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GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

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Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#341

Post by wfeefwfwe »

agentultra wrote: post #265
hu3 wrote: post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

It feels absurd. A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate writing tests! Yay! Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense and specify the…

this all sounds very plausible and convincing until this part:

> But that's what we get with humans, right? No!

> Humans can explain their reasoning.

can you explain your reasoning as to why a language model would never be able to match a human's ability to explain its reasoning?

i've met a lot of humans that are quite bad at this, and i will likely never know for sure why they wrote the unit tests that they wrote unless i rewrite those tests to myself.

but if you have them explain their reasoning enough, and if that reasoning is plausible enough, and if the relationship between that reasoning and what they did is strong enough, consistently enough — you start to trust them.

you don't trust gpt4 to write code for you. which makes sense. but that doesn't mean as much as you think it means, i think.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#342

Post by wankle »

quijoteuniv wrote: post #278
gonehome wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is a so well positioned on this I think Silicon Valley has forgotten what it looks like when they don’t have a horrible CEO. When Microsoft executes well, they’re a scary force. They were exceptional under Gates and it looks like they are again. There’s a massive paradigm shift we’re just at the beginning of and Microsoft has been putting pieces in place for the last couple of years. Nadella has really turn…

Masterstroke is that they are including Linux, in WSL also in windows server. They are 1 step away from being a Linux distribution that runs legacy windows software within containers :D

I'm a long time Ubuntu user but, if Microsoft went Linux, and it wasn't an anti-VM (explained: try to upgrade Win 10 in a VM to see what I'm talking about), Ad infested, user tracking machine then I might have to get back in bed with Microsoft.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#343

Post by immawizard »

tauntz wrote: post #280
fn-mote wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. Another angle: just think of how many mom and pop shops are still contracting out to get web sites, and not getting what we consider quality. Now maybe…

> My expertise is in designing, understanding, and debugging complex systems. I will just apply my expertise to the AI. That might be true for you and me but imagine somebody fresh out from university - the job market for junior devs will totally collapse in the near-near future. And then what? Where do the mid-level engineers come from if there are no* junior roles? Where will the future senior level engineers come…

Mid level engineers will come from building something like GitHub, Netflix or Gmail over the weekend using powerful AI. The skills of current senior engineers will be much easier to gain since the feedback loop for software architecture and design will be down to hours instead of quarters. Being able to architect massive software systems well, will be expected from a new graduates.

The role of junior software developers will not be needed, just as we don’t need people doing multiplication by hand.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#344

Post by NeuNeurosis »

jnovek wrote: post #81
aldarisbm wrote: post #28

At which point do we not need to understand what is in front of us? eg: The Code. I was using chatgpt, with a groovy project (havent used groovy in years), I prompted chatgpt for an answer, and it gave me a solution. The solution (to me) was a bit obfuscated, but it worked. Since I'm only using groovy to figure out this one task, it would've been extremely easy for me to not check what the solution did, and just keep…

One hypothesis I have is that the future of programming is natural language and the “compiler” is a LLM. This would be no different from the days when C took over for asm.

This was my take on the tech. Ultimately it will need to be prompted. Now the form that prompt takes is open to a bunch of speculation but even if it gets superhuman at producing code or any output it is directionless by itself, for now. We are what direct its ability, which I think is really cool. I think getting good at extracting exact outputs from the LLM will be the new engineer.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#345

Post by withinboredom »

gonehome wrote: post #242
zer00eyz wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, I suspect the AI stuff will be hard for them. They bought Siri! What stops them from buying someone for "ai"

Siri still sucks?

"Siri, set an alarm for 5pm eastern standard time" ... you get an alarm for 5pm local time, with the memo 'eastern standard time' (assuming aren't located in eastern standard time, this is not the expected behavior).

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#346

Post by layer8 »

UK-AL wrote: post #233

I think they've done it backwards in regards to it writing tests. Tests are the check to make sure the A.I is in check. If A.I is writing tests, you have to double check the tests. You should write tests, then the A.I writes the code. It almost doesn't matter what the code is, as long the AI can regenerate the code from tests.

Tests don't (can't) prove tthat code is correct. They are merely a rough plausibility check that the code isn't completely wrong and didn't regress. You generally can't derive the right code just from tests.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#347

Post by IanCal »

agentultra wrote: post #265
hu3 wrote: post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

It feels absurd. A Chat-GPT4 model will generate unit tests? Hallelujah! I hate writing tests! Yay! Except how do you know it's generating the right tests? Can it explain its reasoning? Unit tests are a weak form of automated specification. Why are we inferring our specifications from examples to begin with? Who is going to walk through the reasoning and verify these are the right tests and make sense and specify the…

Just a note I think it's 3.5 for the code work. 4 would probably be prohibitively expensive to run and they carefully mention that they use 4 for the PRs and a few other bits but not the code gen - there they just talk about chatgpt. I'd love to be wrong about this.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#348

Post by substation13 »

goldfeld wrote: post #303
hu3 wrote: post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

Almost a decade ago I jumped ship as a programmer for several reasons, and since '18 I am definitely not coding at all. Friends and family have wondered much at my path and letting go of what has become the one promised career for ever larger parts of the population, and making my inroads into the arts and literature, finally settling a bit with the profession of writing on many capacities. Now I look back more gadly…

I think replacing a SWE with AI means we have reached AGI levels.

However, GPT 4, which is amazing but not able to do what a SWE does, is already making concept artists, voice actors and content marketers obsolete. The arts are far more susceptible to this technology.

Anyone who thinks SWE is generating Python snippets doesn't really understand the role.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#349

Post by nemo44x »

hu3 wrote: post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

> We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today.

I don't think that's right. Farms may have less manual labor but there's man, many times more people building farming tools, software, tech, etc.

What will happen is you will be able to do more with your time. We are limited by how many people we can actually hire and the output of those people. Now each person can output more and more. So much that we want to build but we don't is because we are limited by output. We need to prioritize certain things for everything has an opportunity cost. Now we will be able to burn down more things more quickly.

Also the math. Imagine developers just became about 30% more efficient. I want MORE of them now as my money is better spent! If my competitor downsizes to remain at their current capacity then I will crush them because I want 30% MORE developers that are coding 30% more efficiently allowing me to release 40% more things for the same money! I crush my competition then and they know this so they have to keep up as it's an arms race.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#350

Post by devrob »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #310
hu3 wrote: post #130

Scary. For the first time in my life, I feel like my expertise is at risk of being rendered obsolete. Maybe not this year, but the writing is on the wall. Soon coding without an AI will feel as antiquated as delivering food by horse. And resistance is futile because markets will punish those who refuse. We'll probably need less and less developers as AI advance. Just like we need less manual labor in farms today. And…

People said the same thing about Excel in the 80s and 90s. There are more accountants now than then. There might be more programmers out of this developments than before. It just will lower the barrier of entry, and increase productivity. Like most tools

This would be the contrarian perspective, and it's an interesting thought to consider. If memory serves, I think Marc A points out in an old Youtube conference video how most new technologies follow the Promethean myth in their relationship to society.

Funny enough your observation of

> "There are more accountants now than then."

could be extrapolated from in two ways

The optimistic perspective might suppose technological development gives rise to new marketplace adaptations and creation of new and tangential jobs. For example, Facebook / Social Networks / Search creating new roles like: Influencers, Social Media Managers, Search Engine Optimization, et cetera.

For the pessimist perspective, I think you could suppose the "end state" of all technological progress in human societies is, eventually, an oligopoly of two industries: bureaucracy (legal) and politics (marketing).

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