50-year coder claps back at Terence Tao's 'terrible AI proofs' complaint: elegance is your job
esrtweet · x · 2026-10-25
A veteran developer with 50 years of programming experience sharply rebuts Terence Tao's complaint that AI generates 'terrible proofs' lacking elegance. His argument: elegance and explainability are the human mathematician's job — 'it's not the chisel's job to make the sculpture beautiful.' He says he has accepted that he'll never again hand-write significant code and now steers and quality-checks AI, and suggests Tao would complain even harder if AI truly had mathematical taste — because then he'd be obsolete.
Related event: 50-Year Programmer Fires Back at Terence Tao Over AI Proofs(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- dw2: humanity has one or two normal years left — three scenarios for 2029 — Chris_Armstrong · 2026-10-25
- willcb: solve continual learning and usersim RL envs become the AGI game-changer — willcb · 2026-10-25
- Jonas Nahm pushes back on NYT's TSMC-as-Apple analogy for the Arizona fab — pstAsiatech · 2026-10-25
- Math arXiv paper counts diverge by field: steady growth 2022-2025, then a shift in 2026 — IgorCarron · 2026-10-25
- AI experts couple strong benchmark forecasts with low-resolution folk models of society, sparking bottlenecks debate — random_walker · 2026-10-25
- Anil Seth's advice for AI-consciousness believers: go touch grass — anilkseth · 2026-10-25