Comment by bayesianbot
6 months ago
This sounds strange? If I were to build this system (without really having time to think about it), I'd let the AI "build" the order, which would impose some hard limits - like not accepting 18 000 items. Then I'd have the user confirm it without any AI involvement, so you wouldn't end up with bacon in ice cream. This sounds like they just connected an AI directly to ordering functions and that's it?
Would you actually build it, or vibe code it?
You seem to think the execs who decided to push this gave their dev teams any leeway to spend time working out this sort of basic user experience. They gave a ludicrous deadline and the tech folks had to drop everything to meet it, and stuff like “what happens if it makes a mistake” were not considered.
Probably outsourced to three layers deep of “AI consultants”
Yes, we need to build deterministic systems that the AI can work within.
I wonder if we'll ever use AI to write code in dependently typed languages. Dependent types can check almost anything at compile time; they can check that a function returns only sorted data, they can check that the submit_order function only submits valid orders--again, they can check this at compile time.
So, we could express a variety of high level constraints and let the AI go wild, and as long as the resulting code compiled, we would know it was correct, because the type system confirms it.
If we also include an effect system, then the type system could say things like "this function will return a valid Sudoku puzzle solution, and it will not access the network or filesystem", and then, if it compiles, we know the those conditions will hold at runtime.
That’s the dream with dependent type systems, but from my very limited exposure to them, it seems like it’d be very difficult to encode complex constraints like all of your company’s business logic in this way.
Not saying it can’t be done, but I think it’s a bit telling that no such language has ever caught on.
Unit testing can also be used to verify such constraints and is much simpler. It obviously doesn’t guarantee correct behavior like a proof, but if the tests are comprehensive, it can do a great job.
> we need to build deterministic systems that the AI can work within
That's the ordering system the AI crashed by trying to order ten thousand piña coladas or whatnot.
> I wonder if we'll ever use AI to write code in dependently typed languages
Yeah, I write code in Lean with AI pretty frequently lately
That would not surprise me with the promises of miracles from AI vendors that arrive in my inbox daily.
Missing some kind of hard limits is a huge miss. Presumably the 99th percentile of a Taco Bell order is like $100 and/or 20 items. Anything more than that immediately gets a verbal confirmation and/or defers to the human operator.
People have been criticizing this for decades. Turns out it's useful to have common sense at the register
Seems to be about the brainpower of these C-suites.
If I were to build this system I would just put the same fucking order kiosk from inside the shop in the drive through.
It's not 1999 anymore, we know this voice shit makes for terrible interfaces. Give it up already.
Sounds like an expected outcome from the vibe coding AI hype we're seeing.
Yeah it sounds like a bad technical implementation
I mean, if you're doing all that _work_, at a certain point why bother with the LLM? The marketing promise of LLMs is "it's just magic", and unfortunately people do tend to believe the marketing.
Five hundred if statements or decision tree nodes won’t make a functioning automated drive thru kiosk. You need some juice.