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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   5693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Does it have to be a coding problem? I understand that there are time and financial constraints that prevent you from trying a lot of what is being requested, but I also understand @iprayiam3's criticism that it looks like you're cherry picking for something you thing the LLM can do.

This was largely my response. The claims the AI-believer crowd make about AI go far, far beyond coding. Coding by itself is a single, relatively niche field. AI could displace all the coders and if you don't work in software development yourself, would you notice?

Let's say, for the sake of argument, AI can code as well or better than the best human coders.

As an AI skeptic, I am not particularly moved by this, and I don't think this gets you anywhere near AGI.

The important distinction to make here is between coding and software engineering.

I'd argue SOTA LLM's are already, if perhaps not superhuman, already better than the vast majority of humans at tasks that can be defined as purely coding. Any SOTA LLM ranks among the best humans in the world at competitive programming, and recent model/harness combinations appear to also be superhuman at providing code that passes tests for a given spec (which is a bit like a vastly scaled up competitive programming task).

This is distinct from human parity in software engineering, but the bottlenecks there seem to be highly general; long-horizon planning, continual learning, taste, executive function, lack of correcting their own errors etc.

If a drop-in AI software engineer existed that could surpass those limitations, it's difficult to imagine that it would not also be AGI.

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