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Comment by groestl | Hacker News Reader

We might not even need libraries after all, since APIs, libraries and abstractions in general exist for humans to grasp complexities. Abstractions have their merits, but they have downsides too, and AI might be a way to solve them. The interesting part for me is where that ends, because it's systems all the way down, and even on a higher level abstractions exist to allow humans to make sense of the world. Services, products, companies, political parties, what if in the future we don't need any of it anymore because the abstraction is obsolete?

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Libraries do a LOT more than that. Abstractions also make LLMs more efficient, and lets some problems be handed off to much cheaper algorithms. They also mean that the way data is handled can be standardized which means you don't have to design an entire protocol from scratch every time you want to send data somewhere.

Every advantage libraries have given us still exists in the world of AI.

They also help AI to manage complexity, in just the same way.

The libraries are there for avoiding repetition. It is useful on its own without other benefits like implicit/explicit boundaries, readability by humans etc. If all lego(base unit software) pieces were unique shaped it might fit your requirements more efficiently but the cost of building those unique shaped legos explodes with the size of the lego piece required.

LLMs compress the known shapes well and fit them to solve for a problem but they are still not good enough to build from scratch a large new lego piece which fits a full problem perfectly. And such a large lego piece might not be the most efficient solution either and might be difficult to prove so.

> the cost of building those unique shaped legos explodes with the size of the lego piece required.

The cost of plastic injection molding is almost entirely due to the cost of creating the steel mold. My argument is: with LLMs we are entering a world which makes it cost effective to build many more things from scratch, which is akin to going from building things out of pre-fabricated lego pieces to 3D printing (agreeably not cost effective for everything, but for many things).

Libraries contribute to the humans being able to review things well, so no, they may still have their use cases.

An AI might be able to create everything “from scratch”, sure - but I ain’t sitting there reviewing every bespoke thing it shits out. I want that offloaded to make it maintainable.

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