The AI Overconfidence Edition

On code, software, and predictions

Noah here. With all the AI stuff I’ve been doing over at BrXnd, I’ve been trying to keep a bit of church and state and steer clear of the topic around here. But then last week, at least ten people sent me this SK Ventures piece, “Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment.” The article’s thesis is that software production is ripe to be fundamentally changed by the emergence of AI in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) that will collapse the cost of production. From the piece:

For now, however, let’s turn back to software itself. Software is even more rule-based and grammatical than conversational English, or any other conversational language. Programming languages—from Python to C++—can be thought of as formal languages with a highly explicit set of rules governing how every language element can and cannot be used to produce a desired outcome. Programming languages are the naggiest of grammar nags, which is intensely frustrating for many would-be coders (A missing colon?! That was the problem?! Oh FFS!), but perfect for LLMs like ChatGPT. 

Why is this interesting?