This. Set up your dev env and pay attention to details and get it right. Introducing probabilistic codegen before doing that is asking for trouble before you even really get started accruing tech debt.
You say "probabilistic" as if some kind of gotcha. The binary rigidness is merely an illusion that computers put up. At every layer, there's probabilistic events going on.
- Your hot path functions get optimized, probabilistically
- Your requests to a webserver are probabilistic, and most of the systems have retries built in.
- Heck, 1s and 0s operate in a range, with error bars built in. It isnt really 5V = 1 and 0V = 0.
Just because YOU dont deal with probabilistic events while programming in rust, or python doesnt mean it is inherently bad. Embrace it.
We’re comparing this to an LSP or intellisense type of system, how exactly are these probabilistic? Maybe they crash or get a memory leak every once in a while but that’s true of any software including an inference engine… I’m much more worried about the fact that I can’t guarantee that if I type in half of a variable name, that it’ll know exactly what i’m trying to type. It would be like preparing to delete a line in vim and it predicts you want to delete the next three. Even if you do 90% of the time, you have to verify its output. It’s nothing like a compiler, spurious network errors, etc (which still exist even with another layer of LLM on top).
> Just because YOU dont deal with probabilistic events while programming in ...
Runtime events such as what you enumerate are unrelated to "probabilistic codegen" the GP references, as "codegen" is short for "code generation" and in this context identifies an implementation activity.
The scheduler that puts your program on a CPU works probabilistically. There are no rigid guarentees of workloads in Linux. Those only exist in real time operating systems.
> The scheduler that puts your program on a CPU works probabilistically. There are no rigid guarentees of workloads in Linux. Those only exist in real time operating systems.
Again, the post to which you originally replied was about code generation when authoring solution source code.
This has nothing to do with Linux, Linux process scheduling, RTOS[0], or any other runtime concern, be it operating system or otherwise.
Apples and oranges.
It's frankly nonsense to tell me to "embrace it" as a phantom / strawman rebuttal about a broader concept I never said was inherently bad or even avoidable. I was talking much more specifically about non-deterministic code generation during implementation / authoring phase.
> This. Set up your dev env and pay attention to details and get it right. Introducing function declarations before knowing what assembly instructions you need to generate is asking for trouble before you even really get started accruing tech debt.
Old heads cling to their tools and yell at kids walking on lawns, completely unaware that the world already changed right under their noses.
We know the "world has changed": that's why we're yelling. The Luddites yelled when factories started churning out cheap fabric that'd barely last 10 years, turning what was once a purchase into a subscription. The villagers of Capel Celyn yelled when their homes were flooded to provide a reservoir for the Liverpool Corporation – a reservoir used for drinking water, in which human corpses lie.
This change is good for some people, but it isn't good for us – and I suspect the problems we're raising the alarm about also affect you.
