Readit NewsThe hard part is the engineering. Understanding and breaking down the problem, and then actually solving it. If all we gain out of these tools is that we don’t have to write code by hand anymore they are moderately useful but they won’t really be a step change in software development speed.
Maybe if we get super AGI one day. Even then I suspect that from a thermodynamics perspective that might not be cost effective as you often need localized on site intelligence.
It's an interesting question but I bet humans combined with AI tooling will remain cost competitive for a long time barring leaps in say quantum compute. After all organic brains operate at the atomic level already and were honed in an extremely competitive environment for billions of years. The calories and resources required to create highly efficient massively powerful neural compute had incredibly thin resource "margins" with huge advantages for species to utilize.
But then you find out that Nim people still rely on Nimpy, Rust people on PyO3, and even Julia people on PythonCall.
Yeah, no reason to use Python anymore, except by calling Python from your awesome language. The fact that these awesome Python packages are just wrappers over C/C++ doesn't change much - for some reason people using other languages are not willing to write and maintain wrappers of similar quality, including documentation.
> The fact that these awesome Python packages are just wrappers over C/C++ doesn't change much - for some reason people using other languages are not willing to write and maintain wrappers of similar quality, including documentation.
True, the older I get the more I’m amazed at communities of people who just build things and keep them running. It’s impressive. But hey calling Python from other languages is pretty sweet.
Though I recently found the Python libraries for automation stuff to be lacking. So I wrote my own library with Claude. I suspect that the friction of creating good wrappers in smaller languages is lowering. I still used Python for actual clicking with a super small rest api.
And except tooling, ecosystem, documentation and practical real-world application.
True the LSP is pretty bad, but Cursor makes up for a lot of that for me. Atlas dependency manager is great. Valgrind and TSan work perfectly. Gdb sorta works now. LLMS solve the docs issue.
The ecosystem is smaller, but I've been able to use it to successfully create tools for an IoT project with Nim running on an embedded esp32, a multi-threaded api server on linux processing images, and a web SPA with Karax in a couple of weeks of programming work. Oh and calling into Python for some datascience.
Then came Python 3 and it just never felt the same. PyQT projects faltered. Deps split. Strings broke.
However I started using Nim a few years back which has given me that Python 2 feeling – except with static types, better overall language design, meta-programming, and performance!
To pretend that humans are hedonic beasts incapable of cognitive adaption is ridiculous. We do not operate purely on impulse save for pharmaceutical intervention. We can force ourselves to give things more or less importance regardless of the actual stakes.
For those with ADHD they turn on the prefrontal cortex which reduces or removes the feeling of utter torture and pain from doing chores.
It's sort of like taking a drug that takes away the fear and almost physical inability to to touch a hot stove most people have. Normally that'd be bad. Except here the hot stove is actually harmless and useful to touch.
The author isn't even condemning all AI generated MRs. Only ones meeting a few conditions.
I found one just yesterday where the main entry point returns a byte value. It returns 'false' on error, and '0' on success. It may also sometimes return a non-zero error code. You can see why this design would be problematic.
In my experience all of the low level code on uC’s is just short of horrible. That’s ST, NXP, etc, are just full of terrible kludges. Then again some of the Linux kernel drivers can be rough too.
The only vendor I’ve heard has good code and documentation is Raspberry Pi Foundation on their silicon.