r/pcmasterrace • u/Wargulf • 28d ago

News/Article PS5 Linux lead quits as open-source projects have become “a bunch of noobs using LLMs” that “they don’t even understand”

https://frvr.com/blog/news/ps5-linux-lead-quits-as-open-source-projects-have-become-a-bunch-of-noobs-using-llms-that-they-dont-even-understand/
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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

I'm so worried what swiss cheese code is going to exist in every aspect of my life 3-5 years from now.

It's been in the room for decades at this point, my man. Tech debt will destroy civilization someday.

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u/DudeDudenson PC Master Race 28d ago

Ah but we accelerated the growth of tech debt to levels never seen before

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u/grahamulax 28d ago

Actually, for real, I’m gonna say that I started my project over four times because of all the useless junk it had in it

So then I was like OK I’ll try number two and keep it simple

Nope

All right, surely try number three

Nope

So I’ve begun writing things separate from each other and then try to combine them

Oops, nope still regresses

It’s really frustrating!! I would’ve been done with my project so long ago, but then again I would’ve never started my project at all without AI. I’m an animator by trade but a technical artist so I understand systems really well and how things integrate into each other, even if they’re not meant to!

Using my perspective of animation actually works a lot with coding, and it helped me understand the vocabulary and definition definitions

But even now after four years

It still feels like two steps backwards, one step forward as two of those steps backwards is one is unknown, and the other is just pure regression

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u/Jaded-Asparagus-2260 27d ago

If nobody knows tech debt exist, does it really exist? Maybe it's the user who's wrong.

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u/mxzf 28d ago

Yeah, but it used to take years to create years worth of tech debt; now we've got a tool for producing years worth of tech debt in mere weeks.

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u/OrionRBR 5800x | X470 Gaming Plus | 16GB TridentZ | PCYes RTX 3070 28d ago

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

I dunno. We've been doing a pretty bangup job since we were ordered to move from on prem to the cloud :(

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u/shabado-it 28d ago

Yeah, I mean AI doesn't write worse code than most devs I work with. It write better code that I do for that matter.
The issue is that it makes mistakes of understanding, misses context and makes bad assumptions.

It won't forever though

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

It won't forever though

This is the classic fallacy that previous performance and/ or growth is indicative of future performance/ growth. No technology in the history of the world has followed that assumption. It's more likely to become a more useful Clippy than a super intelligence.

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u/DesireeThymes 28d ago

Unfortunately the problem with errors is that when combined with other errors they multiply in complexity.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but the difference between current AI and a human is critical thinking.

A human who is writing code is generating some thoughts behind the code they generate, whereas AI is just predicting what letters and words go next.

The problem is not the super intelligent computer, the problem is the supercomputer given access to everything that lacks human intelligence and human emotion.

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u/shabado-it 28d ago

Obviously I was being overly brief.

What I am saying is that the only reason AI isn't the best software engineer at my work place is that it can handle less context than humans, and it's terrible at knowing the boundaries of that context.

If context windows get large enough, or AI gets better at identifying the limits of it's context, then it would be better at the overwhelming number of day to day SE tasks.

I'm not expecting it to get better at writing code at this point, just handling larger context.

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

If context windows get large enough, or AI gets better at identifying the limits of it's context, then it would be better at the overwhelming number of day to day SE tasks.

That is an unbounded, ill defined requirement. At what point (calendar date and/ or measurable milestone) do you expect the context window to be sufficient? Barring an actual roadmap, it's all just speculative investment. All speculative investments blow up in the end.

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u/Callidonaut 28d ago

Another Clippy??? Oh, god, the horror....

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u/Metallibus 28d ago edited 28d ago

Yeah... This pattern is what clued me into the realization of why AI started growing like wildfire. It was very apparent to me that it was a large jump in usefulness, as it could do a somewhat better job at internet search when search quality was taking a nose dive, but that it was just that jump. Now we've made a few more strides of "progress" and the modern mentality of "previous performance -> future performance" has just absolutely run wild with it.

There was a large jump when we went from feeding these things a couple books to feeding them the entire internet. We don't have another "internet of internets" to feed them next.

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u/All_Thread 9800X3D | 5080 | X870E-E | 48GB DDR5 28d ago edited 28d ago

Airplanes have steadily improved through their entire history as well as gas engines, guns/artillery, medical care has been only improved through history with better imaging and surgery with down to the microscopic level now. 3D printer have just improved sense their implementation from the 90's. Look at lathes and mills just steady improvements from belt powered to tape, to NC, to CNC from 3 axis to 5 to 7 with greater accuracy and speed every iteration

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

Yes. Steadily. That is a flattened, inverse geometric curve. People are investing in this tech like it's the opposite.

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u/All_Thread 9800X3D | 5080 | X870E-E | 48GB DDR5 28d ago

I mean if you consider we went from a bicycle powered aircraft to a jet engine aircraft 36 years later. I would not call that particular faze steady. Through that entire period people knew they could make a better engine and plane and were spending ungodly resources on it. Airplanes clearly show past performance leading to future gains. As well as lots of things I mentioned

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago edited 28d ago

Airplanes clearly show past performance leading to future gains.

I can't tell if you're being deliberately obtuse, or you seriously don't understand what a geometric curve looks like.

Big jump early on: Wright brothers through WW2 was a huge jump.

Smaller (but still big jump): Jet age post-WW2. You could fly anywhere in the world in less than a week (at INCREDIBLE expense.)

Smaller jump still: 70's - 90's. Same performance, but cheaper.

Smaller jump: 90's to today. Bigger planes, more fuel efficient. Cheaper.

Do you see how each subsequent jump is less impactful than the last? As technology reaches maturity, it becomes more difficult and capital intesive to improve. AI is following the same trajectory (as AI is defined as LLM technology.) It will continue to improve, but it will never become the ur-tech that people are touting it as barring some other technological breakthrough. LLMs are stochastic parrots. They do not think. They do not reason. They are literally incapable of originality.

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u/All_Thread 9800X3D | 5080 | X870E-E | 48GB DDR5 28d ago

Oh I fully understand, you just think it's 1941 for LLM right now. Where it could be 1917 for LLM's to put it into the airplanes terms and we aren't even close to the jet engine yet.

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

Based on what? The statistical model is well understood at this point. The only thing every AI firm is currently doing is throwing compute at it to increase complexity in some baseless hope that there is some critical mass they need to hit to fundamentally change the way the model behaves. You can play with the weights, training data, and size all you want. The underlying algorithm remains the same. If I build a computer with a 500THz x86-64 CPU and 900 exabytes of RAM, it isn't going to suddenly gain sentience any more than a hammer will. 99% of the people talking about this tech fundamentally misunderstand what it does and how it works. That leads to unbridled speculation because everybody will speculate it can do whatever they want it to because they don't understand that it is a stochastic parrot. Business leaders are already seeing that isn't the case.

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u/seams 28d ago

I'm sure you didn't intend to, but it's really funny that this is literally the exact line people used to use for crypto and nfts.

Except instead of planes, they were using the internet as an example.

"The internet started as just a few homes, and now it's the whole world! NFTs will do the same, it's in the very early days of the technology! They will revolutionize the world!"

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u/MinimumSilver5814 28d ago

It took the innovation needs of two world wars to fuel that progress, so I’d argue it’s somewhat of an outlier.

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u/Metallibus 28d ago

I mean, yeah. Decent analogy. Airplanes have improved significantly in the past 40 years. And it still takes me the same amount of time to fly across the country as it took my parents to do the same 40 years ago.

Things can improve without effectively doing anything different. Planes got more efficient. Maybe AI will allows us to generate more slop per unit of power. That doesn't mean it'll actually effectively do anything novel.

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u/Available-Square619 28d ago

Lmao so ignorant that ppl out here still think like you.

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

You're right, This Time is Different! New Paradigm!

Why do people like you ignore the past so fervently? I've lived through 4 of these New Paradigms now (and counting.) I look forward to the incredible investment opportunity in about 18 months (or less.)

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u/NobodyKnowsImFamous 28d ago

4? The only thing sorta comparable is the internet, no? What else are we including here?

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

  • Savings and Loan Scandal: The Fed will backstop us banks against interest rate risk, so let's loan fucking every dollar we have!

  • Dotcom Bubble: There is intrisic value in websites, we don't need to show revenue! Business is changed forever!

  • GFC: Savings and Loan Scandal 2: Electric Boogaloo - Underwrite loans to everyone, Ginnie and Freddie will buy all these things off us, so there's no risk! Hey, let's sell to private investors, too! New financialization paradigm! Literally can't go tits up!

  • AI: It's a stochastic parrot that we can sell to executives and non-tech/ statistics people. It's a magic machine that will revolutionize work and automate all the jobs! Entropy no longer exists! We have killed god! Give us all the money forever!

*Bonus: Crypto - Let's use append-only databases to make fraud and drug dealing global and compatible with the internet 2 age! New currency paradigm!

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u/mirrorball_for_me 28d ago

It does write worse code than me and most code I personally reviewed. Anytime someone exclaim it does anything more than increase throughput, I already know everything I need about that dev’s expertise.

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u/mxzf 28d ago

Yeah, it's basically just a dozen junior devs in a trenchcoat that can crap out a whole mountain of code that's not entirely unlike what you asked for.

But typing code was never the slow part to begin with, it was always designing and reviewing code.

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u/mirrorball_for_me 28d ago edited 28d ago

I’d go even further and say that coding was never the bottleneck. Discovery usually is, and companies are both removing designers and adding coding agents at the same time, further deteriorating the upstream-downstream balance. The end result is a lot of features that, if they work at all, nobody wants or solve nobody’s problems.

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u/Metallibus 28d ago

I'd also add that foresight, architecture design, maintainability, parsability, etc are also all way more important than writing code. As they say, you write code once, but it gets read by a person thousands of times. The writing isn't the hard part.

This is all just basics of software engineering. AI is absolutely horrendous at all of it. I wouldn't even consider AI a junior dev because I expect to be able to teach these concepts to a junior and have them learn how to do so.

AI is just a hundred script kiddies in a trench coat clobbering things together. And every time you ask it to change any of those things, it tears the room down and starts over.

If I had a junior dev that would receive PR feedback, entirely start over and rewrite it, and then make the same mistakes again on the next PR, I would not be working with them for long.

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u/kingfofthepoors 7700 64gb ddr5 6000 4070 super -- good enough 28d ago

This right here is 100% accurate AI is a better coder than anybody in this conversation but it's not necessarily a better programmer or engineer as like you said it doesn't understand context it doesn't understand purpose and since it can't understand those things there will always be issues with what it does but if you are intelligent pay attention to the code being written and really go through it AI is a great tool however if you don't know those things all you're doing is opening yourself up for a lot of fucking liability and headaches down the road

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

That's why I don't hire coders. I hire software engineers. There's a reason they make $150k+ and it isn't because they can write good code.

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u/nanotree 28d ago

I'm glad some else makes this distinction. You need software engineers, not just developers who convert requirements to code.

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

Coding is the IT equivalent of plumbing. It has a use, but not a very valuable one. I run 3 development teams at a large bank and not even my junior developers spend more than 15% of their time in an IDE. The architecture/ system design, governance, and roadmap is wher the value is, not the code.

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u/nanotree 28d ago

This is what people who went for a comp sci degree aiming only for the advertised salaries are finding out. The salaries were not that high because they need fingers to code. They need highly skilled labor. There was a time when coding was a skill as such. Those days are gone now when ~80% of software is CRUD apps (not a real statistic, just a guess) and NodeJS frameworks that do all the heavy lifting. This is why extremely difficult leetcode problems became the norm bar of entry for large orgs that can't take the time to do individual screening. This is the kind of thing that programmers used to know how to do, and regularly used.

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

100%. The only places where that isn't the case is aerospace, healthcare, and banking. There's a reason it takes a month or more to get the green light to take something to prod. We cannot have a failed release. Peoples' money will disappear. Banks that lose peoples' money don't get to be banks anymore. Talking to friends in less regulated industries tell stories about failed prod promotions scares the shit out of me. If my team's CHG success rate is less than 98% for the year, we all get fired.

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u/nanotree 28d ago

I work in an a company that straddles the line. Some of their products handle payments. What I work on? Automated customer system recovery through real-time observability. Milliseconds count. Subtle changes to code can end up costing our customers thousands or hundreds of thousands of revenue, generate lots of noise that humans have to shuffle through, wasting man hours, etc. So not quite as intense as banking, but also still high enough stakes that stupid mistakes cannot be tolerated.

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u/mxzf 28d ago

Yeah, but part of the problem is that to make an engineer you realistically need someone to spend some time in the trenches writing code and seeing what the implications of it are.

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u/nanotree 28d ago

... yes? I'm not sure what your point is exactly.

It used to be pretty much implied that if you were seeking a junior programming job, you had already spent 100s of hours learning a bit about it as a hobby. And that was before the Internet when people just learned form hobbies magazines and books. With the Internet, free learning sources exploded.

I've read people's opinions that literally they believe a company is responsible for training them from almost zero knowledge. And that's just absurd. At the very least, you should probably have 100s of hours of learning if you took the time to go to school for it. But some of these people didn't even put any effort in at all.

What I'm saying is, taking an interest and investing in your skills makes you worth the risk to give a junior position. You've done the work to acquire some knowledge already. That's what's expected. If you think the employer needs to do all the work to train you, that's not what you are hired for. That's what is expected if someone is applying for a job as a retail clerk, not a software engineer.

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u/mxzf 28d ago

My point is that a lot of people want to get hired as junior devs using LLMs to crap out code (like, I'm seeing that sort of thing from junior devs working under me). But there's not really a path to get from there to being a senior dev without doing the work to actually poke through the code and see what makes everything tick.

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u/oonethirteen 28d ago

precisely this. if you haven’t gone through the hard fought battles of learning engineering and problem solving skills and don’t actually understand the languages and tech, you’ll get stuck in a box of junk. if you can direct it well and understand what it’s doing it’s a pretty damn good tool at this point

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u/nanotree 28d ago

AI is a better coder than anybody in this conversation

I do not believe this is true. It writes better code than A LOT of people because those people are not classically trained, have not developed a keen intuition for structural organization, do not take the time to learn industry standards, and do not take the time to learn how to develop their own domain-specific standards.

That's the difference between an engineer and a coder.

A coder follows patterns they are familiar with, finds patterns that fit when they don't know something and plug it into their code.

An engineer is the one who came up with those patterns you use.

I tend to work on projects that require me to be more the latter than the former. And it's up to me not to just code to requirement, but to plan ahead and drive the project towards future potential. AIs cannot code like this.

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u/kingfofthepoors 7700 64gb ddr5 6000 4070 super -- good enough 28d ago

I don't think you actually read what I wrote

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u/cscoffee10 28d ago

The issue is that theres a lack of understanding from the people who had the LLM write the code. Poorly written code in the last at least has the "oh thats acting up? Go spit on this file, kick this server, and go check this value in the database". The LLM code that has similar problems people have to spend more time tracing. Its perfectly fine if youre the kind of developer who is used to getting to getting thrown at new code bases all the time to catch a project up or inherited legacy code bases, but theres a lot of folks who can write code without knowing how to read code.

The coding tools can also handle a lot of this, but if you ask the wrong question its going to give you a lot of bad rabbit holes. All of this is a skill set inside using AI, but man I interact with so many folks that I just have 0 faith they will ever be able to figure it out.

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u/Serious-Anywhere-372 28d ago

Lmao yall think way too highly of your selves, imagine any other job talking about their sloppier/lazy Coworkers was gonna destroy civilization lmao

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u/AloneExperience7520 28d ago

Modern financial systems run on codebases that have been around since the 70's. Most of the people that really know how to fix things when they break are either about to retire or about to die. Almost nothing is documented. Many US banks have been trying to update/ migrate off these systems for YEARS and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the act. More than half have failed so far. We ended up just containerizing things on modern hardware. It's still legacy programs, though.

Someday in the nearish future, something on a mainframe job will break. Some integration will throw an error. Nobody will be around who can fix it overnight before the batch processes run. The bank will then fail to open that morning because their GL won't be balanced. It will get fixed. Eventually. In the meantime, there will probably be a run on the bank and it will go into receivership.

It's not Mad Max, but some day, your debit card may not work when you go to use it. You'll log into your online banking and your balance will be zero. You'll get your money back eventually. In the meantime, I really hope you have more than one financial institution relationship.

Trust me, I've been in this stuff for over a decade and counting.

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u/grahamulax 28d ago

Just never fire that one guy

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u/AloneExperience7520 27d ago

I would never. Unfortunately, he's going to die eventually.

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u/NoResolution6245 27d ago

Tech debt will destroy civilization someday.

Not until everything is inevitably rewritten in Rust; only to, then, be rewritten again in whatever new FOTM language people eventually find themselves invested in.