Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by geraneum 5 days ago
> You probably don't care about the ingredients or engineering of asphalt

Everyone does. You don’t think about it everyday because we’ve delegated it to experts which don’t come up with a new composition of Asphalt every time you press “generate”. It’s rigorously battle tested and short of intentional negligence, it’s consistent. I’m amazed how people are forgetting how the world actually works.
2 comments
eithed 5 days ago
Exactly - the normalization of craft (?) is interesting
link
chickensong 5 days ago
You've missed the point.
link
geraneum 5 days ago
The point doesn’t seem to have been thought through.
link
munksbeer 5 days ago
The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials, and to you it felt like driving on the same road, with the same wear and tear and potholes, you wouldn't even notice.

If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour, no-one outside of software engineers will know or care.

link
skydhash 5 days ago
> The point is, if road engineers changed their process and materials,

They do those in labs, and then studies are made to prove that it can replace the current composition. They do not invent those on the spot and let the drivers QA the road.

> If AIs can generate code that looks ridiculous to humans but over time has the correct performance, the correct behaviour

It’s on you to prove that this big “if” can be realized. A -> B only matters when A is true.

link
munksbeer 5 days ago
> It’s on you to prove that this big “if” can be realized. A -> B only matters when A is true

Not really. This is a discussion about what code looks like if AI can write applications that are as good, stable, correct as humans.

I think they can, better than most programmers at the moment, with the correct guardrails and supervision. But in time, I think we may not need to review the code at all, but instead verify correctness and performance only. The AI can write the code however it likes.

Obviously I don't have a proof for this, but based on the progress I've seen so far, if someone forced me to bet one way or the other, this is what I'd bet on.

link
mitxela 5 days ago
But they don't. LLMs can't understand messy code much better than humans can. Maybe a little, but not enough to compensate for the code they create being messy.
link