AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is betting on race horses.

SkyPuncher 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Only if your AI coding approach is the slot machine approach.

I've ended up with a process that produces very, very high quality outputs. Often needing little to no correct from me.

I think of it like an Age of Empires map. If you go into battle surrounded by undiscovered parts of the map, you're in for a rude surprise. Winning a battle means having clarity on both the battle itself and risks next to the battle.

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murkt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good analogy! Would be interesting to read more details about how you’re getting very high quality outputs

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Obscurity4340 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Would you mind sharing some of your findings?

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input_sh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Until it produces predictable output, it's gambling. But it can't produce predictable output because it's a non-deterministic tool.

What you're describing is increasing your odds while gambling, not that it's not gambling. Card counting also increases your odds while gambling, but it doesn't make it not gambling.

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IanCal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a pretty wild comparison in my opinion, it counts almost everything as gambling which means it has almost no use as a definition.

The most obvious issue is it’d class working with humans as gambling. Fine if you want to make that as your definition but it seems unhelpful to the discussion.

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input_sh a minute ago | parent | next [-]

You seem to have a fundamental issue understanding what the term deterministic even means.

If you give the same trivial task to the same human five times in a row, let's say wash the dishes, your dishes are either gonna be equally clean or equally not clean enough every time. If you run the same script five times in a row while changing some input variables, you're gonna get the same, predictable output that you can understand, look at the code, and fix.

If you ask the same question to the same LLM model five times in a row, are you getting the same result every time? Is it kind of random? Can the quality be vastly different if you reject all of its changes, start a new conversation, and tell it to do the same thing again using the exact same prompt? Congrats, that's gambling. It's no different than spinning a slot machine, you pass it an input and hope for the best as the output. Unlike the slot machine, you can influence those odds by asking better, but that does not mean it's not gambling.

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RhythmFox an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How does it 'count almost everything as gambling'? They just said 'non-deterministic' output is gambling-like, that is not 'almost everything'. Most computation that you use on a day-to-day basis (depending on how much you use AI now I suppose) is in all ways deterministic. Using probabilistic algorithms is not new, but it your point is not clicking...

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organsnyder an hour ago | parent [-]

Working with humans is decidedly not deterministic, though. And the discussion here is comparing AI coding agents and humans.

	▲	RhythmFox 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That starts to get into a very philosophical space talking about human action as deterministic or not. I think keeping to the fact that the artifacts (ie code) we are working off will have deterministic effects (unless we want it not to) is exactly the point. That is what lets chaotic human brains communicate with machines at all. Adding more chaos to the system doesn't strike me as obviously an improvement.

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darkhorse222 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Similar to quantum computing, a probabilistic model when condensed to sufficiently narrow ranges can be treated as discrete.

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bazmattaz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Dam this is so accurate. As a project manager turned product manager this is so true. You need to estimate a project based on the “pedigree” of your engineers

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munk-a 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Would it make us uncomfortable to reword the above example to

> AI coding is gambling on slot machines, managing developers is gambling on the stock market.

Because I feel like that is a much more apt analogy.

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cko 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What is it with you guys and stallions?

	▲	deadbabe 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is a long history of managers just wanting to work their developers like horses.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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edu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Great analogy, I’m saving it!