seed or introduce some randomness by raising temperature, in the hope the model answers correctly next time.
Now we're back to running with a random seed and high temperature.
Additionally they also miss on low-code/no-code orchestation tools like Boomi, Workato, Opal and co, where programming is moving from drawing boxes, into agent prompting.
Those are also programming from all practical business purposes.
By power tool we simply mean speeds up work.
And by that definition LLMs are absolutely a power tool of epic proprtions!
If you ever coded before LLMs existed its like night and day.
I'm not convinced that throwing more money (i.e. tokens) at the problem would make us any more efficient, but 1.5x improvement ain't nothing.
And just to address the "night and day" bit.. if you gave a construction foreman a machine that made his team 20% more productive, he'd take that all day long and tell everyone it's "night and day." I'm not sure what your threshold is, but +20% isn't nothing either. That foreman would hit more deadlines than not, and get more bonuses than not.
A: "I spent more tokens than the entire OpenCode team combined."
B: "Why aren't you more successful?"
Yes an llm is not a compiler. But both speed things up... That is the point...
An llm is not a power tool but they both speed things up!
I don't care about determinism for something that is a simulacrum of though ... That is a feature not a flaw...
Finally we are getting better at this ... I get that we are going to lose our jobs a devs and I get that it is scary.. But honestly good riddance.. There is much more to do in this world that we can do after we just let go and accept that what we knew is gone ...
Just to be clear .. A correction Will likely come for the AI industry ... But a correction happened 25 years ago and the internet is still here :)
Just remember to not take life too seriously... You'll never get out alive :P
Of course they are not oracles. Oracles belong to magic, these things are real.
I really can't understand how people seem to expect "intelligence" to be deterministic and infallible and uniform across domains when all examples we have of it (that is, us) are anything but.
I’m sure there are people who think putting glue on a pizza is acceptable but we’re not hiring them to bake pizzas for us.
When I search and get an AI summary it’s either correct or useless. I don’t care how fallible humans are, I’m not asking them to summarize my Google results.
We don't really expect this of intelligence
We do sort of expect this of machines
Most people in society use machines and computers expecting very deterministic behavior, within some constraints. A saw cuts wood as long as your blade isn't dull. A computer shows your emails as long as the power and Internet is not out.
Comparably Unconstrained computer AI systems are still extremely new and there is no social norms or expectations around it yet
In the same way that most people are no longer proficient in assembly, but it has not spelled doom for software engineering, some folks are now using AI tools, and it will probably be fine. The day to day work flow of a typical programmer will probably be different ten or twenty years from now, and we will all move on, as usual.
I don't think software engineering will disappear, but it could change a lot, potentially. More understanding the needs of the end consumer, more writing specifications, less raw coding and debugging. Maybe fewer programmers will be needed, and that would not be the end of the world.