Yeah, and just like all social media platforms adopted short form video sooner or later they are going to give in to what consumers pay for (in attention or money). Right now it's anyone's guess what that might be in the context of software development.
Coming from Ansible with hand-written config templates this was honestly a friction point for me - I felt like NixOS is trying to actively hide what it's actually going to configure. It's gotten better now that I read some nixpkg service sources but from time to time I still feel the urge to just directly manage my systemd units, sshd configs and whatnot. Like, sure it simplifies the setup but at the same time also puts another abstraction between me and the software I'm using.
You always have the option to do your own custom thing like use nix config to manage /etc/iptables.rules.
NixOS does you one thing better by giving you the option to configure things without caring about the underlying implementation, like whether the firewall uses iptables or nftables or something else.
I agree with the many levels of abstraction, but at the same time, directly managing systemd units is also so much easier with Nix then any other distro I've tried.
Can we be sure? Maybe it's just very rare for experience, education and memories to line up in exactly the way that allows synthesizing something innovative. So it requires a few billion candidates and maybe a couple of generations too.
I want to point back to my remark about everyday people.
if you don't limit yourself to "advancing the state of the art at the far frontiers of human knowledge" but allow for ordinary people to make everyday contributions in their daily lives, you get even more
This isn't a throwaway comment. I do this all the time myself, at work. Everywhere I've worked, I do this. I challenge the assumptions and try to make things better. It's not a rare thing at all, it's just not revolutionary.
Revolutions are rare. Perhaps only a handful of them have ever happened in any one particular field. But you simply will not ever go from Aristotelian physics to Newtonian physics to General Relativity by merely "synthesizing the data they were trained on", as the previous comment supposed.
Edit: I should also say something about experimentation. You can't do it from an armchair, which is all an LLM has access to (at present). Real people learn things all the time by conducting experiments in the world and observing the results, without necessarily working as formal scientists. Babies learn a lot by experimenting, for example. This is one particular avenue of new knowledge which is entirely separate from experience, education, memories, etc. because an experiment always has the potential to contradict all of that.
Experimentation leads to experience, so I feel like this was included by the parent comment. And in the case of writing software, agents are able to experiment today. They run tests, check log output, search DBs... Sure, they can't have apples fall on their heads like Newton had but they can totally observe the apple falling on someones head in a video.
Of course it does, but only after the fact. You don't have any experience of the result of the experiment before you perform it.
Sure, they can't have apples fall on their heads like Newton had but they can totally observe the apple falling on someones head in a video
I have strong doubts that LLMs have any understanding whatsoever of what's happening in images (let alone videos). The claim (I've sometimes heard) that they possess a world model and are able to interpret an image according to that model is an extremely strong one, that's strongly contradicted by the fact that they: a) continue to hallucinate in pretty glaring ways, and b) continue to mis-identify doctored (adversarial) images that no human would mis-identify (because they don't drastically alter the subject).
In software, they can and do perform experiments (make a change then observe the log output). I don't think they possess a "world model" or that it's worth spending too much thought on... My reasoning is more along the lines that our brains are also just [very advanced] inference machines. We also hallucinate and mis-identify images (there are image/video classification tasks where humans have lower scores).
For me the most glaring difference to how humans work is the lack of online learning. If that prevents them from being able to innovate, I'm not so sure.
Software is not the world. It’s a tiny bit of what humans do.
The lack of online learning is a critical fault. Much of what humans learn (such as anything based on mathematics) has a dependency tree of stuff to learn. But even mundane stuff involves a lot of dependent learning. For example, ask an LLM to write a cookbook and it can synthesize from recipes that are already out there but good luck having it invent new cooking techniques that require experimentation or invention (new heat source, new cooking utensils, etc).
I guess we'll just have to wait and see how things turn out. Currently it seems we have examples of where it seems like the technology allows some amount of innovation (AlphaGo, software, math proofs) and examples where they seem surprisingly stupid (recipes?).
You had me at "fuzzy", but lost me at "clean up" - because that's what I usually have to do after it went on another wild refactoring spree. It's a stochastic thing, maybe you're lucky and it fuzzy-matches exactly what you want, maybe the distributions lead it astray.
On the line test, I guess it's highly probable that the joke and a few hundred discussions or blog pieces about it were in it's training data.
Was recently optimizing an old code base. If I tell it to optimize it does stupid stuff but if I tell it to write profiler first and then slowly attack each piece one at a time then it does really well. Only a matter of time before it does it automatically.
Good point, but what if you were previously chaining horse carriage rides and now a car can cover the same distance as 10 of them with a single driver?
I don't know, maximum package turnover might be bounded and most likely you were previously not constrained by lack of drivers already... Sure you might try and expand but why would that work better than before? Especially assuming all other providers now also have cars.
I honestly hope someone will read this comment and vibecode an Atlassian 2.0 platform, preferably open source. But really, I will take closed source and paid as well - just give me something that's on par in terms of features and integration but without the terrible UX.
To be clear, I agree with the terrible products part - but currently they are not dying because there is no alternative platform which is flexible, scalable and feature-complete enough. You may find alternatives for niches, like GitHub for software engineering, but the Atlassian stuff allows for knowledge transfer and familiarity across many many domains. I've seen it used anywhere from government burocracy to customer service and construction companies. They nailed the abstraction for flexible issue management, just the implementation is terrible.
I vibe coded a native client for Jira that’s speedy for creating tickets. At this level, you could write something native and just use their API and have it be as quick as you’d like.
The amazing thing is that soon (actually already) we will be seeing people being paid way too much to prompt a LLM to email other people or respond to other peoples emails. And then turn these emails into presentations which will be turned into meeting transcripts again followed by emails.
The lingering question is if the intermediate LLM translation steps will actually make our communication more efficient - or just amplify the already inefficient parts.
Inefficiency all too often is celebrated by our society, as I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work."
Philosophy territory now... you wrote about technology making labor unnecessary 15 years ago - Aristotele did ~2000 years ago too (same text where he tried to justify slavery but nvm that): "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, [...] if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."
I bet in 2000 years they will still be writing about it - yeah, technology changes our lives (for better or worse).
It's pretty fascinating to look at the impacts this has had in the last 2000 years, or even just the last 200.
Take construction work. Incredible improvements through power tools, gasoline-powered mobile cranes, etc. The productivity per worker has exploded. A lot of this has been captured by induced demand: we build bigger, taller, grander. But the improvements aren't distributed equally. Which means that crafts that haven't seen much improvement are now more expensive in comparison to everything else. Which has contributed to our buildings having less elaborate facades and becoming more "bland"
The same in clothing. Clothing has become dirt cheap. Even the poorest people can afford new clothing multiple times a year. But in the same transition we have gone from everything being custom tailored to most things only kind of fitting, being made for variations of the most common body shapes. Not necessarily because tailored clothing has become much more expensive (though higher labor costs from higher average productivity haven't helped), but because every other step has become cheaper and tailoring hasn't.
I wonder what we will say about the trajectory of software in a couple decades
That's a great angle - will handcrafted software of the future become the equivalent of a tailored suit today? One might argue it already is, most companies and individuals do just fine using cloud/SaaS offerings and COTS apps. So on first glance it seems like automating software engineering would mainly benefit exactly those providers. The other side of the coin is that it also allows for cheaper/faster in-house DIY solutions and competition.
Yeah, I could see a world where it swings exactly the opposite way for software. Writing software for yourself is becoming cheap, but gathering requirements, getting alignment between stakeholders or marketing your software isn't getting much cheaper. Maybe everyone will end up with their own in-house solution? Or maybe we end up with configurable SAP-like behemoths, but instead of an army of expensive consultants configuring the software for your use case you have AI agents taking that part
I'm sure whatever path this takes will seems obvious in hindsight
I see how this can boost productivity...for those that today already produce value voluntarily. These will move one level higher. The rest with 100x the amount of performative work. Everyone will be busier created presentations and charts that no one needs and no one will read. Managers will ask for new presentations and reports every sync, and hours will be spent discussing things that don't actually matter.
Hm I don't think a secondary market would work very well, using fab time productively requires lots of knowledge and collaboration with the provider. Compared to resources like grain or oil where it's basically "just come and pick it up when it's there".
And they will most likely also be the last to benefit from hypothetical efficiency gains because they haven't been building up expertise (by burning billions) yet.
Being able to Greenfield something new is a tempting pitch to use to poach employees.
And first to market often doesn't win, or else WebVan would still be doing grocery deliveries. We tend to overstate the first-mover advantages because we more easily remember the cases where that turned into lasting dominance while forgetting all the companies that died to first-mover disadvantages.
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