In the face of generative AI coding agents, the role of human-led architecture becomes even more important in the crafting of software-intensive systems.
All architecture is design, but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the set of significant design decisions that shape the form and function of a system, where significant as measured by cost of change.
As such, remember that coding agents are reasonably good at transforming prompts into code, but they are not particularly good at making decisions that balance the static and dynamic forces on a system in order to yield a reasonably optimal solution: this is where human judgment, human understanding, human knowledge, and human experience shine.
What struck me about this photo is that Trump and Xi invited to their dinner table: an immigrant from South Africa, two Taiwanese immigrants that came to the US as children, and a gay kid from Alabama, all of whom moved to Silicon Valley to make a dent in the universe.
Yann LeCun: we are not going to get human-level intelligence or AGI by just scaling LLMs.
โThereโs absolutely no way in hell.โ
โThe idea that weโre gonna have a country of geniuses in a data center, thatโs complete BS.โ
โIt may feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you.โ
โBut itโs not a PhD.โ
โItโs a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not one that can invent solutions to new problems.โ
Yann LeCun: we are not going to get human-level intelligence or AGI by just scaling LLMs.
โThereโs absolutely no way in hell.โ
โThe idea that weโre gonna have a country of geniuses in a data center, thatโs complete BS.โ
โIt may feel like you have a PhD sitting next to you.โ
โBut itโs not a PhD.โ
โItโs a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not one that can invent solutions to new problems.โ
In my career, compilers have always generated better code that I ever could have. I find this to be increasingly so with contemporary AIs.
But you know what neither can do better than me?
Knowing what software to write, what shape it should take, and what I want it to do.
The entire history of software engineering has been one of rising levels of abstraction.
This is how it was, how it is now, and how it shall be in the fullness of time.
Contemporary AI IMHO is perhaps better named statistical intelligence.
Cybernetics, as promoted by Norbert Wiener, involved principles such as homeostasis and communication architecture, which are orthogonal to the nature of LLMs.