Is looping ready to roll? Experts split on the future of coding

On the closing day of the AI Engineer World's Fair, industry leaders debated whether loops are ready...

On the closing day of the AI Engineer World's Fair, industry leaders debated whether loops are ready for mainstream use and whether humans still have a place in coding.

On the loops-now side, Geoff Huntley, founder of Latent Patterns, was understandably bullish. He said that over two years ago he was at Canva and watched engineers prompting repeatedly and realized that this could be done much more efficiently with a software loop.

"It's somewhat inevitable," he said. "It is not a complete silver bullet. This time next year, at the conference we're going to see a whole bunch of talks saying our factories fail, our loops fail. These are things that we are yet to figure out."

He likened the situation to the first deployments of Kubernetes, where it took the industry years to get deployment right. But when they did, it was a revolution.

Dex Horthy, CEO of HumanLayer, was less enthusiastic. Earlier in the week, he gave a keynote in which he described how — as an experiment — he'd taken humans out of the coding loop and let machines do the job. He monitored the results, and they weren't good. He felt it was clear that AI wasn't up to the job yet.

"I think the basic take here is not whether loops are good or bad," he said. "I've seen lots of people try to apply AI to this problem of having to review bots, but it doesn't feel to me like it's working."

The increasing use of loops was inevitable, he said, but too many people are rushing into the space with too little thought. A more measured approach was needed, and some of the most enthusiastic early adopters would get their fingers burned.

The debate, done in the Oxford-style timed format, was closely fought, and the audience was asked to vote on either side. Unfortunately, the stage lights meant the moderator couldn't count votes, but — based on our view of the audience — Horthy's viewpoint won by a narrow margin.