I did the same thing writing sample code from DirectDraw APIs to make windows games. There was a huge gap between copying tutorials and writing my own game. I never got there. LLMs could bridge the divide. Tutorials can give me the nuts and bolts and feel of whats possible. LLMs can bring into reality the bigger ideas from my mind.

Whats wrong with playing for plaid to connect all your banks to your own software? I think i pay 50 cents a month or something

that's okay! nobody had the bandwidth to check compiler generated machine code either so we just stopped doing it

Its a false premise so often repeated. I am really tired. Compilers are ruleset: If you pass it one statement it'll produce the same output all the time. Its easy to verify it works. And if enough people have used it before and found no problems, there probably aren't many. Spoiler: People always find niche bugs.

But an LLM will generate you two completely different things today and tomorrow. Heck, even if you stash its changes and redo the same prompt.

They are NOT comparable at all.

Even though I disagree with (when I worked on CUDA at nvidia if I ran the TOT compiler on the same shaders one day and the next they could often change), the point is not to compare the two things side by side. It's just to say there are lots of times in life where for whatever reason we can give up old jobs.

Oh I dont disagree that it does replace some jobs. Why use junior developers when AI generates the same quality?

Just that comparing LLM to a compiler is nonsense. Because one is deterministic and the more using it, the better the quality will get.

When encountering a difficult problem, add an indirection.

That indirection, in the case of LLMs, is formal proof. It can actually turn an LLM into a sort of compiler. Where, if the compiler run completes successfully, you don't need another run, and you are sure it is correct.

Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).

In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.

I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.

Yeah, but compilers actually work reliably. LLMs do not.

Programmers don't work reliably too.

Agreed. Investing in creating a whole new phone just to usher in the concepts here sounds like an expensive and slow way to do it.

This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.

People dont like any dating, they want to be past it into a long term healthy relationship mostly. If they could blink and get there they would choose it. So yes. The analogy is even better than even better than stated. Nearly everyone cares about the outcome while very few care and enjoy the process

> People dont like any dating, they want to be past it into a long term healthy relationship mostly.

This is absolutely not true.

I think it is true in general at least for people older than their twenties. People who have gotten divorced dread getting back into the dating scene.

This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.

I mean a big part of a -growth- CEOs literal job is to guess on what the future holds and effectively bet on it.

Big-co CEOs are naturally expected to share their bets - and they aren't going to couch it with a "oh well no one could know for sure but..", that would totally undermine their existence!

On top of that; sometimes just saying a thing can make it happen. So it's never not worth that shot...

This has always been true.

Your selecting a group of people (CEOs and VCs) who have always made and lost money on confidently predicting the future. See also wall street bankers and politicians.

There are winners and losers in any boom - this happened in Cloud, DotCom, computing and hell probably tractors, industrial revolution, etc

You can be vague and right about the future broadly. You can talk specifically about what your company is doing directionally on those lines. But, when I hear people talking in detail about how the future is going to work I just roll my eyes. Not because I disagree but just because nobody knows. and chances are it won't work that way.

What is a16z please?

Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm.

The name has always made me think it was a bunch of corporate lawyers. I suppose the difference is increasingly academic.

A16Z stands for the first and last letters of their names, 16 is the number of characters in between.

I know, I'm talking about the full name.

The subtext is: "maybe they're pushing the abbreviated brand because they want to sound less like a law firm."

That is the comforting idea that allows people to believe in the status quo. It is a possibility but not the likely outcome in my opinion.

For ultimate show of appreciation, there is a way to subscribe to his work on github :)

just don't use it to catch a congressman being murdered over a privacy bill.