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Krsssttoday at 8:56 AM3 repliesview on HN

OS and compilers have a deterministic public interface. They obey a specification developers know, so you they can be relied on to write correct software that depends on them even without knowing the internal behavior. Generative AI does not have those properties.


Replies

raw_anon_1111today at 1:28 PM

Yes but developers don’t have a deterministic interface. I still had to be careful about writing out my specs and make sure they were followed. At least I don’t have to watch my tone when my two mid level ticket taking developers - Claude and Codex - do something stupid. They also do it a lot faster

signatoremotoday at 1:26 PM

> They obey a specification developers know

Which spec? Is there a spec that says if you use a particular set of libraries you’d get less than 10 millisecond response? You can’t even know that for sure if you roll your own code, with no 3rd party libraries.

Bugs are by definition issues arise when developers expect they code to do one thing, but it does another thing, because of unforeseen combination of factors. Yet we all are ok with that. That’s why we accept AI code. They work well enough.

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refactor_mastertoday at 9:23 AM

But the code you’re writing is guard railed by your oversight, the tests you decide on and the type checking.

So whether you’re writing the spec code out by hand or ask an LLM to do it is besides the point if the code is considered a means to an end, which is what the post above yours was getting at.

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