What I've found is that AI allows lazy and incompetent developers to be more lazy and more incompetent. This then has the effect that product quality suffers more, faster. As a result of the sheer amount of code now being pushed out, code reviews, a thing that previously somewhat prevented lazy and incompetent developers from pushing out horrible code, is effectively dead in the water since no human can actually review such amounts of code realistically anymore. Some companies have adopted AI to review code, which, well ... you have AI make code, AI review code ... I hope you can see the stupidity here if you expect to see any deterministic results at all.
I guess time will tell if the consumer will adapt to the lower quality of products, allowing companies to justify the existence of lazy and incompetent developers, or if the consumer will push back, forcing companies to increase the quality of their developers.
Note: I use AI every day and it is entirely possible to create high quality software with it, so long as you are not lazy and incompetent.
I've seen LLMs do something correct 98% of the time then randomly do something crazy that a human would never do because we have continual learning
As humans we don't have our memory reset multiple times per day
> I've seen LLMs do something correct 98% of the time then randomly do something crazy that a human would never do because we have continual learning
I've seen humans vote for Brexit, re-elect Trump, ask questions clearly already answered in an FAQ, try to pull on a door labelled "push", and insist on giving me homeopathic silicon dioxide pills* that cost £5** for a 10-12 gram packet.
Continual learning is a difference, but not by itself a reason to care about "deterministic results".
Nor, indeed, correct results.
> As humans we don't have our memory reset multiple times per day
Humans need sleep well before they can read a million tokens' worth of written text. We're more like 300k tokens if you're actually reading and not skimming for 16 hours straight.
Again, different (in soooo many ways), but this isn't a relevant difference when the topic is "deterministic results".
If I do the same task 100 times I'm not going to suddenly do it crazily different at time 101 because I've built in the memory of how to do it
There is no RNG involved when I decide to push vs pull the unlabeled door to my building every morning, it becomes deterministic because its baked into memory
You can put stuff in context to deal with this but you can't do that for everything, its not practical and you would blow the context window
> If I do the same task 100 times I'm not going to suddenly do it crazily different at time 101 because I've built in the memory of how to do it
That "because" is an unimportant detail.
You, me, everyone, we all fail tasks with some non-zero probability, including tasks we've done many times before. This is literally why typos happen. We don't always catch the typos we make, this is literally why spellcheck exists. We don't always catch logical errors etc., this is literally why professional writers work with professional editors. We don't always spot errors in code we write; this was why compiler errors have to exist at one level, why unit tests and integration tests exist at another, and why despite automated tests we have QA departments.
Statistically speaking, you as a human will have made more comprehension errors reading that paragraph than even LLMs a few years back.
> There is no RNG involved when I decide to push vs pull the unlabeled door to my building every morning, it becomes deterministic because its baked into memory
There's a lot of random inputs into human behaviour. How much they become random outputs is a similar question as for AI.
Your memories are not "baked" at any point; they're made of and by cells doing chemistry. Your entire body is a trillion small bags of chemicals that communicate with each other by leaking out signalling molecules and electrochemical gradients into each other's water supply, and this goes wrong sometimes.
Small (and apparently random) groups of neurons in your (and all animal) brains briefly enter sleep-like states even while you remain apparently awake. This starts well before you even feel tired.
askonomm · · focus · HN ↗
I guess time will tell if the consumer will adapt to the lower quality of products, allowing companies to justify the existence of lazy and incompetent developers, or if the consumer will push back, forcing companies to increase the quality of their developers.
Note: I use AI every day and it is entirely possible to create high quality software with it, so long as you are not lazy and incompetent.
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
> I hope you can see the stupidity here if you expect to see any deterministic results at all.
Are you expecting humans to be deterministic in the code they produce?
ex-aws-dude · · focus · HN ↗
As humans we don't have our memory reset multiple times per day
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
I've seen humans vote for Brexit, re-elect Trump, ask questions clearly already answered in an FAQ, try to pull on a door labelled "push", and insist on giving me homeopathic silicon dioxide pills* that cost £5** for a 10-12 gram packet.
Continual learning is a difference, but not by itself a reason to care about "deterministic results".
Nor, indeed, correct results.
> As humans we don't have our memory reset multiple times per day
Humans need sleep well before they can read a million tokens' worth of written text. We're more like 300k tokens if you're actually reading and not skimming for 16 hours straight.
Again, different (in soooo many ways), but this isn't a relevant difference when the topic is "deterministic results".
* yes, sand: <a href="https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/fda/fdaDrugXsl.cfm?setid=97903a05-fd97-420c-836f-b8d73277b683" rel="nofollow">https://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/fda/fdaDrugXsl.cfm?set...
** and that was what it cost in the 90s
ex-aws-dude · · focus · HN ↗
There is no RNG involved when I decide to push vs pull the unlabeled door to my building every morning, it becomes deterministic because its baked into memory
You can put stuff in context to deal with this but you can't do that for everything, its not practical and you would blow the context window
ben_w · · focus · HN ↗
That "because" is an unimportant detail.
You, me, everyone, we all fail tasks with some non-zero probability, including tasks we've done many times before. This is literally why typos happen. We don't always catch the typos we make, this is literally why spellcheck exists. We don't always catch logical errors etc., this is literally why professional writers work with professional editors. We don't always spot errors in code we write; this was why compiler errors have to exist at one level, why unit tests and integration tests exist at another, and why despite automated tests we have QA departments.
Statistically speaking, you as a human will have made more comprehension errors reading that paragraph than even LLMs a few years back.
> There is no RNG involved when I decide to push vs pull the unlabeled door to my building every morning, it becomes deterministic because its baked into memory
There's a lot of random inputs into human behaviour. How much they become random outputs is a similar question as for AI.
Your memories are not "baked" at any point; they're made of and by cells doing chemistry. Your entire body is a trillion small bags of chemicals that communicate with each other by leaking out signalling molecules and electrochemical gradients into each other's water supply, and this goes wrong sometimes.
Small (and apparently random) groups of neurons in your (and all animal) brains briefly enter sleep-like states even while you remain apparently awake. This starts well before you even feel tired.
ex-aws-dude · · focus · HN ↗
For an LLM I have no mechanism to even update the weights