451–460 of 771 posts
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$50+ in monthly subscription fees? BRB buying some MSFT
We forgot very quickly that there was an entire generation of developers who paid $1000-2000 or more for an MSDN subscription just as the base cost for doing business. This is what Microsoft does.
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So it's on par with a junior software engineer?
No, I don't think it's comparable to a junior engineer. It works best for pretty short snippets of code. It also can't decide when to run the program and how to interpret/make changes based on the results.
Not quite, but a bit of plumbing can get you closer. Not human using a computer close, but interestingly closer nonetheless.
I've been trying to accomplish something akin to this by having a program monitor and alter another program within a virtual machine, using GPT-generated solutions to error traces to correct bugs in the sand boxed program.
It watches the program to see when an error occurs, feeds the error to GPT with pertinent code, then tries to splice in the solution.
It kind of works. I don't think we're going to see human-levels of success from this in the immediate future, but I was able to write a simple event-based system which alters a program to resolve simple bugs. It even does it on a different git branch, and there is some stubbed out code and prompts for generating tests. In my manual testing, this actually worked too. If the tests passed I was going to have it push the change set and create a PR explaining the changes, tests, etc.
I doubt I'll continue now that Copilot is doing this already. My point though is that with the right configuration, the right data and prompts, and a system orchestrating the start/stop/test patterns based on the state of the sandboxed program, you can begin to achieve something akin to an inexperienced person solving bugs.
Sometimes it does a terrible job and other times it kind of falls over itself. But we're already leaps and bounds ahead of previous systems, and I just cobbled this together with what's possible via OpenAI's API.
The crazy part is that there are so many possible layers. Like say we get our initial solution and we verify that it works. Well, now we can have a system which optimizes the implementation. Like a PR buddy that observes the implementation and determines: should this test be appended to an existing suite of tests? Can the test case simply be added to an existing table-driven test? How can we streamline this patch to avoid an endless stream of additional files and tests to maintain? I think that's actually tractable already. While the success rate won't be 100% today, it'll clearly only improve.
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…
Honestly, this just seems like another tool. An amazing one, yes, but a tool nevertheless. > 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. The same way coding without Internet feels antiquated, or coding without autocomplete, or coding without fast compilation times... If anything, progression of tools has shown se…
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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
or actively remove many reasons why people ended up trying out linux distributions in the past like e.g. universtity students needing to run programs which don't run on windows natively all the time, so many try out native Linux distros, some stay. Now all of them can just use WSL. Or like devs which need to develop for Linux servers etc. Basically they have accepted that windows server have failed and their server l…
I can't remember last time I paid for Windows. Microsoft usually offers free upgrades.
I haven't seen any ad on Windows. I frankly find hard to believe there are ads in Windows.
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> 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 develop…
I suspect SWE may trend toward other ailing fields like law with individual devs working on entire 'cases' and it being very competitive; rather than the recent "20min Js tutorial on YT to SF startup" industry.
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Public companies aren't people. It doesn't make sense to trust them, but it also doesn't make sense to hold a grudge against them. They act in a way that fits the moment. Right now, Microsoft seems to be in a "build good tools" moment. If they get too dominant they could re-enter an "abuse power" moment. But that would be because it's what they think is in their best interest, not because "Microsoft is [uniquely] unt…
Yep. But also this kind of essentialist thinking doesn't work for people, either, so :-) Nobody is just one thing or another. And neither are companies. They act on various levers, in response to various interests, and it's about looking at the tendencies and patterns. Holding grudges against people makes little sense, either.
Microsoft really seems to have wrapped up the developer ecosystem with VS Code and the Github acquisition combined with OpenAI. They are going to have an absurd amount of data to optimize their models thanks to that, not sure how other AI focused companies can overcome that have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be and potentially move away from their ecosystem. Credit t…
> have to wonder at what point developers remember how anti-developer Microsoft used to be Microsoft has historically been anti-opensource, but not anti-developer. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter and in my experience throughout the 90s and early 2000s their developer ecosystem (aka Visual Studio) has really been first-class. I am not a fan of Microsoft because they have been openly hostile to open source,…
This meant they had to be insanely good at supporting a vast array of diverse hardware, but also offered exceptionally good support for developers to keep the barriers of entry low in the Windows software market. They had even a cute name for these commoditized and neutered competitors - "ISVs". Basically, Microsoft owned the OS and the major applications like office & enterprise software, media, browser etc. and everything else was supplied by an ISV, for example your accounting software for country XYZ, a market where MS had no interest in entering.
As long as you kept within the ISV playground, MS was developer friendly, but it would turn very hostile to any perceived competitor to their core assets. Undocumented APIs, monopoly abuse, dark patterns, the entire circus. This strategy made the PC market impenetrable for nearly two decades, and it was only through sheer luck and complacency that the mobile revolution caught them on the wrong foot.
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…
I'm extremely skeptical about this happening. I haven't seen any evidence that GPT is capable of creating something new or even thinking logically. What's going to happen if you ask it to create something that isn't like anything in its training set?
My experience is that GPT just makes shit up that looks plausible at a glance when it doesn't have an answer instead of just admitting that it doesn't know; this is obviously very dangerous when it's supposed to be writing computer programs. That OpenAI hasn't made any progress towards fixing this makes me wonder if it's even possible for the GPT to understand that sometimes it doesn't understand. At the very least it must be a non-trivial problem.
There are 5 different sign-up waiting lists. Each one needs to be signed-up for separately. [1] Copilot X: https://github.com/github-copilot/chat_waitlist_signup/ [2] Copilot Voice: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-voice/ [3] Copilot Docs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-for-docs/ [4] Copilot for PRs: https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-for-pull-requests/ [5] Copilot CLI: https://githubnext.com/pro…
$50+ in monthly subscription fees? BRB buying some MSFT
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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…
Copilot user here. Copilot (the existing gpt-3 one) definitely helps at writing unit tests. Yeah, sometimes it doesn't nail it, but one thing it can do reliably is to repeat a pattern, and I don't know about you, but my unit tests tend to repeat the same pattern (with some tweaks to test this-or-that-case). Quite often it infers the correct change from the name I gave the test method, but even if it doesn't it'll wri…
Isn't this something we've built into every modern language(and arguably the entire point of languages)? If you have multiple pieces of code that share code with tweaks(to test this or that case for example), shouldn't you parameterize the bulk of the code instead of getting autocomplete to parameterize it for you and dump it into your source file multiple times?