Comment by dpark
6 hours ago
> The only reason those details don’t matter to you is because someone has gone through the pain of ironing out every details
I disagree. Very often the reason the details don’t matter is that they are irrelevant. There are a million ways an app might remember my personal settings, as a simple example. SQLlite db, json file, ini, cloud storage, registry, etc. The specific implementation matters very little so long as it’s sane.
> Saying what’s in the middle doesn’t matter is strange
I understand your point but do not agree. I think over the next decade we will get increasingly good at specifying rigorously the parts of the surface that matter while increasingly caring less and less about the rest. We will not find a way to write rigorous code in English because that would necessarily be less efficient than just using a programming language.
> There are a million ways an app might remember my personal settings, as a simple example. SQLlite db, json file, ini, cloud storage, registry, etc. The specific implementation matters very little so long as it’s sane.
It may not matter if you’re just an end user. But if you’re the one deciding the tools to be used, you may wonder about consistency (sqlite is better than a json file or ini file), availability (local storage is better than a cloud service), security risks,… Trusting an LLM to take care of that looks like negligence to me.
> Trusting an LLM to take care of that looks like negligence to me.
You are of course entitled to hold your opinion. How to work with LLMs successfully will be determined by those who believe it’s possible rather than those who argue it’s fundamentally negligent, though.
The arguments against AI coding have rapidly evolved from “it’s not possible” to “it’s possible but breaks down as soon as the system gets complex” to this “it works but it’s negligent” argument. The industry will continue to move on.
This is my oldest comment[0] on the AI tools subject back in December 2022
> Coding may be abstract, but execution of the resulting program is not. And results of the execution is driven by real world needs. Truth is that a human can invent things because it can pattern match across whole domains. You can say there is a mechanic solution to that, how can we do an algorithm that have the same result. AI cannot unless the algorithm was already created. I think the current state of AI is great for searching and creating starting point, but it can never get us to the finish line.
I've not seen anything since then that has changed my point of view. My job as a developer is always about creating pragmatic solutions for problems that exists outside of the computer world. I'm not attached to code and will gladly rewrite it if it's lacking or faulty. But the actual purpose is to get something that works well in the hand of the user. But the user's needs are not static, so I also create something that is flexible enough to be able to adapt it later when those needs changes.
So when I read comments that says they don't care about code, but also have no answer about how they will solve their user's problems or how will they modify the software to future changes, it seems so strange to me. Like is your belief backed by real world experience?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33873394
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