alt Hacker News> They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming
Are we really still doing this?
Replies
Yes, until everyone gets it through their head.
I'm confused what else you think they are?
Its fundamentally how LLMs work.
Well, since the fundamental underlying structure is still the same, yes.
That's a very good way to describe what they do (better than 'AI') but ironically, it really well explains the mechanism, and how they are in fact able to 'code so well' which is contrary to the authors own premise.
Agents code extremely well.
They're not particularly good at 'architecture' and I think that's where his specific concerns about 'not being able to see the problems' arise - the issues are are almost never in the syntax, because the AI writes perfect code. The issue is that it's not doing exactly what you intended.
Instead of 'missing the target' ... it's 'hit the wrong target perfectly'.
Any senior developer working with AI daily should be able to have a baseline intuition for all of this, and would therefore reject the hyperbole of the premise 'it can't code!'.
Of course it's producing gargantuan amounts of slop - that's not because 'it can't code', that's something else entirely.
Yes, the beatings will continue until morale improves!
It's the mantra of the AI skeptics. Sounds so clever because it's technically true. Just like humans are just piles of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon atoms, along with maybe a dozen or so other trace elements, none of which have any intelligence or will or desire to do anything - hence humans cannot possibly be intelligent or have any free will.
Author here. I have never said that phrase before this blog post and certainly understand the absurdity of it. I certainly don't mean that you need something biological or whatever consciousness might or might not be.
However there's still a distinction. Unless I'm responding to an LLM, you had a childhood. You learned about the world and space and agency before you ever learned how to program. And you didn't learn it from billions of examples, you learned from a few examples, some self directed experiments, some feedback from teachers, etc...
I'm saying that's what matters. The process matters. You didn't learn to mimic a distribution, you learned to program. Of course in the perfect mathematical limit it's the same, but in practice it's not.