| I can understand that. I think that might be somewhat of a quick generalization. There are tendencies of people in the field to sometimes jump to rapid conclusions, but that is not researchers at all or in this case, me. I tend to be incredibly conservative, for example, and I have tangled with a number of "real world" systems enough to know some of the intricacies (though not at the edge). If I were to make a point as to why your notes on self-driving cars and in-warehouse robots may not transfer to the case of software development, it's that they are fundamentally two very different problems with very different issues attached to them. It unfortunately is very much apples to oranges. They are both NP-hard but very different kinds of NP-hard. A software program is a closed-loop target, though it is NP-hard. But we're optimizing for a different kind of metric here that is well-defined. Any kind of self-directed reinforcement-or-otherwise autoregressive-in-the-world algorithm is going to have an extraordinarily long tail of edge cases. What I was talking about when I mentioned the geometry of the problem is not the parsing of the code, but the geometry of a near-optimal solution. Certainly, scale will be expensive, but Sutton is our friend here. That's why it's more "trivial" than problems that require humans in the loop -- you don't need humans to parse, structure, generate, and evaluate the data flow of a software code base, though admittedly if models like RHLF become popular as you noted, the endpoints that generate code under those geometric constraints -- those will become extremely expensive. I think the geometric problem is very hard but the hurdle of scaled language models is more technically impressive to me. What's nice is that unlike needing to generate a long, 1d story, too, there's more robustness with a huge field of possibility that's had years of work on the software side of things. It's not that it's going to be easy, but I think we've all grown as we've seen how hard self-driving cars are, and it's just not that kind of scenario, since all consequences of the 'world' within the repo-generation case are (for the most part) self-contained. I hope that helps elucidate the problems a bit. To me, my optimism is much more rare, and only generally when I feel like I have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of it enough (i.e. I roughly know deliverability and have decent known error bounds on the sub-problems). That said, I heartily agree with you that when all else fails -- assistive is good. What I see a "complete solution" doing well is creating a Kolmogorov-minimal, complete starting point and things evolving from there. Whether that works or not remains to be seen. |