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AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

blog.codeanywhere.com

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Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#41

Post by nixpulvis »

kneebonian wrote: post #32

Here's my concern with this. Is that the AI is good at generating "mostly correct" code, that will have subtle errors, so less skilled coders just take the output of whatever the LLM spits and assume it's correct, later it turns out there is a bug. The person who submitted the code doesn't understand the code, because they didn't bother learning it just that it was mostly correct. Instead of discovering and fixing th…

> Is that the AI is good at generating "mostly correct" code, that will have subtle errors, so less skilled coders just take the output of whatever the LLM spits and assume it's correct, later it turns out there is a bug.

Not unlike the code generated by the fresh out of bootcamp, careless rookie, who isn't trying to make things work so-much-as collect a paycheck. But hell, at this point I need a job too, maybe I should swallow my morals and submit AI solutions as well?

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#42

Post by brookst »

notpachet wrote: post #30
tippytippytango wrote: post #14

I hate to even reply to this because it's falling into the author's trap. But, it's the typical new-tech clickbait. There's no data to back up their alarmist, knee-jerk hand wringing, just like when people thought novels were bad for people [1], or when writing would ruin our memories [2]. This article will be looked at similarly in a few years. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0... [2]…

> just like when people thought novels were bad for people, or when writing would ruin our memories In fairness, there are also lots of counterexamples where the long-term consequences of a new technology were not adequately foreseen, and ended up posing huge problems in the long run. So I don't think it's unreasonable for people to look skeptically on these sorts of tools.

Agree, but in general those unforeseen consequences differed from the moral panic at the time. Saying “this will have consequences and we should, IDK, know that” is different from prophesying specific dooms without evidence.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#43

Post by brookst »

blackbear_ wrote: post #39
tippytippytango wrote: post #14

I hate to even reply to this because it's falling into the author's trap. But, it's the typical new-tech clickbait. There's no data to back up their alarmist, knee-jerk hand wringing, just like when people thought novels were bad for people [1], or when writing would ruin our memories [2]. This article will be looked at similarly in a few years. [1] https://archive.nytimes.com/op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0... [2]…

By definition, there's never any data to judge innovations. Obviously some opinions turns out to be wrong, but if everybody just waits for data before doing anything, nothing will ever happen. So if you don't like what they are saying, at least try to provide a counterargument.

“There is no evidence supporting that argument” is a counter argument.

Or maybe it’s better to say that hand-wringing is not an argument that merits a counter argument.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#44

Post by pjkundert »

13years wrote: post #10
pjkundert wrote: post #2

Learning to code with an AI assistant is pretty much the ideal way to learn and understand the profound limitations of LLM based AIs. After just a few minutes, the outputs presented by your AI in a highly confident manner will be shown to be … suspect, or completely wrong. It quickly casts a shadow over everything else it confidently spews forth as “truth”.

This is an important point I've also made. "How can we reasonably verify the output and know it is correct? At least when using AI to create code, we can easily test the code to see if it performs according to the desired behavior. However, that is no easy task for most general information. It is unclear at this point how difficult it will be to improve AI in this regard." from - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-…

This is really one of the great things about Twitter, etc.

Follow a few people who are proven (by their predictive accuracy) to be experts in their fields.

Their comments on the quality of claims in their field of expertise is much more valuable than the reports being made by "experts" presented on corporate media, or by LLMs.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#45

Post by sorokod »

brookst wrote: post #37

“Automobiles: a convenient crutch for people who can’t ride horses, or a recipe for disaster?” “Word processors: a convenient crutch for people who can’t type, or a recipe for disaster?” God these headlines are going to be hilarious in ten years. Yes, AI code is primitive today. The first implementations sometimes get basic stuff wrong and often get complicated stuff wrong. But the state of the art is evolving daily.…

Perhaps in ten years, till then I'd like software to be clearly labeled with "contains AI generated code" when that is the case.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#46

Post by antonvs »

kneebonian wrote: post #32

Here's my concern with this. Is that the AI is good at generating "mostly correct" code, that will have subtle errors, so less skilled coders just take the output of whatever the LLM spits and assume it's correct, later it turns out there is a bug. The person who submitted the code doesn't understand the code, because they didn't bother learning it just that it was mostly correct. Instead of discovering and fixing th…

What you're describing will primarily happen at incompetent orgs without good development practices, code review, good management, good hiring, etc.

If anything, a tool that reveals and punishes incompetence is good for everyone. I'm not the world's most enthusiastic capitalist, but in this case, I think we can let the market sort it out.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#47

Post by photochemsyn »

ChatGPT and Github CoPilot are best viewed as tools with limitations, but there are ways to check their output. How about asking ChatGPT to look for flaws in a snippet of Github CoPilot-generated code, or using the auto-comment function on CoPilot to do the same with some ChatGPT-generated code?

This is a decent way to check machine learning systems. I haven't tried it in a while, but if you take a text in English and run it through about five different languages sequentially on Google Translate, then go back to English, the result can be interesting.

The author's point might apply to people who are learning a computer language for the very first time. You have to learn the low-level intrinsic complexity by hand, it can't just be dropped into your head in a big chunk. To paraphrase Euclid, "There is no royal road to geometry, or to programming."

Where these tools are pretty great is when having to write something in a new language. For example, if you've never used Javascript but are familiar with C, you might ask, "what's the JS equiavalent of a C struct", or if with Python, "how do I constuct the JS struct equivalent, with its fields being the keys from this Python dict" and then "how do I populate the fields correctly using this json object as the source" and so on.

However, this approach could get one into trouble, if you didn't know what object lifetime was, or what scope was all about, or the difference between a shallow copy and a deep copy, why having many references to a single object might result in data corruption, etc, etc.

Also, often the output or recommendation is just wrong, or very poor code style, so it needs further checking with search engines, usually something like "known issues with library x" etc. That's why I'm not really convinced paying for them, especially on a limited budget, is worth it, at least not quite yet.

Incidentally, I really dislike the subscription model all these online services promote, with no option for just purchasing a service for a given block of time and not having to manually halt the payment.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#48

Post by antonvs »

burnished wrote: post #36

Was this article AI written? This is exactly the same format of argument that convinced me as a learner to use notepad++ for years, which I now believe to be a garbage idea. IDEs provide so much important contextual information - a copilot program to show you different techniques would be helpful in a similar vein. Caveat: chatGPT is a chat program, that it can produce working code in places is a coincidence, it woul…

> the same format of argument that convinced me as a learner to use notepad++ for years

Offtopic, but there was a time when that wasn't an entirely specious argument: back when most major IDEs were very heavyweight and bloated, think Eclipse or Netbeans.

They've improved an enormous amount since then, both in their performance and general UX, as well as in the important assist features they provide, to the point that if you're not using those today, you're definitely hampering your productivity.

There's some relevance to the current situation, which is that these AIs are certainly going to improve, probably very rapidly.

> Caveat: chatGPT is a chat program, that it can produce working code in places is a coincidence

Is it? OpenAI has the Codex models - https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/codex :

> The Codex models are descendants of our GPT-3 models that can understand and generate code. Their training data contains both natural language and billions of lines of public code from GitHub.

...but I don't know how/if those might be integrated into ChatGPT.

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#49

Post by leobg »

kneebonian wrote: post #32

Here's my concern with this. Is that the AI is good at generating "mostly correct" code, that will have subtle errors, so less skilled coders just take the output of whatever the LLM spits and assume it's correct, later it turns out there is a bug. The person who submitted the code doesn't understand the code, because they didn't bother learning it just that it was mostly correct. Instead of discovering and fixing th…

So how about just prompting it with the task of not only producing the code, but also test cases to go along with it?

Somebody please make a SaaS out of this idea, with a fancy tailwind sales page and a “generous free tier”. :-P

Re: AI assistants: The convenient crutch for new developers or a recipe for disaster

#50

Post by nkko »

burnished wrote: post #36

Was this article AI written? This is exactly the same format of argument that convinced me as a learner to use notepad++ for years, which I now believe to be a garbage idea. IDEs provide so much important contextual information - a copilot program to show you different techniques would be helpful in a similar vein. Caveat: chatGPT is a chat program, that it can produce working code in places is a coincidence, it woul…

We are trying to build a workflow and it goes like this: - we sketch the general idea for the article in Notion - we use ChatGPT to expand on the topic and explore contrarian perspectives to validate the idea - I do the final edit and use Grammarly and Quilbot to ensure clarity and fluency - result goes onto our 400k subs newsletter (from a 1mil list of our users who opened any of our newsletters at least once) - feedback is used to improve on the idea which goes on our blog

From the content creator's perspective, AI tools are of immense help. Finally, we as a small team can allow ourselves to find time and create content instead of being stuck in a constant development loop.

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