Mastodawn

Timnit Gebru (she/her).

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930

Incredible thread.

Answered some of my questions about what people think the future will be if everyone codes like this. It seems to be: instead of thinking about constraints of any kind or "what is the most efficient way to do Y or the most readable way to do Z?" answer the question, "what is the most brute force way to perform X if I pretend that there are no resource constraints and nothing needs to make sense as long as I see some sort of test passing? Just ship it with spaghetti code.

Noah Bailey Apr 2

@timnitGebru it’s exactly the way people have been building “cloud infrastructure” for ages, it was just a matter of time before programming also became a game of coal-shovelling :(

Paul Rietschka Apr 2

@timnitGebru Never in my life did I think I'd see software development, a field that's spent decades building best practices and being concerned with security and code quality, destroy itself in a matter of months.

At this point these people might as well be just reading tea leaves, or casting chicken bones on the ground.

MegatronicThronBanks Apr 2

@prietschka @timnitGebru

It's.... been total shit for 20 years. This is just the latest.

Laurent Bercot Apr 2

@prietschka @timnitGebru

software development, a field that's spent decades building best practices and being concerned with security and code quality

Do not mix "software development", the scientific-or-close-to-it discipline that exists, that has principles, that is taught (often badly, but that's another debate) in schools, with what techbros flood the industry with top-down.

Enterprise coding was never driven by sound software development practices. It was always bullshit. It was always an application of the latest company fads and buzzwords; vibe coding is only the latest one, certainly the most harmful, but not fundamentally different.

The knowledge and skill remains, no matter what these assholes do. It just won't be found in the capitalist world. It never was.

EndlessMason Apr 2

@ska @prietschka @timnitGebru
"We need to wrap it, so we are future proof, what if the library changes?!"

The compiler will tell us, what are you on about?

EndlessMason Apr 2

@ska @prietschka @timnitGebru
"No no no, we can't use that wrapper, it belongs to the other team, what if they change it?!"

@ska @prietschka @timnitGebru The enterprise approach is always focused on delivering a product, and hardware is usually cheaper than optimisation.

If your database is lagging, what's the best solution: Hire a database guru to optimise your configuration and make sure you are using appropriate indexing and query structure, or just whack another quarter-terabyte of RAM in the server?

Laurent Bercot Apr 2

@Qybat @prietschka @timnitGebru You're this close to understanding that capitalism is the problem

varx/social Apr 2

2010: Whee, I'm a software engineer!

2015: Hmm, can I really claim "engineer"? We're not *that* rigorous.

2020: Actually, yeah! Some of this really is engineering!

2026: Never mind. We're a bunch of fucking clowns.

Shannon Clark Apr 2

@timnitGebru @jonny it also reads like code if “no humans actually talked to each other or coordinated their work in any way”

As a product (and past project) manager I often tell people that the main job of real programmers is communicating with otber humans. The code is the easy part.

Deciding what the code should (and should not do) and coordinating everyone’s efforts is the hard stuff.

But also how you avoid everyone reinventing (badly) the same functionality and how you avoid crunches

GunChleoc Apr 2

@Rycaut @timnitGebru @jonny My favorite success metric isn't LOC added, but LOC removed. You can't avoid it when working in a team that similar bits of code get created concurrently, so you have to regularly unify that stuff. I enjoy being the cleanup detail.

I was told that LLMs are supposed to be good at that tracking down that stuff, but I guess somebody needs to bother to prompt it to do so?

Shannon Clark Apr 2

@gunchleoc @timnitGebru @jonny it’s a good thing to track.

My favorite success metric is a two parter.

We release Friday evening to production .,,.

And the whole team has dinner at home.

(Meaning code pushes to production have become stable and routine that no one has to babysit them and no one has to stay late to resolve failures and problems)

It means both that the dev/test environments are solid & that as a team our processes are working to mean we don’t suddenly release crashes

GunChleoc Apr 2

@Rycaut @timnitGebru @jonny "It's Friday afternoon, let's push to prod"" memes coming in... 😁

I'd still release on a Tuesday, but it does make for a good metric. I like myself a bit of quality in the workplace, and I don't just mean the code.

Shannon Clark Apr 2

@gunchleoc @timnitGebru @jonny yes not releasing on Friday's is typically a better pattern, especially if the release needs to be watched over - my point is that when you can push to prod reliably on Fridays and it truly is routine that is an indicator of a lot of good elements in the workplace & teams - it means all the internal systems, developers, QA folks etc are likely working well together.

But yes, also good for some "fun" memes...

@timnitGebru stricking to see how much of their "programming" of the LLM looks a lot like the "giving instructions for the unpaid intern to do business critical tasks" that is so pervasive everywhere...

jonny (nonvenomous)Apr 2

@timnitGebru I am deeply honored by the compliment, coming from you :). just trying to do whatever small part i can in this fight against the information oligarchs.

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 2

@jonny Truly thank you for your service 🫡

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE Apr 2

"But it's unreadable and unmaintainable!"

"So what? No human needs to read it or maintain it, the AI will do that."

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE Apr 2

We've been here before of course. The above is a description of assembler code generated by a compiler.

Stefan Lücking Apr 2

@timnitGebru
This is exactly the result I feared when I was asked three years ago (in March 2023) what I think about using LLMs for coding.

My reasoning at the time was the AI models were trained on software code that was already optimized for low labour costs irrespective of efficiency or resource constraints. So, I expected that AI tools will make this even worse.

myrmepropagandist Apr 2

This thread inspired me to make a possibly terrible meme.

Timnit Gebru (she/her).Apr 2

@futurebird 😂 😂 😂

Jean-Francois Cloutier Apr 2

@timnitGebru "AI engineering" is an oxymoron.

"Engineering" should file a restraining order against "AI"

Dave Alvarado Apr 2

@timnitGebru yeah, that sounds about right. Brute force is generally the most expensive way to do anything. It makes sense that AI is the darling of Wall Street.