Comment by risyachka
10 hours ago
Its like ordering a project from upwork- someone did it for you, you have no idea what is going on, kinda works though.
10 hours ago
Its like ordering a project from upwork- someone did it for you, you have no idea what is going on, kinda works though.
Since there are no humans involved, it's more like growing a tree. Sure it's good to know how trees grow, but not knowing about cells didn't stop thousands of years of agriculture.
The Gas Town piece reminded me of this as well. The author there leaned into role playing, social and culture analogies, and it made a lot more sense than an architecture diagram in which one node is “black box intelligence” with a single line leading out of it…
Very interesting analogy
Except that the tree is so malformed and the core structure so unsound that it can't grow much past its germination and dies of malnourishment because since you have zero understanding of biology, forestry and related fields there is no knowledge to save it or help it grow healthy.
Also out of nowhere an invasive species of spiders that was inside the seed starts replicating geometrically and within seconds wraps the whole forest with webs and asks for a ransom in order to produce the secret enzyme that can dissolve it. Trying to torch it will set the whole forest on fire, brute force is futile. Unfortunately, you assumed the process would only plagiarize the good bits, but seems like it also sometimes plagiarizes the bad bits too, oops.
Its not like tree at all because tree is one and done.
Code is a project that has to be updated, fixed, etc.
So when something breaks - you have to ask the contractor again. It may not find an issue, or mess things up when it tries to fix it making project useless, etc.
Its more like a car. Every time something goes wrong you will pay for it - sometimes it will get back in even worse shape (no refunds though), sometimes it will cost you x100 because there is nothing you can do, you need it and you can't manage it on your own.
Trees are not static, unchanging, pop into existence and forget about, things. Trees that don't get regular "updates" of adequate sunlight, water, and nutrients die. In fact, too much light or water could kill it. Or soil that is not the right courseness or acidity level could hamper or prevent growth. Now add "bugs". Literal bugs, diseases, and even competing plants that could eat, poison, or choke the tree. You might be thinking of trees that are indigenous to an area. Even these compete for the resources and plagues of their area, but are more apt than the trees accustom to different environments, and even they go through the cycle of life. I think his analogy was perfect, because this is the first time coding could resemble nature. We are just used to the carefully curated human made code, as there has not been such a thing as naturally occuring, no human interaction, code before
I wouldn't say it is a tree as such as at least trees are deterministic where input parameters (seed, environment, sunlight) define the output.
LLM outputs are akin to a mutant tree that can decide to randomly sprout a giant mushroom instead of a branch. And you won't have any idea why despite your input parameters being deterministic.
You haven't done a lot of gardening if you don't know plants get 'randomly' (there's a biological explanation, but with the massive amounts of variables it feels random) attacked by parasites all the time. Go look at pot growing subreddits, they spend an enormous chunk of their time fighting mites.
3 replies →
In what world are trees deterministic? There are a set of parameters that you can control that give you a higher probability of success, but uncontrollable variables can wipe you out.
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Great analogy. “I don’t know any C++ but I hired some people on Upwork and they delivered this software demo.”
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