Comment by spaceman_2020

Our current architectures are complex, mostly because of DRY and a natural human tendency to abstract things. But that's a decision, not a fundamental property of code. At core, most web stuff is "take it out of the database, put it on the screen. Accept it from the user, put it in the database."

If everything was written PHP3 style (add_item.php, delete_item.php, etc), with minimal includes, a chatbot might be rather good at managing that single page.

I'm saying code architected to take advantage of human skills, and code architected to take advantage of chatbot skills might be very different.

Agreed in general, the models are getting pretty good at dumping out new code, but for maintaining or augmenting existing code produces pretty bad results, except for short local autocomplete.

BUT it's noteworthy that how much context the models get makes a huge difference. Feeding in a lot of the existing code in the input improves the results significantly.

Same. Like Claude code for example will write some tests. But what they are testing is often incorrect

Most senior SWEs, no. But most technical people in software do a lot of what the parent commenter describes in my experience. At my last company there was a team of about 5 people whose job was just to make small design changes (HTML/CSS) to the website. Many technical people I've worked with over the years were focused on managing and configuring things in CMSs and CRMs which often require a bit of technical and coding experince. At the place I currently work we have a team of people writing simple python and node scripts for client integrations.

There's a lot of variety in technical work, with many modern technical jobs involving a bit of code, but not at the same complexity and novelty as the types of problems a senior SWE might be working on. HN is full of very senior SWEs. It's really no surprise people here still find LLMs to be lacking. Outside of HN I find people are far more impressed/worried by the amount of their job an LLM can do.

I had predicted the same about websites, social media presence, Google maps presence etc. back 10-15 years ago, but lo and behold, even the small burger place hole-on-a-wall in rural eastern Europe is now on Google maps with reviews, and even answers by the owner, a facebook page with info on changes of opening hours etc. I'd have said there's no way that fat 60 year old guy will get up to date with online stuff.

But gradually they were forced to.

If there are enough auto repair shops that can just diagnose and process n times more cars in a day, it will absolutely force people to adopt it as well, whether they like the aesthetics or not, whether they feel like learning new things or not. Suddenly they will be super interested in how to use it, regardless of how they were boasting about being old school and hands-on beforehand.

If a technology gives enough boost to productivity, there's simply no way for inertia to hold it back, outside of the most strictly regulated fields, such as medicine, which I do expect to lag behind by some years, but will have to catch up once the benefits are clear in lower-stakes industries and there's immense demand on it that politicians will be forced to crush the doctor's cartel's grip on things.

This doesn't apply to literal ASI, mostly because copy-pasteable intelligence is an absolute gamechanger, particularly if the physical interaction problems that prevent exponential growth (think autonomous robot factory) are solved (which I'd assume a full ASI could do).

People keep comparing to other tools, but a real ASI would be an agent, so the right metaphor is not the effect of the industrial revolution on workers, but the effect of the internal combustion engine on the horse.