What is are the benefits of supporting extremely high churn rate in version control? What is the code doing? What problems are being solved? Are changing requirements the driving factor, and if so, why are requirement changes accelerating?

> ..., the latent demand for merging code is practically infinite, and every bottleneck we remove immediately leads to a further increase in the amount of code we produce.

If the goal is to write software which solves real problems, how can the demand for code grow infinitely?

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Wazzymandias an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> What is are the benefits of supporting extremely high churn rate in version control

Inventing new problems caused by our "solutions"

> What is the code doing

Don't you know? We're just 6 months away from AGI; no one will ever need to read source code ever again!

> What problems are being solved?

How do we build a house of cards that's so tall, people value it at trillions of dollars, and build it so quickly, people don't realize it's worth far, far less?

> goal is to write software which solves real problems

No, no, you silly goose. The goal of software is to make gluttonous amounts of money. The side effect just happens to sometimes, occasionally solve real problems

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ciconia an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I find the accelerationist mindset utterly ridiculous. All that busywork and for what exactly? What effect has all this overproduction of LOC had on the physical world and on our existence (beyond the externality of erecting huge data centers in every corner of the globe and the consequent ecological impact)? Is software getting better (in terms of quality, security, efficiency)? Are we getting better government services? Are we getting better food? A better environment (silly question)? Are we working less, as tech titans keep promising us? Are we getting anything better? Not to mention all the negative aspects of this technology and the financial apparatus driving it.

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yoyohello13 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I agree with the sentiment, and the answer to all these questions is usually ‘just wait 6 more months’. Like what is tangibly, actually better in the real world right now with AI? Whenever I ask this question people pipe up with a side project or a new SaaS, but that stuff is just not very important compared to the things you called out. Food, services, QOL.

It seems to me like the AI labs are just pushing the envelope with blind faith that”something” will happen if they just get enough development speed. Nobody seems to have a coherent idea of what that something is.

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daveguy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Seems to me the goal is to create a convoluted spaghetti mess in every code base so that humans no longer have a chance to understand how it works and thereby force all software development to go through LLM obfuscator-deobfuscator cycles.

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marknutter an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It took a long time for the internet to result in things that improved life for in tangible ways.

	▲	jaggederest an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Damn near a decade or more. We're a little under 4 years into the chatbot era.

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jrflo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> All that busy work and for what exactly?

All that busy work was for going from zero revenue to $50B in revenue in about 3 years, and releasing AI systems that are getting better and better at a ridiculous rate. AI isn't solving all the world's problems but you can't deny that they are extremely successful with this method of operating.

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billyp-rva an hour ago | parent [-]

It's a fair question to ask. If literally all the economic growth (and then some?) is going to AI companies, then nothing else is improving, in the aggregate.

	▲	jrflo 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The broader question is definitely relevant, I was thinking more in context of the original post justifying their need to re-invent source control. I definitely think that's an interesting question though. I know that in the physical product development world I'm seeing really odd asymmetric speed ups. Creating simulations is essentially automated at this point, stuff that would take days to code by hand can be done in an hour. Firmware debugging feels 3x faster than before. But the big slow stuff like manufacturing, assembly, and testing are completely unchanged. All of that little stuff probably adds up to maybe a 5% faster product development cycle than before if you're really leaning into AI. It's the type of thing that will compound over time especially if it's happening all over the economy, but won't blow your socks off.

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stephen_cagle 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To play the devils advocate here (just for software), I would say principally this:

"A world where starting is incredibly easy and finishing is more complicated than ever"

LLM's do allow you to oneshot huge starting bits of work in record short time. The frontier of the amount of work they can oneshot is clearly getting larger and larger. But I am still not convinced that they allow you to maintain existing work at a cost that is below a human being.

But, if the frontier of what you can oneshot continues to grow unbounded, then it really will not matter. We will eventually oneshot all software and maintenance will be a thing of the past.

... But that is a very big bet.

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freecodeio an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I find the accelerationist mindset utterly ridiculous. All that busywork and for what exactly? What effect has all this overproduction of LOC

Yeah I wish this whole energy was towards optimization and improving hardware.

One thing that people are finding hard to believe is that the frontier labs are cultists who want to "create god". Hence the focus on improving intelligence so they can get to recursive AI, as well as the fear-mongering.

Aanthropic-openAI duo cannot go bankrupt soon enough. This industry is going to flourish with those two out of the picture. They're the pets.com of 1999 trying to have a say how the internet should be.

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ex-aws-dude an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It is really laughable when you zoom out and realize that nothing much has really changed day to day

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stephen_cagle 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the main thing that raises my eyebrow.

If you are constantly churning your codebase to the point that you need to invent a system that handles your churn... then you must at least be admitting that the previous 6 refactors you wrote were not good, but NOW you have it right.

I feel that good, well designed code change by accretion, not by rewrites. Code that remains stable for a long period of time was likely better than code that needs be continuously rewritten (at least with humans writers).

But maybe this is just a human-centric view of what good code means? That LLM "slop it until it works" approach to development will have a different measure of what quality looks like?

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pshc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Surely their goal is ever-faster recursive self-improvement.

	▲	Aperocky an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It looks like they are recursively gradient descending into their own local minima at increasing code velocity.