The Eternal Sloptember

Bro claims to write good code. He got fired <4 weeks from twitter. AI is hyped but code isnt that bad.

To me this sounds like an old cobbler complaining that machines aren't producing good shoes if left unsupervised and that the old process of making shoes completely by hand is far superior.

So what he is telling us? That agents are not infaillable and they are not capable to one shot complex software and they do not produce perfect code?

We know what and the solution is to use agents for what they are good at and work around their limitations and we have a human in the loop.

>not some RLVR shit that comments out the failing test and tells you all the tests are now passing

That's what harnesses should be about: detect when the agent is misbehaving and force it to take the right approach.

This example in particular should be easy to solve if we generated the tests before coding and we have a workflow or state machine that doesn't allow the agent to disable tests and doesn't allow it to reach the next stage unless all tests are passing.

Coders underestimate the utility of AI in so many boring day to day tasks. If you freelance, that’s where the money is at, not in creating a startup that fills holes in AI offerings or in creating generic slop while hoping for ad money.

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Nah this person is dead wrong. Lets come back in 2 years and check on it. I'm willing to make a reasonable bet on these terms: companies will go even more AI native, will use even more tokens and spend even more money.

EDIT: To people downvoting me, please come up with a reasonable bet and lets try to work it out.

EDIT 2: $500 bet paid to your account on whether LLM's are going to still be used productively or not. No one?

> They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming

Are we really still doing this?

Geohot's next venture will be writing a book titled "Fear & Trembling".

I don't think LeCun is saying they won't be able to program. I think he says we won't hit AGI. Programming does not require AGI; it's a pretty specific skill!

-- I think this article is COPE, if I'm being quite honest. I thought of putting cute analogies, like the C programmers saying the Python and Javascript programmers are not "hardcore" enough... but the truth should be obvious to anyone using LLMs effectively.

-- Current AI is a much better programmer than 100% of people and when directed by someone in that top 10%, it's a force majeur.

" Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming"

In other words - they can program, and probably better than you.

I don't like being too critical but this is a really superficial post - as if either 'AI is a Software Engineer - or - It must be Fraud'

It's an extremely powerful tool that is very 'pattern oriented' and with guidance can absolutely write great code - and even across modules given the right basis.

It's also great at so many other tasks - finding bugs in big code bases, doing migrations etc.

It's not going to make very goo architectural decisions for you, and if you're doing anything novel you have to read most of the code ... but that's too be expected.