I did a lot of work on intentional programming at Microsoft back in the 90s on C++, and also intentional software later.
Our approach was quite a bit different to Kiczales at the time. We had "attribute providers" which were essentially compiler plugin DLLs.
These plugins could register themselves at various parse points and add work like enzymes on the AST.
So here we have a compile time attribute that writes all the boilerplate to add windowing support to a class. Adding message maps, hooking up the dispatch, life cycle etc.
[Window]
class MyWindow { };
It worked, but as others pointed out, it suffers from combinatorial explosion, and issues with debug ability.
That said, as long as you stick within well defined verticals it was still very useful and saved a lot of typing, and reduced cognitive load.
I have thought quite a lot about modern versions of this using LLMs and I can see why the article notices a parallel to prompts or spec based designs.
At some point I tried to make a version of the system we built almost 30 years ago, but using an LLM as the preprocessor instead of rigid AST hackery.
It works a lot better, and you can approach a more continuous interpolations between intent blocks and generated code. Even the combinatorial problem largely disappears.
I stopped working on it though because I couldn't really see anyone wanting to adopt a new language or some whacked out extensions these days.
Maybe it does have its place though in certain fields. It might be worth having another go at it with fresh hindsight.
> Housing demand is back up. Not just single family homes but also condos.
Hmmm, the median house price is $2.1M.
> It's a good time to live in SF.
It seems pretty K shaped.
Great time to live in SF and Bay Area iff you are an AI researcher, founder, VC, executive at one of the hyper-scalers, or a senior engineer with massive equity package in the few winning companies.
Not entirely sure if it's a great time to live in SF if you work at a bakery, are a Barista at Starbucks or even a mid tier SWE.
Just as a reminder, Google DeepMind is right here in the UK, and there are hundreds, thousands of top AI researchers that are foundational to everything that the US is doing, as much, if more so than the Chinese contributions.
We need compute, yes, but we certainly aren't short of talent if we put our minds to it, and many of them are already here.
I'm working on a durable ECS system, mostly for games, though generally useful. It's to exercise a storage engine I have been building with Git like properties.
Should be able to turn the computer off at the mains half way through, then restart and instantly carry on without any loading phase as if nothing had happened.
Well that's the dream.
Now the lower layers work I'm mapping out the actual ECS part and what the API will be like.
I'm quite enjoying it and it's a really fun challenge.
That's certainly one way to do it, but where would you place them?
No, but seriously, you could imagine what we witnessed playing out in a high stakes Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton style fable.
The fiery blowhard Pentagon chief, the arrogant know it all tech bro lab head, an alarm being called in from a remote office and surfaced through Amazon.
Half of me wonders if it was all a live simulation/drill, to practice what happens if a much more serious event occurs, and a model needed to be quickly shut down.
Under such conditions we would be looking at Amazon's actions through a much more benevolent lens.
Not saying it has been, but it certainly crossed my mind as something worth doing regardless.
Right, but I am talking about the general government response trajectory.
And also, even though Anthropic may not have labs themselves directly, there is a funnel of research that comes in the form of papers and conference tracks.
The AI community is pretty tight knit, and not having access to frontier models affects everyone.
I wonder how this is going to work given half the people working at the AI labs are Chinese foreign nationals, and even more interesting, DeepMind is based in the UK. Plus there is an awful lot of AI research going on all across Europe, especially Switzerland, that is feeding straight into the US major labs.
Banning foreign nationals from using your technology only makes sense if you don't rely on foreign nationals to build it in the first place.
Or are we so far along now we think we don't need them anymore.
I'm wondering if they might go for a restricted access model that goes beyond passport or citizenship, where people can still use it, but you have to be individually vetted, and put on a list to get security clearance.
A Ryzen 9 laptop with 24GB of RAM and a 5070 is £1200. This thing better be dirt cheap. Basically add the price of the RAM, and deduct the price of having to use ARM and being forced into a Windows ecosystem. So what's that total? £1500 to £2000 depending on who you ask? Who is this for? Not gamers, not average Windows users, not professional developers or content creators.
Thing is, hardly any games are optimized for ARM. And no serious AI development occurs on Windows.
I understand that you want multiple models running concurrently, but then 128GB is starting to look cramped.
It's a bold move that goes one to one against Apple and AMD Strix Halo.
I'm looking at it and thinking, if it can run Linux at a fair price it could be great.
I'm curious. I am thinking, what does a non developer buy this thing, take it home, and do with it.
What does the unboxing and first 24 hours look like?
A mixture of emotions somewhere between thinking you are living in the future, and frustration at not actually being able to do much.
The target audience seems like wealthy early adopters, but that is about it.
Hah, I did this on CB radio here in the UK last year, which was hella fun. I created a dashboard to run the whole thing with hosts/presenters and guests. Different LLM providers with different personas. I had a way where you could clone a persona from a known person, so one of my stock presenters was Art Bell, for example. Then I had all kinds of strange guests. Well it was just for fun so the setup was incredibly janky, but it did work, and as you mentioned, I found it quite hilarious as well - and unhinged! I did want to get into the management side of it too but got tired of the project. I still think it would be incredibly cool for community radio, especially as agents can pull from local newspapers, events or facebook, so they can talk about a missing cat or the state of the pot-holes. Very cool stuff OP!
I used it to add a MIDI driver and support to my OS this afternoon. Worked okay, but I agree it is a bit clunky yet. I think it is pretty good for a preview release. Much better than nothing.
Our approach was quite a bit different to Kiczales at the time. We had "attribute providers" which were essentially compiler plugin DLLs.
These plugins could register themselves at various parse points and add work like enzymes on the AST.
So here we have a compile time attribute that writes all the boilerplate to add windowing support to a class. Adding message maps, hooking up the dispatch, life cycle etc.
[Window] class MyWindow { };
It worked, but as others pointed out, it suffers from combinatorial explosion, and issues with debug ability.
That said, as long as you stick within well defined verticals it was still very useful and saved a lot of typing, and reduced cognitive load.
I have thought quite a lot about modern versions of this using LLMs and I can see why the article notices a parallel to prompts or spec based designs.
At some point I tried to make a version of the system we built almost 30 years ago, but using an LLM as the preprocessor instead of rigid AST hackery.
It works a lot better, and you can approach a more continuous interpolations between intent blocks and generated code. Even the combinatorial problem largely disappears.
I stopped working on it though because I couldn't really see anyone wanting to adopt a new language or some whacked out extensions these days.
Maybe it does have its place though in certain fields. It might be worth having another go at it with fresh hindsight.