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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

131–140 of 519 posts

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

#131
post #50

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.

Always mention your stack before writing stuff like this - people who write js/ts where every problem that could be done has been done will get very different mileage than, say, people who write C and assembly for some obscure architecture

It can handle a quite broad range of languages. I've had decent luck with quite obscure stuff. Oberon worked quite well, for example.

But out of curiosity, to give it something harder, I asked ChatGPT w/GPT3.5 to write me an interrupt handler for a simple raster effect for the Commodore 64 in 6502 assembly, and it got tantalisingly close while being oh-so-wrong in relatively basic ways which suggests that it hasn't "grasped" how to handle control flow in a language without clearly delineated units.

GPT4 appears to have gotten it right (it's ~30 years since I've done this myself), though the code it wrote was a weird mix of hacks to save the odd cycle followed by blatant cycle wasting stuff that suggest it's still not seen quite enough "proper" C64 demo code.

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

#132
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…

Do you think people that read and write assembly feel this way?

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

#133
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…

And then we'll have people praying to the Omnissiah with their prompts.

I wonder what implications this has for the reports claiming that general IQ is going down in most countries. Obviously, there are people out there who do not suffer from this trend. And perhaps they are the ones making the systems that help those less endowed? Anyway, the road to the tech religions Warhammer 40,000 seems set!

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

#134
I asked ChatGPT (the free one) today to translate me EBNF rules into a recursive descent parsing function in Rust and it did it correctly, it also then applied various refactorings I requested to make the code cleaner.

When it comes to boilerplate these tools are game changers I must say. Harder problems they crap all over themselves but that's ok, that's where we still have a job for the next 5 years (I hope).

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

#135
post #61

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 t…

Its just that usually the new tools and technologies that have this effect are accurate, deterministic, or at least try to be or pretend to be.

So, its quite literally an issue of lost knowledge. Is like replacing wikipedia with something that answers faster, but without sources. Its cool in the short term, and people are more productive at learning things, but you also go back to the hear-say time before books were invented.

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

#136
One of the things I've found is that at least with GPT-4, you can automate a lot of infrastructure. This can make it much easier to get started with new project where you need to set up various servers, containers, VMs etc. I haven't fully automated it yet, but I've done it enough manually through copy/paste between ChatGPT and the terminal to see it that would work if it was hooked up to langchain. You can create prompts to make it set up VMs, docker containers and then install and configure all kinds of software.

To make it work in most cases it should follow the same stuff as this implementation of a Reflexion agent for SOTA Human-Eval Python results, but use it for infrastructure. GPT-4 can generally figure out how to create tests from the documentation that will make it know when the task it finished correctly.

https://github.com/GammaTauAI/reflexion-human-eval

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

#137

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…

Let me provide a counterpoint - ChatGPT made the code base more readable, it was able to integrate a few useful solutions the devs didn't know about, it helped write tests and even came up with a few good ones on its own.

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

#138

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…

> 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.

Liability doesn't work that way. Your view is so naive I'm having doubts about whether your an adult or not.

If you delivered the product, you're liable, regardless of where you got the product from.

After getting sued, you might be able to convince a judge that the supplier is liable. But getting sued is expensive, and the judge may not rule in your favour.

And even if it goes in your favour, OpenAI is simply going to turn around and point to the license you agreed to, in which no guarantee of fitness for purpose is specified, and all liability falls to the user.

You're still going to be liable.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nah, it'll still be human readable. that was the whole point of C and Java. Let the computers to the hard stuff in bytecode or asm. Compiler development will get even more complex though.

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

#140
post #54

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 “y…

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

You can just say "Continue."

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