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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

#91

Post by zer00eyz »

First of all chat GPT is great.

It is all the magic of early google, and stack overflow... Not as many ads less bullshit.

I have been coding for 25 years. Chat GPT + willing sr engineer means 2 less jr. dev's. I lived through the dot com bust, and now I can do a heroic amount of work with less effort.

This raises two points:

1. It's clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language design or libraries, but we need to do better at the core.

2. We continue to narrow the path to get experience as an engineer. This is great for companies in the near term (this looming down cycle), but bad for the industry as a whole long term (we dont have a pool of strong jr. engineers).

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

#92

Post by throwaway049 »

consp wrote: post #24
blueorange8 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue seems to be many people don't learn even then.

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

#93

Post by Thorentis »

baq wrote: post #84
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…

> Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus? just pasted this into bing creative mode. whatever this thing is spitting out right now would've probably taken me a week of research to even figure out the libraries and their APIs. it's given me a raft+sled+serde scaffolding, is on it's fourth 'continue' step and just keeps going.

How do you know what it created actually works and hasn't just been hallucinated? Have you checked every API call? Is it using non deprecated versions? Does it even run?

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

#94

Post by Thorentis »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #44
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.

I can read the code and verify it. Sometimes there are small mistakes but overall the architecture and approach are mostly correct. It won't produce 100 % production-grade code, but that's not expected for a PoC. And personally I also get stuff subtly wrong at times, I just iterate and test to find these cases and fix them. So I guess we're not fully replacable yet.

You can't read API calls and know if they're real, or if the function names are plausible but non existent. This is the problem with GPT. It creates great sounding possible APIs, but has no idea which APIs actually exist.

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

#95

Post by geraneum »

krmboya wrote: post #86
braveyellowtoad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. However, it’s worthwhile also noting these represent a very small proportion of all jobs in software development.

Did the number of jobs of people coding in assembly go down, or is it that the number of jobs of people not coding in assembly go up? (I truly don't know. Just curious)

I tend to believe that the number of people working with machine instructions might have even increased! We have much more of the tech that I mentioned nowadays compared to 90s. Also a lot of other industries have entered digital age and in many of them, i.e aviation, transportation, financial, etc. knowing the intricacies of your hardware is crucial.

The thing is that web development has seen such a boom which has seemingly dwarfed everything else in its wake.

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

#97

Post by thunderbong »

an_aparallel wrote: post #59
blueorange8 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I look at it differently. If what we've been writing can be replaced by a machine, that leaves us with coming up with more creative solutions. We can now spend our time more usefully, I think!

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

#98

Post by roel_v »

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.

Make it write a test suite that you can manually verify/expand as necessary, just like code written by humans. I don't understand this 'but how do you know it works' argument. How do you know the code you wrote yourself works? I hope you don't rely on your superior programming skills to just get it right the first time?

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

#99

Post by stravant »

worldsayshi wrote: post #80
ihatepython wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

What holds me back the most from using these tools is the vagueness of the copyright situation. I wouldn't straight out want to use it at work. For hobby projects that I might want to use for something serious one day, I'm on the fence. Developers who use this for serious stuff, how goes your reasoning? Is it just a calculated risk? Reward is greater than the risk?

I just don't care.

Google vs Oracle is still being fought a decade on now.

What hope does the legal and legislative system have of possibly keeping up here? The horse will well and fully have left the barn by the time anything has been resolved and furthermore if AI continues becoming increasing useful there will be no option other than to bend the resolution to fit what has already passed.

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

#100

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

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…

I think AI generated glue code is actually a massive win for linux as a desktop operating system. Suddenly everyone and his grandma can form programming pipes with just a few prompts in a gui program.

We are going to be vringes softwarearechologists and programmers at arms.

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