Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

Tight feedback loops are the key in working productively with software. I see that in codebases up to 700k lines of code (legacy 30yo 4GL ERP systems).

The best part is that AI-driven systems are fine with running even more tight loops than what a sane human would tolerate.

Eg. running full linting, testing and E2E/simulation suite after any minor change. Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one.

> Or generating 4 versions of PR for the same task so that the human could just pick the best one.

That sounds awful. A truly terrible and demotivating way to work and produce anything of real quality. Why are we doing this to ourselves and embracing it?

A few years ago, it would have been seen as a joke to say “the future of software development will be to have a million monkey interns banging on one million keyboards and submit a million PRs, then choose one”. Today, it’s lauded as a brilliant business and cost-saving idea.

We’re beyond doomed. The first major catastrophe caused by sloppy AI code can’t come soon enough. The sooner it happens, the better chance we have to self-correct.

If it's monkeylike quality and you need a million tries, it's shit. It you need four tries and one of those is top-tier professional programmer quality, then it's good.