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by qingcharles 182 days ago
I agree. I think we've gotta get through the rough couple of "AI slop" years of code and we'll come out of it the other side with some incredible tools.

The reason we don't all write code to the level that can operate the Space Shuttle is because we don't have the resources and the projects most of us work on all allow some wiggle room for bugs since lives generally aren't at risk. But we'd all love to check in code that was verifiably bug-free, exploit-free, secure etc if we could get that at a low, low price.
1 comments
MobiusHorizons 182 days ago
at some level it's not really an engineering issue. "bug free" requires that there is some external known goal with sufficient fidelity that it can classify all behaviors as "bug" or "not bug". This really doesn't exist in the vast majority of software projects. It is of course occasionally true that programmers are writing code that explicitly doesn't meet one of the requirements they were given, but most of the time the issue is that nothing was specified for certain cases, so code does whatever was easiest to implement. It is only when encountering those unspecified cases (either via a user report, or product demo, or manual QA) that the behavior is classified as "bug" or "not bug".

I don't see how AI would help with that even if it made writing code completely free. Even if the AI is writing the spec and fully specifies all possible outcomes, the human reviewing it will glance over the spec and approve it only to change their mind when confrunted with the actual behavior or user reports.

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svat 181 days ago
> I don't see how AI would help with that

What if the AI kept bringing up unspecified cases and all you (the human) had to do all day was respond to it on what the behavior should be in each case? In this model the AI would not specify the outcomes; the specification is whatever you initially specified, and your responses to the AI's questions about the outcomes. At some point you'd decide that you'd answered enough questions (or the AI could not come up with any more unspecified cases), and bugs would be in what remained, but it would still mean substantially more thinking about cases than now.

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