In today’s episode, Yud tries to predict the future of computer science.

  • zogwarg@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    In such a (unlikely) future of build tooling corruption, actual plausible terminology:

    • Intent Annotation Prompt (though sensibly, this should be for doc and validation analysis purposes, not compilation)
    • Intent Pragma Prompt (though sensibly, the actual meaning of the code should not change, and it should purely be optimization hints)
    • self@awful.systemsM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      a dull headache forms as I imagine a future for programming where the API docs I’m reading are still inaccurate autogenerated bullshit but it’s universal and there’s a layer of incredibly wasteful tech dedicated to tricking me into thinking what I’m reading has any value at all

      the headache vastly intensifies when I consider debugging code that broke when the LLM nondeterministically applied a set of optimizations that changed the meaning of the program and the only way to fix it is to reroll the LLM’s seed and hope nothing else breaks

      and the worst part is, given how much the programmers I know all seem to love LLMs for some reason, and how bad the tooling around commercial projects (especially web development) is, this isn’t even an unlikely future

        • self@awful.systemsM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          ·
          1 year ago

          fucking hell. I’m almost certainly gonna see this trash at work and not know how to react to it, cause the AI fuckers definitely want any criticism of their favorite tech to be a career-limiting move (and they’ll employee any and all underhanded tactics to make sure it is, just like at the height of crypto) but I really don’t want this nonsense anywhere near my working environment

          • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            8
            ·
            1 year ago

            I’ve seen a few LLM generated C++ code changes at my work. Which is horrifying.

            • One was complete nonsense on it’s face and never should have been sent out. The reviewer was basically like “what is this shit” only polite.
            • One was subtly wrong, it looked like that one probably got committed… I didn’t say anything because not my circus.

            No one’s sent me any AI generated code yet, but if and when it happens I’ll add whoever sent it to me as one of the code reviewers if it looks like they hadn’t read it :) (probably the pettiest trolling I can get away with in a corporation)

            • blakestacey@awful.systemsM
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              6
              ·
              1 year ago

              I’m pretty sure that my response in that situation would get me fired. I mean, I’d start with “how many trees did you burn and how many Kenyans did you call the N-word in order to implement this linked list” and go from there.

          • zogwarg@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Possible countermeasure: Insist on “crediting” the LLM as the commit author, to regain sanity when doing git blame.

            I agree that worse doc is a bad enough future, though I remain optimistic that including LLM in compile step is never going to be mainstream enough (or anything approaching stable enough, beyond some dumb useless smoke and mirrors) for me to have to deal with THAT.

            • froztbyte@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              4
              ·
              edit-2
              1 year ago

              This also fails as a viable path because version shift (who knows what model version and which LLM deployment version the thing was at, etc etc), but this isn’t the place for that discussion I think

              This did however give me the enticing idea that a viable attack vector may be dropping “produced by chatgpt” taglines in things - as malicious compliance anywhere it may cause a process stall

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Eternal September: It’s Coming From Inside The House Edition

            I hear you on the issues of the coworkers though… already seen that overrun in a few spaces, and I don’t really have a good response to it either. just stfu’ing also doesn’t really work well, because then that shit just boils internally