Comment by crabbone
5 hours ago
> What better practices do you mean?
I literally listed examples above... Code reviews weren't the norm until some time around 2010-ish. Then programmers realized that reviews help improve the code quality, and, eventually, this became so popular that today virtually everyone does it.
Anyways, I'll give an example from something that I've personally experienced / contributed to, which isn't as massive of a thing as code reviews, but is in the same general category.
Long ago, Git didn't have --force-with-lease option. Few people used `git rebase` command because of that (the only way this would work is if using it later with --force, which could destroy someone else's work). In the company I worked at the time, we extended Git to have what was later implemented as --force-with-lease. Our motivation was the need for linear history and some other stricter requirements on the repository history (s.a. every commit must compile, retroactive modifications in response to tests added later etc.)
This is an example of how a process, that until then was either prone to accidental loss of programmer's work or would result in poorly organized history was improved by inventing a new ability. This is also an example of something AI doesn't do, because, at its core, it's a program that tries to replicate the best existing tools and practices. It won't imagine a new Git feature because it has no idea what it could possibly be because its authors don't know that either.
> opus 4.7 is all you need, but how can you argue with the fact that adoption since 4.5 has been an inflection point?
What did it invent?
Right no I understand what you mean, I asked to be sure and you’ve confirmed my understanding.
I think we’re talking past each other because your comment is like 99% interesting and insightful and also I agree with it completely but there is only one part of your claim that I have an issue with which is
> It won't imagine a new Git feature because it has no idea what it could possibly be because its authors don't know that either.
I left comments in other threads with a lot of detail but this is a fairly common misconception. It is true in a sort of practical sense today, and I have many experiences as you do with respect to this, but the gist is: this is a world of RL with verifiable rewards, you are not bounded by human ability at all and that is why we have the adoption, funding, and frothy excitement. It is not simply mimicking human coding. In early stages it will because human programming traces are used as kind of a bootstrap to get to an RL phase without any limitation on performance. This is a very well studied field and it just isn’t that much of a question of if and now it’s not even really a question of when.
> What did it invent?
This is a perpetual question with constantly moving goal posts so I’ve given up convincing anyone but by now it’s solving unsolved Erdos problems, not sure how convincing you find that (not opus though but that hardly matters now)
The point I’m trying to make is: we aren’t there yet but it’s a crazy idea to think that isn’t imminent given all of the measurement and observations we have.
Additionally my point on 4.5 being a turning point is adoption. You wouldn’t see adoption numbers if we were not accelerating rapidly from say 3.x performance along the scaling trend that we’ve known for years now