I find the perspective of outsiders on "coding" really interesting. Recently I heard Paul Kedrosky make up some cool-sounding analysis of how "coding" is perfect for "next token generators" but "finance" is really something else. His argument boiled down to "coding is inflationary" and "finance is deflationary": the prompt "make fitness app" expands into a million LoC and the prompt "analysis this financial statement and tell what's interesting" does the opposite (or something). It's insane how people with influence can have opinions that are disturbingly irrelevant at best and flat out wrong at worst.

It's hilarious to watch non-coders have opinions on us while once I form an opinion on someone's work it's somehow invalid. No, "coding" is not just "write me code". I ask it all the time to "tell me how this system is designed, how it interacts with its environment and tell me any points of particular interest". It's the same bloody process just on different concepts. That's actually what it's really good at. Your "finance" job, while I'm sure is very complex (sigh), does not contain divine elements that are somehow beyond the grasp of correlation itself. Whence do these magic elements spawn from? (The heavenly abodes?)

To write "code" effectively you have to understand your environment and clearly grasp the unstated but very present background radiation of not only your particular business but dev and even tech culture in general. The models are becoming scary good at this. I feel it's very irresponsible to keep harping on "code" as something that's somehow special. It's absolute not. It's just very, very high leverage: automate automation and you got it all. No other job has that property except perhaps AI research itself but which itself again needs code to materialize.

These models are being RL'd to death on code. I wonder what happens once some off-shoots will finally be RL'd to smithereens on law, medicine and finance. I however wouldn't start with that. Code is much more valuable because it is generative and high-leverage. There is no end to what you can achieve once you crack that. Law and medicine are uninteresting specks of dust compared to that. They are closed, solvable problems in comparison. What if "crack" "law"? This buys you absolutely nothing. You can't code up a robotic development platform with law or medicine. You can't setup infrastructure with law. It's useless for our purposes.