Remix clone Hacker News

The question isn’t “can AI code?”, the question is “can AI keep coding?”.

How do any of these companies create “an AI Software Engineer”? Scraping knowledge posted by actual engineers on StackOverflow? Scraping public (& arguably private) GitHub repos created by actual engineers? What happens when all of them are out of a job? AI gets trained on knowledge generated by AI? Where will the incremental gain come from?

It’s like saying I will teach myself to cook better food by only learning from recipe books I created based on the knowledge I already have.

▲

fragmede 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> AI gets trained on knowledge generated by AI?

This sounds like the ouroboros snake eating its own tail, which it is, but because of tool use letting it compile and run code, it can generate code for, say, rust that does a thing, iterate until it's gotten the borrow checker to not be angry, then run the code to assert it does what it claims to, and then feed that working code into the training set as good code (and the non-working code as bad). Even using only the recipe books you already had, doing a lot of cooking practice would make you a better cook, and once you learn the recepies in the book well, mixing and matching recepies; egg preparation from one, flour ratios from another, is simply just something a good cook would just get a feel for what works and what doesn't, even if they only ever used that one book.

▲

ethanwillis 2 days ago | parent [-]

The original recipe books don't cover all possible things that could be created, not even in all their combinations. And most importantly even the subset of novel combinations that can be created from the recipe books -- there is something missing.

What's missing is the judgement call of a human to say if some newly created information makes sense to us, is useful to us, etc.

The question above is not about whether new information can be created or the navigation of it. It's about the applicability of what is created to human ends.

	▲	darth_avocado 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> What's missing is the judgement call of a human to say if some newly created information makes sense to us, is useful to us, etc. When I gave an example of a recipe book, that’s what I meant. There’s the element of not knowing whether something worked without the explicit feedback of “what worked”. But there is also an element of “no matter how much I experiment with new things, I wouldn’t know sous vide exists as a technique unless I already know and have it listed in the recipe book.” What I don’t know, I will never know.

▲

janalsncm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I can’t think of a better argument for never posting to Stack Overflow again. Or public GitHub.