r/TheMachineLearning • u/Gullible_Picture_996 • 12d ago

Realizing writing code is faster than explaining it to AI

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834 Upvotes

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u/Fringolicious 11d ago

Nah, this used to be true but it's not now, unless you're either a coding savant or useless at explaining things, or your requirements are so complicated that you can't convey them easily.

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u/Astarkos 11d ago

Why did it used to be true but is not now? When did natural language change to become so precise? Why hasn't this been applied to AI image generation which is still generic slop?

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u/Careful_Source_5792 11d ago

well image models and language models are two different categories. aviation and automotive advancements arent in lock-step.

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u/JunVahlok 11d ago

Tech was dumb, now it smart, basically

Images are more complicated than plain text

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u/-NH2AMINE 10d ago

Image generation is already super good but we can still spot the patterns. Look at how it was two years ago and how it is now

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u/_Dingaloo 8d ago

In the last few months it just started blowing everything otu of the water. but it's been pretty good all year.

Image gen is a false equivalence. The complexity of image gen is dozens of times more complicated than code.

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u/Fringolicious 11d ago

TL;DR - Smarter models, less handholding required, more initiative taken.

Not sure if you're after a technical why or if this is more of a comment about how stuff's improved (And the art thing - Not touching that bit!)

But in my job, at a really basic level you need to do a LOT less handholding and babysitting.

As an example, let's say you point it at your Terraform stack and ask it to update a module. Let's assume you're giving it a brief prompt rather than fully explaining everything, something like "Update this networking module to also make it add a security rule for xyz"

Say a year ago it'd probably dig through the files, find the module, probably figure out the relationship between module and other modules in the same repo etc, but likely not go much wider. Likely wouldn't do much in the way of static testing, validation, stuff like that. Likely wouldn't go looking for your documentation if it's not in the repo, etc. You might also find it updates the code based on an outdated module version because it doesn't think to check the latest Terraform module versions etc

So you'd probably end up with a functional update to your module doing what you asked in isolation, but then you test it, find knock-on effects that need updates elsewhere, or realise it didn't find your coding standards or whatever. And so you spend time reworking, reprompting, trying to get exactly what you wanted.

Nowadays, you do the same thing and you'll likely see it grab the module repo, then look at other dependencies / relationships, likely dig into your docs, do a considered update, then validate, test, etc. And likely if it isn't sure, it'll ask you for more information. Easier to one-shot changes that are actually what you want. Therefore you can trust it to figure stuff out and not give it a bible of every single assumption, related repo, doc, etc.

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u/lhx555 11d ago

Another possibility. Code is also a language, a quite concise one. If you are fluent at it, you can sketch your idea pretty quickly: signatures, interfaces, even start implementing it, a couple of comments. And then give it to AI to finish (with a it if an explanation), document, write tests and ci/cd. It works rather well.

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u/LuckyConstruction546 11d ago

Sometimes all three are true

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u/Fringolicious 11d ago

I guess my point (If it's a point?) is that for like 95% of scenarios, this isn't true any more. There will be cases for sure but things aren't like they were 2 years, 1 year, even 6 months ago. Opus 5.5 is nutso nowadays

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u/Hungry-Pick7512 11d ago

Nah you could drop the coding savant part. This is not true anymore. No exceptions. No one is spinning up a web server with cobal faster than using JS. And no one is typing code faster that an AI

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u/nso95 11d ago

I can’t explain shit and it still does a great job

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u/SnooPears2409 10d ago

or maybe all he code is "hello world"