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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

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

#61

Post by asim »

Every generation faces this sort of issue which is learning skills for the current technology which then get displaced in 20-30 years. I think there's always a worry we're going to lose some knowledge in the process but equally the productivity gain seems to be 10x and it leads to dealing with higher level problems. Very few people are kernel hacking now as a percentage of the overall engineering community.

I guess the question is. What do we build with this form of engineering. It's so very early. We're using it as a way to augment current systems but I think we'll build for entirely new things soon.

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

#63

Post by skybrian »

jfvinueza wrote: post #46

Yes, agree. I mean GPT-4 is an all in all a fantastic tool, but it's especially good for developing. The moment you transform a blurry idea into structured data in any form (and it helps a lot with that: you can chat like two decent citizens and ask it to transform it to json at any given time), you can pretty much generate infinite boilerplate that's consistent through a whole application: interfaces > tables > migr…

I tried using ChatGPT a bit with the GPT4 model and it seems quite promising, but also very slow. When it's writing out the same function again with a change I asked for, it reminds me of the old days when connecting to a BBS with a 300 baud modem.

Am I doing it wrong somehow?

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

#64

Post by vasco »

ummonk wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Exactly, this sounds like people that think knowing assembly or managing memory manually with C gives them an advantage. I learned those things too and am not a single bit ahead of a developer that learns newer languages and never does a malloc in their lives.

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

#65

Post by geraneum »

ummonk wrote: post #27
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…

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.

> but without much value in the broader tech industry.

Not talking about AI; but if you want to work on compilers, linux kernel, game engine optimization, GPU optimized code and many many other things than web development you need to be more than familiar with how to work with machine instructions, albeit not working with it every single day. These are significant parts of the industry which make the rest possible.

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

#67

Post by graeber_28927 »

withinboredom wrote: post #39
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 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.

To me it's a feature. If I ask any human, often I get "no" as an answer, but with ChatGPT I can be confident that it will produce something, whether it's right or wrong. If it constantly said "I'm nut sure, I'd rather decline this one", I'd be tempted to ask it to go on anyway. If it's wrong, it's wrong, but let me decide. It might be close!

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

#69

Post by zachthewf »

ihatepython wrote: post #60
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!

Heh, is this a Therac 25 joke?

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

#70

Post by thoughtsbykean »

This article and discussion thread has been really insightful. I've been avoiding chatgpt because I feel like I will not learn as well compared to prototyping and agonising through documentation.

I'll take this mentality onboard to more ambitious projects.

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