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threecheese05/15/20251 replyview on HN

The “fully incomprehensible to humans” aspect of this potential future state interests me as a software person.

The last 50 years of software evolution have been driven by a need to scale human comprehension for larger and more integrated codebases. If we decreasingly need/rely on humans to understand our code, source code’s forward-progress flywheel is going to slow down and will bring us closer to (as you suggest) incomprehensibility.

Not only did we scale the breadth of codebases - the flywheel built layers and layers of abstraction over time (have you seen the code sample in this article??), fostering a growing market of professional developers and their career progressions; if most code becomes incomprehensible, itll be the code closer to “the bottom”, a thin wrapper of API on top of an expanding mass of throwaway whatever-language AlphaAlgo creates.

If we don’t wrangle this, it will destroy a profession and leave us with trillions of LoC that only people with GPUs can understand. Which may be another profession I suppose.


Replies

yujzgzc05/15/2025

Very few people already understand highly optimized numerical kernels. Many are already machine optimized. This takes it just a bit further. Most programmers do not do high performance algorithm development.