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

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1479 points sandslash | 1 comments | 19 Jun 25 00:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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abdullin ◴[19 Jun 25 07:03 UTC] No.44316210[source]▶
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.

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latexr ◴[19 Jun 25 11:54 UTC] No.44317792[source]▶
> 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.

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bonoboTP ◴[19 Jun 25 12:08 UTC] No.44317876[source]▶
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.
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agos ◴[19 Jun 25 12:18 UTC] No.44317938[source]▶
if the thing producing the four PRs can't distinguish the top tier one, I have strong doubts that it can even produce it
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1. solaire_oa ◴[19 Jun 25 15:03 UTC] No.44319323[source]▶
Making 4 PRs for a well-known solution sounds insane, yes, but to be the devil's advocate, you could plausibly be working with an ambiguous task: "Create 4 PRs with 4 different dependency libraries, so that I can compare their implementations." Technically it wouldn't need to pick the best one.

I have apprehension about the future of software engineering, but comparison does technically seem like a valid use case.