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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

#111

Post by stayux »

Let me tell you something. I am a product designer. I know we are doomed to be obsolete. Not only that, but I will use ChatGPT to develop my prototypes and small scripts.

And finally, will find a time to build some ideas with Dart/Flutter. Something inside is telling me that in a generated future, people who can code will be able to create free from no code tools and SaaS silos. And this is enough motivation for me:)

I see a strange future in which product designers (who will spend less time on decorating and fiddling with DS components) with the help of ChatGPT will fulfill the role of junior devs in the production pipeline.

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

#113

Post by comboy »

red75prime wrote: post #55
jeron wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right? I don't find enough people amazed by that. Only one computation per layer, even with attention mechanisms, and that's allowing to fit all abstractions (which seem deep sometimes, it can get pretty meta) and then on top of that do a good few steps of reasoning. It's so counter-intuitive to me.

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

#114

Post by roel_v »

hallqv wrote: post #3
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.

Wrong, gpt4 is very capable of writing “new” and complex code. Also gpt4 >> gpt3.5 for coding.

"Also gpt4 >> gpt3.5 for coding. "

This is not my subjective experience. It's better, sometimes somewhat, but also much slower. I'm not sure which one is the better tradeoff for real work. I have it on 4 by default now, don't want to think about this for every question I ask, but for my work, 3.5 was fine.

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

#115

Post by ihatepython »

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?

> Developers who use this for serious stuff, how goes your reasoning? Is it just a calculated risk? Reward is greater than the risk?

It seems obvious that AI is the future, and that ChatGPT is the most advanced AI ever created.

For me (in the medical industry), if something goes wrong and someone dies a horrible death, I can just say that I didn't write that code, ChatGPT did. Not my fault.

Next time you are at the hospital getting an MRI, I hope you think about how it's entirely possible that ChatGPT wrote the majority of the mission-critical code.

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

#116

Post by auggierose »

zachthewf wrote: post #69
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!

Heh, is this a Therac 25 joke?

I really hope it is a joke.

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

#117

Post by ihatepython »

zachthewf wrote: post #69
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!

Heh, is this a Therac 25 joke?

Yes

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

#118

Post by jlnho »

JimmyRuska wrote: post #38
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…

Having spent a lot of time with GPT-4 recently, it's possible the new generation will not have the same issues we did. For example they can write some code and say, "adjust for best practice". Then "explain why needs to be " Oh this is called , give me an example of it. Give me another example. Give me another example. Give me use cases where this would be better. Give me a short story where it was done my way but it…

OT: Are you _the_ Jimmy Ruska (jimmyrcom on YouTube)? If so, thanks for your videos. I remember watching those as a teen, they were super inspiring and solidified my decision to pursue a career in IT.

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

#119

Post by precompute »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #110
precompute wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can "flash context", but being able to write code to make the infrastructure that makes LLMs possible is required to sustain this new "ecosystem". I don't think every dev will be equally hit by this new paradigm, it's basically a two-tier system now, the LLM babysitters and the actual competent human coders (whose input probably gets fed into a LLM).

s/LLM/StackOverflow/g and squint, and you're basically describing the preceding decade.

Well, stackoverflow required competent users to participate. There's no need for that any longer. The "gap" will probably be addressed by LLM-designed tools that are only usable via LLMs and bigtech will be more than happy to put their own LLM-designed tools at work for their products, which means there'll be vendor lock at scale, so in the vein of the "digital realm emulating the analog realm" there'll be companies you'd have to specifically train for and none of it would carry over...

but this is assuming this current level of progress stagnates for at least the next five years. Sigh...

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

#120

Post by alecco »

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 bet programming languages will evolve to compensate for this. Something like Constraint Programming crossed with Prompt Engineering.
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