AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects • Hacker News Board

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#51

Post by anon7725 » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 6:52 AM UTC

ant6n wrote: post #34

withinboredom wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/p…

I learned coding in a classroom.

I’ve sat in classrooms where coding was discussed but that wasn’t where I learned how to do it.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#52

Post by anon7725 » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 6:56 AM UTC

asabla wrote: post #7

zamfi wrote: post #6

@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…

In some way it's kind of poetic. The mental overhead of producing softwares shrinks more and more. It will sure be at the cost of understanding and/or see errors as you say. I already looking forward of being that graybeard. And show off to my neighbors or grandchildren

GPT doesn’t change some fundamental things that we know about the theory of computation as well as complexity. It’s a wonderful tool that we’re just beginning to learn about, but it’s not a get out of jail free card for the halting problem or a million line codebase that models 50 years of business evolution.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#53

Post by withinboredom » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 6:59 AM UTC

awestroke wrote: post #43

withinboredom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know it is even close to correct? When I’ve asked it for code, it has been subtly wrong, or worse, correct but missing important edge cases that it doesn’t even seem to be aware of.

How do you know your own code is correct? Now apply the same strategy to others code

Haha, that’s actually a good and fair question. I don’t actually know the answer to that. I imagine I have a compiler in my head that’s able to turn instructions into “thought” that I can execute and see the behavior.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#54

Post by b33j0r » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:02 AM UTC

I am using it in exactly the same way. I have access to ideas and code that I never would have tried before.

These other well-documented experiences that sound super perfect don’t match mine, though I’m a fan! Here’s how it goes for me.

I am a premium user and all, but it still bails on me every single time it’s going well, by writing half of a function or saying “network error”, then losing context.

I have to say “you stopped generating that last part, please continue and don’t bother qualifying.” Then it wastes more tokens apologizing anyway.

Whoever trained these models to apologize and say “as a large language model, I can’t promise that I know how Bjarne Stroustrup would refactor that bitshift, and yada yada” really wasted a lot of our productivity. And saved no one from any dangers of AI.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#55

Post by red75prime » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:02 AM UTC

jeron wrote: post #33

ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What 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…

everything seems easy when you're armed by the corpus of all human text

Everything seems easy when you cannot stop and think and have to output the next token after doing the fixed amount of processing. It's amazing what GPT-4 can do given this limitation.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#56

Post by ReptileMan » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:02 AM UTC

I think that Chat GPT will make programmers jobs more tedious but always in demand. That is the leakiest abstraction of them all people. There will always be subtle bugs to fix 2-3 levels down.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#57

Post by anonyfox » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:03 AM UTC

Am I the only one that isn’t blocked by coding speed (I can MVP very fast with lot of techstacks) but with … deployment?

Don’t get me wrong, I am a senior DevOps, know my terraform/CDK/… and AWS/heroku/digitalocean/hetzner/vercel/… stuff by heart, so it’s not missing knowledge.

But I really hate the maintenance work down the road. I just don’t want to get emails about some deprecated stuff from some provider and have to do anything just so stuff keeps running. I would pay a premium (!) for a stability guarantee not in service uptime but toolchain reliability :/

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#58

Post by villgax » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:06 AM UTC

If only some GPTxyz comes up with CUDA, Rust/C++ conversion for best optimisation & exploit finding

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#59

Post by an_aparallel » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:07 AM UTC

blueorange8 wrote: post #31

jhrmnn wrote: post #2

Ok, 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.

This isn't an example of a coding problem, but just yesterday we had a very difficult technical problem come up that one of our partners, a very large IT company couldn't solve. None of our engineers knew how to solve it after trying for a few days. I would say I'm an expert in the industry and have been doing this over 20 years as a developer. I thought I knew the best way to solve it, but I wasn't sure exactly. I a…

this is exactly the kind of post that folks who say "oh - it wont take our jobs - our jobs are safe (way too advanced for silly AI)" - need to be reading. You're an expert, and it answered an expert question, and your colleagues couldnt do it either...after a few days...and this is just early days.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#60

Post by ihatepython » Fri, Mar 31, 2023, 7:07 AM UTC

ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What 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…

> How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?

I couldn't agree more. I work as a software engineer in the medical field (think MRI's, X-rays, that sort of thing). I've started using ChatGPT all the time to write the code, and then I just fix it up a bit. So far it's working great!