undefined | Better HN

0 pointsjerf25d ago0 comments

Code isn't going anywhere. Code is multiple orders of magnitude cheaper and faster than an LLM for the same task, and that gap is likely to widen rather than contract because the bigger the AI gets the sillier it gets to use it to do something code could have done.

Compare the actual operations done for code to add 10 8-digit numbers to an LLM on the same task. Heck, I'll even say, forget the possibility the LLM may be wrong. Just compare the computational resources deployed. How many FLOPS for the code-based addition? How many for the LLM? That's a worst-case scenario in some ways but it also gives you a good sense of what is going on.

Humans may stop looking at it but it's not going anywhere.

0 comments

gobdovan24d ago

I think grandparent comments were talking about how Codex designers try to push LLMs to displace the interface to code, not necessarily code itself. In that view, code could stay as the execution substrate, but the default human interaction layer moves upward, the way higher-level languages displaced direct interaction with lower-level ones. From a HCI perspective, raw computational efficiency is not the main question; the bottleneck is often the human, so the interface only has to be fast and reliable enough at human timescales.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

gobdovan24d ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse