alt Hacker NewsThe argument here seems to be “you need AGI to write good code. Good code is required for… reasons. AGI is far away. Therefore code is not dead.”
First, I disagree that good code is required in any sense. We have decades of experience proving that bad code can be wildly successful.
Second, has the author not seen the METR plot? We went from: LLMs can write a function to agents can write working compilers in less than a year. Anyone who thinks AGI is far away deserves to be blindsided.
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That's not my argument at all! Though I can see why you took that away; my bad for not making my argument clearer.
I believe that even when we have AGI, code will still be super valuable because it'll be how we get precise abstractions into human heads, which is necessary for humans to be able to bring informed opinions to bear.
In agree in principle, but the compiler is a terrible example given the amount of scaffolding afforded to the LLMs, literally hundreds of thousands of test cases covering all kinds of esoteric corners.
Also (and this is coming from someone who thinks it's quite close) "AGI" is not implied by the ability to implement very-long-horizon software tasks. That's not "general" at all.