this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
289 points (99.0% liked)

Technology

68244 readers
4237 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

I keep hearing good things however I have not yet seen any meaningful results for the stuff I would use such a tool for.

I've been working on network function optimization at hundreds of gigabit per second for the past couple of years. Even with MTU-sized packets you are only given approximately 200 ns for processing (this assumes without batching). Optimizations generally involve manual prefetching and using/abusing NIC offload features to minimize atomic instructions (this is also running on arm, where atomic fetch and add in gcc is compiled into a function that does lw, ll, sc and takes approximately 8 times the regular memory access time for a write). Current AI assisted agents cannot generate efficient code that runs at line rate. There are no textbooks or blogs that give a detailed explanation of how these things work. There are no resources for it to be trained on.

You'll find a similar problem if you try to prompt them to generate good RDMA code. At best you'll find something that barely works, and almost always of the code cannot efficiently utilize the latency reduction RDMA provides over traditional transport protocols. The generated code usually looks like how a graduate CS student may think RDMA works, but is usually completely unusable, either requiring additional PCIe round-trips or has severe thrashing issues with main memory.

My guess is that these tools are ridiculously good at stuff it can find examples of online. However for stuff that have no examples, it is woefully under prepared and you still need a programmer to manually do the work line by line.