alt Hacker NewsThere’s also the other way around. Semantic AI is a good chunk of meat, but it can only be useful as it’s harnessed properly with a nice set of bones. I think that symbolic AI will make a come back eventually. Not as an accelerator of what’s already been done in the Industry, but as the actual revolution.
And don’t be naive to think that there aren’t sophisticated symbolic handling mechanisms being implemented in the training of the models by Big Tech. Not even baby soap is truly neutral.
As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or IntelliJ.
I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?
Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.
Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.