alt Hacker NewsGreat article. I feel most people, even great software engineers, seem to lack the intuitive understanding that building software is essentially modeling a system, and that every model faces the same limit: the number of interactions between its part grows combinatorially as the system grows. If some of those parts or interactions produce no value (bloat), then complexity is added for no gain. This is true regardless of who created the model or wrote the code.
Instead they seem to think that AI can someone work around what is essentially laws of nature.
Replies
> Instead they seem to think that AI can someone work around what is essentially laws of nature.
There's a lot of magical thinking about AI's present and future capabilities.
And migrating from one system-model to another is an additional system-model - the building of which is an even rarer skillset.
> Instead they seem to think that AI can someone work around what is essentially laws of nature.
I am not. I am just assuming that whatever approximation humans can build, a robot could do better.
Yes, I don't think many software devs have a proper conception of what it is they are actually doing. They view their job mostly as "make computer do thing" and not "model and represent some aspect of reality as a system of computable functions". Yes I know it sounds overly academized and pedantic but there actually is a huge difference in these perspectives and imo it's only when you adopt something closer to the latter that engineering really happens.
In a team, the contributor thinks of the value of his own feature, but not the complexity it adds to the whole. A reviewer needs to do that. Preferably at the planning stage. It is a tough to tell people not to add a feature, but it has to be done.
When I'm reviewing AI code I worry about complexity more than anything; correctness is relatively easier to assure, whereas complexity is a value judgment.
If anything I’ve seen AI become a multiplier. The low initial cost to add new features eliminates the only brake many organizations have on accumulation of bloat.