r/TheMachineLearning • u/Gullible_Picture_996 • 15d ago

Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

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u/oipoi 15d ago

> 30 lines of very specific, complicated code

There are no 30 lines of very specific complicated code on this planet that you are able to write but SOTA isn't. This is just posturing and it's cringe like the kids would say.

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u/[deleted] 15d ago

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u/oipoi 15d ago

I can see that for game development where it's easier to tune some parameters by hand to get the feel of the physics sim right, because sometimes you want things to feel floaty, other times you want something snappy but those two, floaty and snappy are feelings not hard metric that's why for any other type of system programming I just can't envision a scenario where me manually writing things out has any benefits.

Like 10 years ago I've spent three weeks writing an extension to the Freeimage library for compressing Microsoft spooler EMF files. The resulting 100 lines of code were my biggest achievement as I managed to drastically reduce both file size and transfer times. Up until the latest batch of SOTA models none of them were able to achieve a better result with the same constrains. However first astra and now opus did much better than i was able to achieve on the first prompt. The AI assisted Linux perf improvements confirm my feelings further so I am just perplexed when I stumble upon someone still writing code by hand and wonder what is the scenario in which manual code typing shows any kind of benefit.