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AI teaches itself to use an API

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Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#82

So how much longer before it can discover how to use cloud-provider APIs to (assuming you've given it a credit card number or cryptocoin wallet) get more hosting for itself?

On the other hand, what’s the point, cloud providers already have good APIs and clients for almost all languages, so what’s the use of something “interpreting” the API?

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#83
post #46
post #36

So the AI can learn to use APIs that follow perfect RESTful semantics, are fully documented and intuitively behave exactly like one would expect. Our jobs are safe.

I wouldn't say so. The 'Learning by mistakes' step in the demo shows that the AI can work through these issues, presumably this can be done more efficiently than a human.

The learning from mistakes part of the example is – you tried /port_wines but the path is /wines/port instead.

But what about if the path is actually /beer and you have to pass a hidden undocumented query parameter called ?wine=1 for it to give you wines. But then the response is still of Beer objects (because that's the only thing the API validator would allow), so you have to map all the Beer fields to their equivalent Wine counterparts. But not all of them make sense, so you have to ignore them. Which ones? Ask the engineering team. Turns out the guy who wrote all this left years ago, and no one remember how it works. Someone digs up a link to a documentation page, but that internal wiki was taken down and so it returns a 404. You ping a sysadmin to see if they kept any backups. He points you to a few PBs worth of SQL dumps from an internal migration a few years ago and asks you to take a look in those. You simultaneously have to write up a status update for senior leadership which is due by end of day and give them a revised launch date for the project. They want to know why it can't be done in half the time.

The day an AI can figure all this out, I will be looking for another career. Until then I'm fine.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#84
I’m a skeptic. There is no evidence behind this tweet that the technique works. I may be mistaken, but I don’t see the authors as having a background in the field. Likewise they don’t describe the technique in any detail.

Sounds like snake oil to me, or fake it until you make it.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#85

Is there a good way/site/method to keep up to date with the latest AI projects? Seems like a lot of people are now trying to specialize these GPT AIs and I would like to find out about them as there will likely be a few that could help me with my workflows.

https://www.futuretools.io/ Seems good

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#87
post #5

I’ve recently thought about iron man movies, where tony stark actually designs stuffs by simply talking to jarvis. I’ve always thought « if only i could have those kind of tools available, i would too be able to design crazy stuffs ». We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI ». That’s how i choose to think about AI tools for developers from now o…

damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI

I was watching one of the movies and Stark was flying around some baddie castle/base. He tells Jarvis to locate all the missile placements and, when that's done, he tells Jarvis to target them.

That was when I thought, "oh, he's just a middle manager now" and lost interest.

I'm less concerned that AI tools will replace developers in the short term, and more concerned that it will encourage incompetent management to try their hand at "contributing" to projects using AI tools, creating more headaches for the developers. Kind of like how Blackberries made managers feel super productive firing off emails, while adding significantly to the work load of those under them.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#89
With these kinds of things and ChatGPT advancing its code writing capabilities, how much of developers jobs are safe in future. If i could produce and "edit" my production code easily by AI, i don't need to have so many developers.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#90

Run it against the Win32 API and if you can show me a successful outcome then I'll be impressed.

Considering it's a widely used API, there's probably enough in an LLM's training data for it to not even need much trial and error. I've recently done since Xlib stuff with ChatGPT and it was pretty helpful (and Xlib is __not__ a very nice API).

On the other hand, I asked for some trivial examples of Nim macro syntax and it couldn't make something that compiled even after feeding back the compile error messages.

If there's a private/obscure API you need to deal with that is the size and complexity and has the amount accumulated cruft that Win32 has, yeah, you're out of luck (but maybe should also be reconsidering the life decisions that got you to that point).

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