I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.
> ...but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.
I don't think so.
Even on LLM generated code, it is still not enough and you cannot trust it. They can pass the tests and still cause a regression and the code will look seemingly correct, for example in this case study [0].
AI is more than happy to declare the test wrong and “fix it” if you’re not careful. And the cherry on top is that sometimes the test could be wrong or need updating due to changed behavior. So…
I wonder if there's a startup out there selling AI-generated comments for astroturfing HN, Reddit, et al. And then I wonder if that startup is a YCombinator company...
This kind of mental model only works if you think of things as made huge shadowy blobs, not people.
dyld has one principal author, who would 100% quit and go to the press if he was told (by who?) to insert a back door. The whole org is composed of the same basic people as would be working on Linux or something. Are you imagining a mass of people in suits who learned how to do systems programming at the institute for evil?
Additionally, do you work in tech? You don’t think bugs appear organically? You don’t think creative exploitation of bugs is a thing?
Yeah, I completely reject nutritional science. Even without bribes involved, there are just too many complexities for them to draw useful conclusions. Ignored the food pyramid too.
You should try the carnivore diet and completely eliminate Vitamin C intake to prove them scientists wrong! Scurvy is just a complex myth, after all. Just like rickets, or blindness from Vitamin A deficiency.
The part I do not understand is why you then DO buy MAHA. Why is completely making things up better?
If you think nutritional science is too unreliable, I can see that perspective. The conclusion then should be “I don’t know” not “trust the people who argue with psychological techniques instead of science”.
I agree with you re: abstraction - one of the author's only points where I didn't totally agree.
But also worth noting that whenever you make an abstraction you run the risk that it's NOT going to turn out increase clarity and precision, either due to human limitation or due to changes in the problem. The author's caution is warranted because in practice this happens really a lot. I would rather work with code that has insufficient abstraction than inappropriate abstraction.
Broad strokes: absolutely. The practical reality gets tricky, though. All programming abstractions are imperfect in some regard, so the question becomes what level of imperfection can you tolerate, and is the benefit worth the cost?
I think a lot of becoming a good programmer is about developing the instincts around when it’s worth it and in what direction. To add to the complexity, there is a meta dimension of how much time you should spend trying to figure it out vs just implement something and correct it later.
As an aside, I’m really curious to see how much coding agents shift this balance.
Seems like engagement bait or a thought exercise more than a realistic project.
> "But I need to debug!"
> Do you debug JVM bytecode? V8's internals? No. You debug at your abstraction layer. If that layer is natural language, debugging becomes: "Hey Claude, the login is failing for users with + in their email."
Folks can get away without reading assembly only when the compiler is reliable. English -> code compilation by llms is not reliable. It will become more reliable, but (a) isn’t now so I guess this is a project to “provoke thought” (b) you’re going to need several nines of reliability, which I would bet against in any sane timeframe (b) English isn’t well specified enough to have “correct” compilation, so unclear if “several nines of reliability” is even theoretically possible.
I've done some work in this sort of area before, though not literally on a malloc. Yes you very much want to be careful, but ultimately it's the tests that give you confidence. Pound the heck out of it in multithreaded contexts and test for consistency.
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