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▲ passive 2 hours ago

This seemed like a high possibility, but since our adoption of LLMs in software so far has mostly been to throw out best practices, I am skeptical that it will lead us to expanded verification.

It's like Bezos talking about how we're going to have 3 day work weeks while he makes his employees piss in a bottle.

▲scruple an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Automated proofs do sound very neat but I think they'll be constrained to a vanishingly small set of already paranoid domains like cryptography, aerospace, etc. Everywhere else is going to spend the dividends on shipping more unvetted code faster, we're just trading discipline for velocity.

▲skew-aberration 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Piss bottles are easily explained by rent though. You get more productive, so the landlord ups the rent, and you have to produce more for the people owning the scarce land (your landlord, the grocery store's landlord, the farmer, etc).

Software doesn't have this scarcity dynamic. People will use LLMs to build better sounder foundations (as rust is 'better' than c) and code quality will improve as we migrate to them. You won't get screwed on your rust++ license though to the point you have to piss in bottles.

▲skydhash 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Software doesn't have this scarcity dynamic

Time is finite. People’s problems that can be solved by software is also finite. There’s diminishing returns in improving software. Rewriting bash in rust, and then testing the result would barely help anyone. Also the real world (where inputs come from) is messy. You can have the perfect mechanism (memory safety), but that grain of sand (corrupted or unexpected data) can still make it behave erratically (wrong result).