alt Hacker NewsOur industry never exhibited an abundance of caution, but if you have trouble understanding the value of AI here, consider that you are akin to an assembly language programmer in the 1970s or 80s who couldn't understand why people are so gung-ho about these compilers that just output worse code than they could write by hand. In retrospect, compilers only got better and better, and familiarity with programming languages and compilation toolchains became a valuable productivity skill and the market for assembly language programming either stagnated, or shrank.
Doesn't it seem plausible to you that, whatever the ratio of bugs in AI-generated code today, that bug count is only going to really go down? Doesn't it then seem reasonable to say that programmers should start familiarizing themselves with these new tools, where the pitfalls are and how to avoid them?
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No because programmers aren't the ones pushing the wares, it's business magnates and sales people. The two core groups software developers should never trust.
Maybe if this LLM craze was being pushed by democratic groups where citizens are allowed to state their objections to such system, where such objections are taken seriously, but what we currently have are business magnates that just want to get richer with no democratic controls.
If I have a horse and plow and you show up with a tractor, I will no doubt get a tractor asap. But if you show up with novel amphetamines for you and your horse and scream "Look how productive I am! We'll figure out the long-term downsides, don't you worry! Just more amphetamines probably!", I'm happy to be a late adopter.
High-level languages were absolutely indispensable at a time when every hardware vendor had its own bespoke instruction set.
If you only ever target one platform, you might as well do it in assembly, it's just unfashionable. I don't believe you'd lose any 'productivity' compared to e.g. C, assuming equal amounts of experience.
> compilers only got better and better
At no point compilers produced stochastic output. The intent user expressed was translated down with a much much higher fidelity, repeatability and explainability. Most important of all, it completely removed the need for the developer to meddle with that output. If anything it became a verification tool for the developer‘s own input.
If LLMs are that good, I dare you skip the programming language and have it code in machine directly next time. And it is exactly how it is going to feel like if we treat them as valuable as compilers.