It's funny, i push back on pull requests because there is too much description now - a 20 line change has pages and pages of generated description, rationalisation for why it is safe, defense of each design decision, analysis of risks and side effects. People are indignant, you're rejecting my change because there is too much documentation? And my response is, I don't have time to read it and you put me in the position where I can't afford not to - because approving the PR implies I did and accepted it. The investment to read all that for the value of a code change that I'm one prompt away from doing myself if I cared is just not high enough. So it's rejected.
You might be surprised how many organisations/ teams now don’t even review pull requests. Claude does coding, Codex do code review, and if developer did 5 round of this before pull request, we could very well just let CI merge.
I'm very curious how this goes long term. I guess we will find out.
My instinct says that these systems will expand their complexity to fully fit the cognitive budget of the agents that coded them and then atrophy the same way human-built systems do at lower cognitive budget. Only this time, because of the larger up front budget, the complexity ceiling will be higher, and the potential depth of the problem may be much much larger. It may mostly manifest as increasing cost over time - the agents grind for longer and longer, iterating over and over to fix all the failing tests, and the breaking point will be where it never converges and you come back to millions of dollars in budget spent and still tests are failing and effective gridlock on system changes.
But this may be all my human-biased fantasy that justifies still taking a role in software development.
> ... these systems will expand their complexity to fully fit the cognitive budget of the agents that coded them and then atrophy the same way human-built systems do at lower cognitive budget. Only this time, because of the larger up front budget, the complexity ceiling will be higher ...
That is exactly how one could describe the relationship between heroin and the users health systems. It’s okay for a little while, until it isn’t but there is no going back. When the risks start telling, lawyers will have a field day. Assisted by LLM’s obviously, which then puts the burden on judges, who then need LLM assistance.
This thing called attention economics has captured my attention quite hard. Digital opiates are everywhere since 10 to 20 years. And in my view, the part that they implicitly of explicitly strive to capture your attention is new.
Well articulated. I tend to think that the outcome will vary hugely by project. We already observe this with some reporting certain models behave in a certain way, whilst others see the opposite.
To use the wooley term “quality”, the top 20% might stand a good chance of making huge strides. But the remaining 80% of projects (in particular the bottom 20%) will atrophy extremely quickly. Yet, these will be the project that many push LLM’s too as their domain/technology is complex and/or outdated. Digital transformations that can be done quickly will be tantalising but ultimately unsatisfactory long term (as you describe).
zmmmmm · · focus · HN ↗
ramshanker · · focus · HN ↗
zmmmmm · · focus · HN ↗
My instinct says that these systems will expand their complexity to fully fit the cognitive budget of the agents that coded them and then atrophy the same way human-built systems do at lower cognitive budget. Only this time, because of the larger up front budget, the complexity ceiling will be higher, and the potential depth of the problem may be much much larger. It may mostly manifest as increasing cost over time - the agents grind for longer and longer, iterating over and over to fix all the failing tests, and the breaking point will be where it never converges and you come back to millions of dollars in budget spent and still tests are failing and effective gridlock on system changes.
But this may be all my human-biased fantasy that justifies still taking a role in software development.
rapidfl · · focus · HN ↗
wow this is a beautiful way to put it
wjnc · · focus · HN ↗
This thing called attention economics has captured my attention quite hard. Digital opiates are everywhere since 10 to 20 years. And in my view, the part that they implicitly of explicitly strive to capture your attention is new.
the_gipsy · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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joshghent · · focus · HN ↗
To use the wooley term “quality”, the top 20% might stand a good chance of making huge strides. But the remaining 80% of projects (in particular the bottom 20%) will atrophy extremely quickly. Yet, these will be the project that many push LLM’s too as their domain/technology is complex and/or outdated. Digital transformations that can be done quickly will be tantalising but ultimately unsatisfactory long term (as you describe).