[georgehotz]

How much of modern software was slop before AI? Is this really something new? I argue it's been happening in many companies since at least 2010. Made with good old fashioned humans and some help from ZIRP. Remember that time I worked at Twitter?

SQLite is the most popular database in the world. It's maintained by 3 people. There's hope. AI is a great tool that's here to help you if you want, but at the end of the day, the output matters and it's quality not quantity. Don't work for people who don't agree.

[cognitiveinline]

Software is solved. Significant amount of code written (>90% of engineers) wrote slop. And it would get merged. Overall - both floor and ceiling of quality of software has definitely been raised. Just that it's had a labor scare and impact.

Before it needed you to jailbreak a console. Today point frontier at a console, and it could also figure it out. The console folks also can do that before release and ensure it's unbreakable.

Now that software is solved, we are faced with the philsophical necessity of our vocation.

[georgehotz]

lol saying software is solved is like saying math is solved. It's not.

And it's unclear which direction this will tip things for jailbreaks, it's always been a two-player game. It will still be people like me doing the jailbreaks, they will just have harder problems to solve and better tools to help solve them.

[cognitiveinline]

Ok, I'll rephrase to be more specific: Software is magnitude more solved now than it was 7 months ago.

And we're seeing the early signs of same in Math as well.

[georgehotz]

Is chess solved? (it's not)

[cognitiveinline]

I don't think it'll be useful to get into semantics of the word "solved" now, then!

Whatever's done to chess, the same is now done to software.

[georgehotz]

I don't think it is yet. I think the top software engineers well outperform models in normal time controls. AI coding today looks more like how blitz was solved years before classical.

This will shift and eventually programming will look like chess, but the goal of chess is so obvious it doesn't need to be talked about. The goal of programming isn't. The new tools are so much fun to use to amplify your power!

And chess isn't solved at all, it's just superhuman. Programming is even more complex.

[nunez]

With all due respect, this is a bit disingenuous coming from you.

GitHub's exponential growth in number of commits and PRs answers your question.

Before AI, if you wanted to contribute to OSS, you had to have _some_ idea of what the code did. At least enough of an idea to compile it so that you could test your changes.

That was the bar. Sure, lots of low quality PRs existed, but that gate kept the influx somewhat manageable.

Also, the diffs were a lot smaller, as bigger diffs meant bigger effort, a risky gamble for a PR that might not get merged. You've lived that life, so you get it.

Post AI (post Opus, really), any hooligan with $200/mo to burn can "land" a Heisenberg sized PR into any project with green tests without having the slightest bloomin' clue what their diff does or how the codebase they're integrating into works. That's impossible for humans to keep up with.

For every SQLite cathedral, there are a hundred corporate projects whose employers are mandating 100% AI generation with manual PR/MR merges.

[georgehotz]

The AI PRs are a bit annoying, but I've been learning new ways to see the signal and it's not that bad. Heisenberg sized PRs from new contributors never should have been merged even pre AI. AI is like a new version of the software engineering game came out and the meta shifted, but the new game is pretty cool!