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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

#141

Post by lysecret »

Technotroll wrote: post #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 lo…

Id say it has approximate as high a chance to work as "random code from the internet". Also, it is often just relying on an old version of an API or a Library.

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

#142

Post by lelanthran »

speedylight wrote: post #127
ihatepython wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I honestly have issue with using ChatGPT to write medical software.

GP is talking nonsense. No developer is ever going to be able to say "not my fault, I used what ChatGPT gave me" because without even reading the OpenAI license I can all but guarantee that the highly paid lawyers made sure that the terms and conditions include discharging all liability onto the user.

GP appears to think that if he sells a lethally defective toaster he can simply tell his buyer to make all claims against a unknown and impossible to reach supplier in China.

Products don't work like that, especially in life-critical industries (I worked in munitions, which has similar if not more onerous regulations).

The buck stops with whoever sold the product.

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

#143

Post by Closi »

precompute wrote: post #85
JimmyRuska wrote: post #38

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…

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).

This assumes that a future version won't have super-human coding abilities which can write code vastly better than any human. The language it writes in might not look anything like our current languages, because it might be able to write highly efficient code that it would be too slow and impractical for a human to write, and refactoring the entire codebase might happen automatically overnight rather than slowly across months.

In that world the skill won't be to code, but to accurately describe software/business requirements. Unless a future AI can do that too.

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

#144

Post by politelemon »

robinduckett wrote: post #124

I am going back and picking up old projects that I had semi-abandoned and now have the confidence to continue using ChatGPT as a second pair of eyes and it seems to work much better with GPT-4 than the previous models.

By old projects do you mean telling ChatGPT to go and look at your codebase first? Or it's just a matter of knowing what topic you wanted to pursue and just asking those questions and shaping it through further questions?

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

#145

Post by groestl »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #125
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…

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 ho…

> New incredible models come out every day

The double meaning at play here...

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

#146

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

precompute wrote: post #119
marginalia_nu wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's no need for that any longer.

I don't think so:

LLMs have used Stackoverflow's answers for training. Now, if people would stop going there for questions, people would stop giving answers, so LLMs would have no data to train on for new problems.

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

#147

Post by AJRF »

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.

I wonder why people say stuff like this. Are people writing code then just blindly shipping it to production?

The process goes;

1. Write some code

2. Get AI assistance with some part

3. Check it's right, make changes

4. Write tests

5. Put up for code review

6. CI runs checks

7. Release Candidate

8. Release Testing

There are many, many chances to catch errors. If you don't have the above in place, i'd focus on that first before using AI assistance tools.

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

#148

Post by jsty »

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…

> Then "explain why needs to be "

It would be nice, but until there's a breakthrough on having LLMs / other models generate, maintain and walk the user through a representation of their reasoning, these explanations are likely no more reliable than a random StackOverflow answer - except without the benefit of other users scoring / picking holes in the answer

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

#149

Post by lelanthran »

creshal wrote: post #121
zer00eyz wrote: post #91

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 langua…

Yeah, and for each piece of boilerplate we remove, we add another few layers of abstraction. At the end of this process we are stuck with crap like YAML and JSON (or, heaven forbid, XML) with the business logic being thinly spread out between logic in shell scripts, shell variables (for CD, for example), in YAML and/or JSON and/or XML within the frameworks in use (spring, mybatis, etc), multiple third-party libraries.

There is no one place where you can find the business logic.

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

#150

Post by qwertox »

In my eyes ChatGPT is a blessing for developers.

The only thing I dislike about d3 is the boilerplate code to hook it up to a div and get the first lines to render, so yesterday I did a:

Assuming I have the following data: ```{ "status": "ok", "data": { "a": [[1680079200000, -199], [1680079800000, 92]], "b": [[1680079200000, 248], [1680079800000, 259]]] } }```, where the first item in the array is always the unix timestamp in ms, and the second one the value of the datapoint. Also assume that I have a website with an HTML element ``. Please show me the code used to draw a graph of "a" and "b" with d3 into the `div` element.

And it generated all the code I hated to "create".

Then little things like "Ok, I want the time not to be in AM PM, but in HH:MM" which used to mean to visit a couple of pages, the answer's right there.

I absolutely love it.

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