[clusterhacks]

I am a slow adopter of new tech but plan to spend a significant amount of time in 2025 using AI tools when coding. I am net negative on AI simply replacing programmers, but I think the practice of development is undergoing a seismic shift at this point.

My recent usage is oriented towards using pseudocode descriptions that closely map to Python to produce Python functions. I am very impressed with Claude 3.7's syntactic correctness when given a chunk of pseudocode that looks "python-y" to begin with.

My one concern is that much of my recent code requirements lack novelty. So there is a somewhat reasonable chance that the tool is just spitting out code it slurped somewhere in github or elsewhere in the larger Internet. Just this week, I gave Claude a relatively "anonymous" function in pseudocode, meaning variable names were not particularly descriptive with one tiny exception. However, Claude generated a situationally appropriate comment as part of the function definition. This was . . . surprising to me if somehow the model had NOT in its training set had some very close match to my pseudocode description that included enough context to add the comment.

[doug_durham]

At this point very little code is "novel". Everyone is simply rewriting code that has already been written in a similar form. The LLM isn't slurping up and restating code verbatim. It is taking code that it has seen thousands of times and generating a customized version for your needs. It's hubris to think that anyone here is generating "novel" code.

[clusterhacks]

I have seen the argument that very little code is novel but I find it inherently unsatisfying and lacking in nuance? I think what bugs me about is that if you squint hard enough, all programming reduces to "take some data, do something to it." That "something" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the argument that "something" is or isn't novel.

Heck, if we think about it from the programming language perspective, all code is "simply" using already existing language functions to cobble together a solution to some specific set of requirements. Is no program novel?

There is probably a consideration here that maybe boils down to the idea of engineering vs artisanal craftsmanship and where a specific project falls in that spectrum . . .