> Then I compared the implementation, for correctness, to other systems, finding that other implementations sometimes contained more errors. I researched more, and found that the local inference world is full of subtle errors that accumulate and damage the model output, issues in the attention implementation causing performance slopes after the context is over a certain limit because indexed attention implementations are broken (do more work than they should, for instance), and so forth.

I agree 100% that AI helps a lot with that. But I feel like there's something missing between "AI helps a lot with that" and "I believe reading code is mostly pointless". I genuinely wonder how the above can be accomplished without reading any code.

> I genuinely wonder how the above can be accomplished without reading any code.

We can't see the code for the laws of physics, and yet experiment by experiment we've come a long way.

That's not usually going to be the most efficient way to understand code, but I've found that it's pretty useful to be one of the few empiricists in an organization full of rationalists (software engineers are typically rationalists in my experience). I wouldn't propose that we dispense with rationalism altogether, but it does seem that the we'll benefit by achieving a better balance than we've traditionally had.

I write 2% of code. And read 5-10%.

I feel like everyone is being too black and white. And everyone has different ways of staying in flow with a software task.

Having looked at his code, I doubt this.

he said he read it though, and check the last line