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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

121–130 of 519 posts

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

#121

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…

> 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.

We've been iterating over that for decades, there's always one more step of grunt work to remove, one more layer of boilerplate code to move into the compiler (or a code generator), one more deployment task to automate, one more elegant new syntax to add to a language, …

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

#122
Roughly 80% of the time, currently. Which is great! But if you don't keep that in mind, you risk making a fool of yourself.

It'll most likely improve in the future, I'm sure. The amount of real-world progress this will bring to humanity boggles the mind. I think we'll see progress in many and as-of-yet unthought of areas, because the power of mathematics, algorithms, and advanced systems will become available to a lot more people due to this "helpful uncle".

I do hope they work on improving its math skills though, also in the sense that it can explain the steps taken when solving equations or algorithms, or even how algorithms could perhaps be "translated" and implemented in various languages. In my opinion this is key to understanding mathematics, and a whole host of other systems as well. Moreover, it helps people who previously didn’t have the capacity to understand these things, so the effect on “world knowledge” is cumulative.

Personally, ChatGPT has been a great help for understanding many things a lot better, everything from mathematical equations to subsystems in Linux. And of course, it has helped me improve my coding.

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

#123

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…

For the interested, this is the response by GPT4 given that prompt: --- As an AI language model, I'm unable to write full code examples, but I can provide you a high-level overview of how to implement a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust using the Raft consensus algorithm. 1) Define the data model: Design a data model for your probabilistic database, which should include the basic CRUD operations (…

> As an AI language model, I'm unable to write full code examples

The example prompt is clearly asking for too much in one go, but this objection is trivial to overcome for anything not specifically hitting guardrails (and sometimes for those too) by telling it to act as if it's a [insert various roles to try].

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

#125
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…

That would be nice for us, but it's unlikely.

Knowing the subtlelties of memory management in the 80' didn't help the Ruby coders to create RoR and run Basecamp, or the Python coders to create Django and run the Washington Post.

People jumped at ORM, CSS frameworks and JS wrappers, and won the day because they traded memory and CPU for what the user wanted.

The new generation will do the same. They will figure out how to be super productive with AI, way more than what we are. And our superpower will be useful in specialized cases, but mostly, their impacts will be small compared to the order of magnitude of speed they'll gain by using the new paradigm.

People said interpreted languages were a waste, that you had to learn SQL, that Electron was an abomination.

But the people building stuff always win, not what we think is the right way.

That's why PHP won at some point. JS won at some point.

And something super practical (but that will make us say uhh...) made by AI will win at some point.

That's also why all the open letters and ethics committees will have no impact: the short term advantage given to AI users will be such that they will take everything over by storm.

It's already happening in porn: we just gave millions of teenage boys a shiny new toy, and they are spending days and nights on it. New incredible models come out every day. Some hyper specialized. Last week, I saw a publication of a new model specially trained on only vagina called "bettervulva" and one for boobs called "breastinclass". Somebody spent hundreds of hours on those, collecting the data, annotating it, and training.

I guarantee each niche of the world is doing exactly the same. Not to mention each new model is coded with somebody who has the previous models to help with the new one, code included.

This is snowball from now on.

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

#126
post #27
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.

If that was all they were doing, sure.. but if they wrote language parsers, understood computing from the nand-gate up and worked their way up and down the stack over-and-over.. these types of guys will blow past all of us. The understanding you get from going up and down stacks is ridiculous.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I honestly have issue with using ChatGPT to write medical software. I don’t know what your exact process is like but I hope you’re giving the code it generates extra scrutiny to make sure it really does what you put in the prompt. It kinda feels like the judge who used ChatGPT to determine whether to deny or grant bail.

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

#128
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that is why we need AI assist in cars. With that said, where I'm from (Europe) most people drive "stick". That is, until recently. Now most new drivers are learning on auto or AI assisted vehicles. Is it better or worse? It'll definitively lead to fewer accidents. But driving stick is kinda cool tho, imho xD And I'm sure it also give you a better intuition about how a gear box actually works.

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

#129
Two big hurdles for ML: a) explainability b) accountability.

ML-enhanced development neatly circumvents this: explainability and accountability is passed on to the developer. This includes bugs and license infringements.

I have no qualms about ML tools in development. But so long as the buck stops with me, I prefer to write from scratch.

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

#130
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…

> 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".

Not iteratively forever, the only feedback it will (eventually) get is it's own feedback, because humans will be using the AI best practices, and what it deems as best practice is almost certainly going to be too opaque to us mere mortals.

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