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491 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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sysmax ◴[] No.44383569[source]
I wish people would make distinction regarding the size/scope of the AI-generated parts. Like with video copyright laws, where a 5-second clip from a copyrighted movie is usually considered fair use and not frowned upon.

Because for projects like QEMU, current AI models can actually do mind-boggling stuff. You can give it a PDF describing an instruction set, and it will generate you wrapper classes for emulating particular instructions. Then you can give it one class like this and a few paragraphs from the datasheet, and it will spit out unit tests checking that your class works as the CPU vendor describes.

Like, you can get from 0% to 100% test coverage several orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Or refactoring, where you want to add support for a particular memory virtualization trick, and you need to update 100 instruction classes based on straight-forward, but not 100% formal rule. A human developer would be pulling their hairs out, while an LLM will do it faster than you can get a coffee.

replies(3): >>44383596 #>>44383598 #>>44384005 #
762236 ◴[] No.44383598[source]
It sounds like you're saying someone could rewrite Qemu on their own, with the help of AI. That would be pretty funny.
replies(1): >>44384101 #
1. mrheosuper ◴[] No.44384101[source]
Given enough time, a monkey randomly types on typewriter can rewrite QEMU.