Comment by Voultapher
3 hours ago
Honest answer, building and maintaining a large complex project over many years. We have plenty of examples of one-shots like the 1000x slower gcc, but those don't see updates after they achieved their advertisement goal.
Maybe a little more philosophical, novelty. You can ask an LLM to write in the style of <famous author> but afaik the results are bad when you ask it to write in a novel style no-one has seen before.
Fair enough, but I don't think that's something fundamental. Agentic AI hasn't been around for many years, and many of its most enthusiastic adopters have, shall we say, attention issues, so I don't think it's odd that we don't have long term maintained wholly AI-coded projects yet.
Lack of novelty in creative tasks is largely a product of how we deliberately train them to not surprise us. AIs from a few years ago, of the sort Janelle Shane wrote about, were puny compared to today's. But they weren't instruction tuned, so they had plenty of chaotic creative energy.