this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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How is it useful to type millions of solutions out that are wrong to come up with the right one? That only works on a research project when youre searching for patterns. If you are trying to code, it needs to be right the first time every time it's run, especially if it's in a production environment.
Well actually there's ways to automate quality assurance.
If a programmer reasonably knew that one of these 10,000 files was the "correct" code, they could pull out quality assurance tests and find that code pretty dang easily, all things considered.
Those tests would eliminate most of the 9,999 wrong ones, and then the QA person could look through the remaining ones by hand. Like a capcha for programming code.
The power usage still makes this a ridiculous solution.
That seems like an awful solution. Writing a QA test for every tiny thing I want to do is going to add far more work to the task. This would increase the workload, not shorten it.
I do agree it's not realistic, but it can be done.
I have to assume the people that allow the AI to generate 10,000 answers expect that to be useful in some way, and am extrapolating on what basis they might have for that.
Unit tests would be it. QA can have a big back and forth with programming, usually. Unlike that, QA can just throw away a failed solution in this case, with no need to iterate on that case.
I mean, consider the quality of AI-generated answers. Most will fail with the most basic QA tools, reducing 10,000 to hundreds, maybe even just dozens of potential successes. While the QA phase becomes more extensive afterwards, its feasible.
All we need is... Oh right, several dedicated nuclear reactors.
The overall plan is ridiculous, overengineered, and solved by just hiring a developer or 2, but someone testing a bunch of submissions that are all wrong in different ways is in fact already in the skill set of people teaching computer science in college.