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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • AI is not capable of novel or complex stuff,

    This seems to be both untrue and mostly irrelevant.

    The recent FLT proof is clearly complex and novel.

    But also a huge amount of programming is only barely complex and not really novel at all.

    The biggest issues I’ve seen with AI so far are:

    • The slop comments are just painful to read. I think this might mostly be Claude though, I recently switched to Codex and it’s way less annoying.
    • It is so benchmaxxed to “succeed at all costs” it will often do stupid things just to make the test pass or whatever. To be fair a lot of humans are like that - “I dunno but it seems to work” attitude.





  • Python is a poor choice IMO. It’s just too slow, even for web servers. Everyone says “oh it’s IO bound or database bound; Python doesn’t matter”) but in my experience it does.

    Better choices:

    • Go - very easy. Build in web stuff. Fast. Trivial to deploy.
    • Typescript, especially via something like Deno’s Fresh. Much faster than Python, better type checking, and best of all you can use TSX-based templates instead of shitty text-based ones like Jinja.
    • Rust. Definitely the hardest option, but on the plus side you will learn Rust and that’s a big plus.

  • They can be guided. For example I asked Claude to benchmark some SystemVerilog.

    First it just did time ./run.sh and I was like “no, idiot. That’s going to include the compilation/startup overhead.”

    So then it said “I’ll just increase the simulation time to amortise the startup cost.” Again I told it that was bad and to actually measure the time in SV.

    So since SV has no wall-time functions, it used $system("date") or some bollocks like that. No! I said - use DPI-C.

    Finally it did the right thing. Would it have been quicker to do it myself? Absolutely not.

    Current AI is at lazy junior engineer level (but sped up 10000 times). You just have to make sure they don’t make lazy dumb decisions. E.g. they’re going to do everything in Bash if give half a chance.

    Tbf to AI I think they’ve learned a lot of this from humans. I bet if you searched for $system in SV you will find a lot of hand crafted horrors. I’ve seen human-written C code that found an ELF symbol by system("nm ... | grep ... | awk ..."). I shit you not.