[flagged]
AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
21–30 of 519 posts
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#22@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…
And then we'll have people praying to the Omnissiah with their prompts.
> Omnissiah
I like that.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#23Ok, so when people say that they use ChatGPT for coding, they use it as a code snippet library? Here, a function that has been probably written million times before in some similar form, and a template for a simple web app.
For me it’s pasting a snippet of code I’m struggling to debug and asking it to help. Sometimes it works, sometimes it comes up with an answer that is also buggy or doesn’t work.
I find it much more useful for soft things like writing a complaint to a vendor for me, dealing with customer service, or cover letters from a job ad that I only have to slightly tweak. Takes me five minutes instead of 30+ and I got a few compliments about my “outstanding” cover letter.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a former coworker who bought a Tesla very shortly after getting her license, and relied almost exclusively on autopilot. I rode with her a few times when she offered to drive me home, it was legit terrifying when she had to drive in manual mode to eg get out of a parking garage. Years later, I don’t think her driving has meaningfully improved.
Unfortunately this seems to be true of a lot of people that don't have tesla's as well ;)
Even if you have proper training to get your license (most people here didn't even get that) you only learn to drive while actually doing it.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#25Ok, so when people say that they use ChatGPT for coding, they use it as a code snippet library? Here, a function that has been probably written million times before in some similar form, and a template for a simple web app.
Wrong, gpt4 is very capable of writing “new” and complex code. Also gpt4 >> gpt3.5 for coding.
> gpt4 >> gpt3.5
Leftwise bitshift would make gpt4 worse though :P
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#26Ok, so when people say that they use ChatGPT for coding, they use it as a code snippet library? Here, a function that has been probably written million times before in some similar form, and a template for a simple web app.
To give an example, I had 3 things on my hobby to-do list that fit together: learning some data compression algos, learning Golang and testing out Chatgpt/Copilot coding efficiency. So I downloaded slides and exercises from a course of my old uni, and started implementing the exercises in VSCode with Copilot. Whenever I had a question, I would consult chatgpt. Whenever my Copilot code didn't work, I'd go through it line by line to see what's wrong and paste it to ChatGPT to see if it knows what's wrong.
My experience:
- Copilot did a decent job at suggesting functions when I typed out comments. It got progressively worse as the compression algorithms got less common (eg. Huffman vs. entropy coding) The smaller the functions, the more manageable it was. - ChatGPT got most things right, and a few things really wrong. It was always super confident. - If given a piece of code and asked "How would you suggest to refactor this?", ChatGPT gave mostly very useful ideas. - The bigger the project got, the worse the overall codebase looked. It became a mix of styles, pretty inconsistent, more subtle bugs were introduced that took me a while to figure out. (The nice thing about lossless compression is that you know if the code is right by using it)
- My "productivity", how many lines of code "I" wrote, was way beyond anything I could usually reach. I do also feel like I got a very quick start into Golang with this, much faster and broader than reading documentation or doing a getting started. That said, that knowledge now definitely needs to be refined in order to use the appropriate concept at the right time. Comparing my code with more professional Golang code bases I spot a lot of things that need to be improved.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#27@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…
Our experience coding from scratch will have about as much validity as the experience of people who coded in assembly has today. It'll be a specialized skill with its own niche but without much value in the broader tech industry.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#28@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…
It’s crazy to think about. We are nearing the end of the age where people who have been programming for “20 years this year” and self-taught probably learned to program from books. In the next few years, people who have been “programming for 20 years” might start to include YouTube learners and boot campers.
As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/paste. You had to type every listing in to get it running, as well as find that semi-colon you forgot on line 16,46,102 of 200. Then you had to remember everything, take notes, and literally research answers. You couldn’t just ask a random person on the internet, at least for a few years after I learned how to program when online forums became a thing.
One big difference I can think of between my younger peers and myself: When I see an error message, I take it as a “hint that something is wrong” where my younger peers tend to take error messages literally. Probably because I “grew up” with terrible error messages that hardly ever pointed to the actual file/line the error was on.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a non-trivial example of this? I tried to make GPT-4 create an algorithm for an enhanced tic-tac-toe game (think Wordle vs Quordle to somewhat visualize the difference) and it's failing miserably.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 there are a lot of examples in this paper. Also it’s not that it writes perfect code straight away and you never have to re-prompt or change anything manually. But it’s still an insane speed-up.
Do you know if there are any papers published by people who don't work at Microsoft so may actually be more objective?
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#30What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So it really helps me overcome research barriers in software development in an incredibly short time, stuff that would've taken days or weeks to research can be done in literal minutes. And as I said before what's amazing is that the PoCs are really elegant and minimal, i.e. no superfluous code at all and condensed to the essence of the problem you're trying to solve.