Comment by ezst
14 hours ago
Now we do computing like we play Sim City: sketching fuzzy plans and hoping those little creatures behave the way we thought they might. All the beauty and guarantees offered by a system obeying strict and predictable rules goes down the drain, because life's so boring, apparently.
I think it's Darwinian logic in action. In most areas of software, perfection or near-perfection are not required, and as a result software creators are more likely to make money if they ship something that is 80% perfect now than if they ship something that is 99% perfect 6 months from now.
I think this is also the reason why the methodology typically named or mis-named "Agile", which can be described as just-in-time assembly line software manufacturing, has become so prevalent.
> software creators are more likely to make money if they ship something that is 80% perfect now than if they ship something that is 99% perfect 6 months from now.
Except they are shooting themselves in the foot. I reminds me of the goldrush where the shovel and trousers sellers (here the AI companies) would make more money than the miners (developers).
Soon there will be barely any software to build if the general public can just ask an AI to do the things they want. 10 years ago, people would ask a friend that knew about photoshop to help them edit a picture or create something. Nowadays most of them just ask an AI. Same will happen to any kind of productivity or artistic tool. The people alergic to AI slop will just go full luddite and analog and won't use a computer for anything artistry so software creators will lose them alltogether. Home and professionnal software might gradually just disappear and most software creators will have spent thoundands of dollars in tokens with nothing to sell anymore. What might survive might only be the tools that AI rely one, operating systems, database and storage systems, etc.
But boy you will have been super productive, yet totally cancelled by the increase in competition, for the few years it lasted.
The difference is that it's not a toy. I'd rather compare it to the early days of offshore development, when remote teams were sooo attractive because they cost 20% of an onshore team for a comparable declared capability, but the predictability and mutual understanding proved to be... not as easy.
We spent a ton of time removing subjectivity from this field… only to forcefully shove it in and punish it for giving repeatable objective responses. Wild.
the LLM can use types just like the human
It’s like coders (and now their agents) are re-creating biology. As a former software engineer who changed careers to biology, it’s kind of cool to see this! There is an inherent fuzziness to biological life, and now AI is also becoming increasingly fuzzy. We are living in a truly amazing time. I don’t know what the future holds, but to be at this point in history and to experience this, it’s quite something.
The issue is that for most things we don't want the fuzzy nature of biology in our systems. Yet some people try to shoehorn it into everything. It is OK for chat or natural language things, which are directed at a human, but most other systems we would like to be 100% reliable, and not 99% or failing after a few years, and at the very least we want them to behave predictably, so that we can fix any mistakes we made, when writing that software.