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AI Coding (geohot.github.io)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[+] -6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

AI is just an even higher level of abstraction. Just like we've replaced assembly with C (so we won't need to know how processors work internally), and then C with some higher-level languages (so we could stop care about allocating memory that much), now we are replacing those higher-level languages with natural language (to stop wasting time on learning syntax of frameworks).

Does it mean programming jobs are obsolete? Of course not. Because programming was never about writing code. It has always been about translating requirements into actual software solutions.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It's not though. Programming languages, like assembly before them, are deterministic. If you run the same C code again the same environment, it will do the same thing, and altering the code will alter the behaviour correspondingly. It's possible to reason about it. The same does not apply to LLMs. You can't reason about their behavior, when means you can't build anything non-trivial with them. All that is mentioned in the article.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Software you create with LLMs is deterministic, because it is the same code as you produce manually. The process of creating it is maybe not, but it is a task of a programmer to review it before publishing it.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    it is the same code as you produce manually.

    LLMs do not create the same code that I would, nor do they produce code at the same level that I would. Additionally, LLMs are not deterministic (normally - there are ways to manually seed some but it's rare). Determinism has a very specific meaning. Compilers supporting reproducible builds are deterministic. LLMs producing a different output each time are not.

    it is a task of a programmer to review it before publishing it.

    Tell that to my coworkers. It's honestly insulting the code I have to review and contribute to. Having used these tools myself, I'm better off writing the code myself.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    You have no idea what an abstraction is. You're describing the technological sophistication that comes with maturing science and completely missing out on the details. C was a hack because UNIX's authors couldn't fit a Fortran compiler onto their target machine. Automatic memory management predates C. Natural-language processing has been tried every AI summer; it was big in the 60s and big in the 80s (and big in the 90s in Japan) and will continue to be big until AI winter starts again.

    Natural-language utterances do not have an intended or canonical semantics, and pretending otherwise is merely delaying the painful lesson. If one wants to program a computer — a machine which deals only in details — then one must be prepared to specify those details. There is no alternative to specification and English is a shitty medium for it.

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