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cactusplant7374today at 6:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

> But of course writing code directly will always maintain the benefit of specificity. If you want to write instructions to a computer that are completely unambiguous, code will always be more useful than English.

Unless the defect rate for humans is greater than LLMs at some point. A lot of claims are being made about hallucinations that seem to ignore that all software is extremely buggy. I can't use my phone without encountering a few bugs every day.


Replies

idopmstufftoday at 6:06 PM

Yeah, I don't really accept the argument that AI makes mistakes and therefore cannot be trusted to write production code (in general, at least - obviously depends on the types of mistakes, which code, etc.).

The reality is we have built complex organizational structures around the fact that humans also make mistakes, and there's no real reason you can't use the same structures for AI. You have someone write the code, then someone does code review, then someone QAs it.

Even after it goes out to production, you have a customer support team and a process for them to file bug tickets. You have customer success managers to smooth over the relationships with things go wrong. In really bad cases, you've got the CEO getting on a plane to go take the important customer out for drinks.

I've worked at startups that made a conscious decision to choose speed of development over quality. Whether or not it was the right decision is arguable, but the reality is they did so knowing that meant customers would encounter bugs. A couple of those startups are valuable at multiple billions of dollars now. Bugs just aren't the end of the world (again, most cases - I worked on B2B SaaS, not medical devices or what have you).

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bryanrasmussentoday at 6:05 PM

most human bugs are caused by failures in reasoning though, not by just making something up to leap to the conclusion considered most probable, so not sure if the comparison makes sense.

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