Comment by overgard

19 hours ago

> Focusing on Dario, his exact quote IIRC was "50% of all white collar jobs in 5 years" which is still a ways off, but to check his track record, his prediction on coding was only off by a month or so. If you revisit what he actually said, he didn't really say AI will replace 90% of all coders, as people widely report, he said it will be able to write 90% of all code.

Ugh, people here seem to think that all software is react webapps. There are so many technologies and languages this stuff is not very good at. Web apps are basically low hanging fruit. Dario hasn't predicted anything, and he does not have anyone's interests other than his own in mind when he makes his doomer statements.

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overgard

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keeda  18 hours ago

The problem is, the low hanging fruit, the stuff it's good at, is 90% of all software. Maybe more.

And it's getting better at the other 10% too. Two years ago ChatGPT struggled to help me with race conditions in a C++ LD_PRELOAD library. It was a side project so I dropped it. Last week Codex churned away for 10 minutes and gave me a working version with tests.

  • overgard  15 hours ago

    I think that typescript is a language uniquely suited to LLMs though:

      - It's garbage collected, so variable lifetimes don't need to be traced
  - It's structurally typed, so LLMs can get away with duplicating types as long as the shape fits. 
  - The type system has an escape hatch (any or unknown)
  - It produces nice stack traces
  - The industry has more or less settled styling issues (ie, most typescript looks pretty uniform stylistically).
  - There is an insane amount of open source code to train on
  - Even "compiled" code is somewhat easy(er) to deobfuscate and read (because you're compiling JS to JS)

    Contrast that with C/C++:

      - Memory management is important, and tricky
  - Segfaults give you hardly anything to work with
  - There are like a thousand different coding styles
  - Nobody can agree on the proper subset of the language to use (ie, exceptions allowed or not allowed, macros, etc.)
  - Security issues are very much magnified (and they're   already a huge problem in vibecoded typescript)
  - The use cases are a lot more diverse. IE, if you're using typescript you're probably either writing a web page or a server (maybe a command line app). (I'm lumping electron in here, because it's still a web page and a server). C is used for operating systems, games, large hero apps, anything CPU or memory constrained, etc.

    I'm not sure I agree that typescript is "90% of all software". I think it's 90% of what people on hacker news use. I think devs in different domains always overestimate the importance of their specific domain and underestimate the importance of other domains.

    • keeda  11 hours ago

      I wouldn't say TypeScript is 90% of all software exactly, but tons of apps on all kinds of technologies like Python / Django, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Wordpress, "enterprise" Java and the like, primarily doing CRUD and data plumbing especially for niche applications and internal LoB sites that we never see on the open Internet.

      I agree C++ is harder, and I still occassionally find a missing free(), but Codex did crack my problem... including fixing a segfault! I had a bunch of strategically placed printfs gated behind an environment variable, it found those, added its own, set the environment variable, and examined the outputs to debug the issue.

      I cannot emphasize how mindblowing this is, because years back I had spent an hour+ doing the same thing unsuccessfully before being pulled away.

ilumanty  17 hours ago

Claude keeps getting SQLite's weird GROUP BY with MIN/MAX behavior completely wrong. Generally, complex SQL is not its strong side.