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amelius • yesterday at 7:37 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

I don't think the analogy holds because AI still produces good code.


Replies

nvme0n1p1 • yesterday at 7:46 PM

No it doesn't. It produces working, but sloppy code, and it's able to do so because of deterministic test suites that run quickly and give a reliable score of the result, letting an agentic loop iteratively improve its output. But we have no test suites that answer "is this code maintainable" or "does this feature make sense in the context of our business", so AI still fails those tests.

If we had a way to write a test suite for English that could reliably answer "is this sentence useful to my target audience" or "does this paragraph make any goddamn sense", you might be able to run some sort of agentic loop to approach good writing, but so far we don't.

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phito • yesterday at 7:45 PM

No, it also produces impressive looking code that is actually not that great. It's exactly the same.

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ChrisLTD • yesterday at 7:43 PM

Sometimes it doesn't, but it's tough to see because of the volume of what you have to wade through

ionetan • yesterday at 7:42 PM

I think it is more about comprehension. It reveals that AI does not actually understand what it does. It gets code right mostly because it is probabilistic and has seen enough sound precedents to land in something that works, but it does not come from an internal comprehension.

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cgh • yesterday at 7:54 PM

Unlike human languages, computer languages have tightly-specified boundaries so LLMs do a lot better. See also math.