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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

#161

Post by latexr »

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…

You seem to be saying that as if it’s a good thing, but that’s terrifying.

The article says they “get the right answer 80% of the time”. That’s abysmal when you don’t know what you’re doing. Software which is 20% bugs is software you can’t rely on. Depending on what it does, it can be actively harmful.

Being a “magician (…) among mere mortals” is not a positive. We live in an interconnected society where the actions of others affect us. It would be nice if you can trust what other people are doing when they’re dealing with your water supply, electricity, food production, hospitals…

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

#162

Post by postexitus »

ak_111 wrote: post #154
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

There are no perl jobs.

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

#164

Post by ak_111 »

postexitus wrote: post #162
ak_111 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

There are no perl jobs.

Exactly my point. You had proportionally as many perl jobs in the late 90s as you have Ruby jobs today. It even had early mover advantage in the scripting space and insanely good ecosystem of libraries.

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

#165

Post by latexr »

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…

> For example they can write some code and say, "adjust for best practice".

And they’ll get code which isn’t good, just a parroting of bad ideas widely disseminated. A bit like Casey Muratori’s concept of fake optimisation: https://youtu.be/pgoetgxecw8?t=600

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

#166

Post by Nition »

ihatepython wrote: post #115
worldsayshi wrote: post #80

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 can't believe people are taking your comment seriously. How far has reality moved into parody, if a comment saying you'll be happy to blame ChatGPT when people die doesn't go far enough to give it away?

Maybe they're just replying without having properly read your post, but that's not great either.

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

#167

Post by BiteCode_dev »

ak_111 wrote: post #154
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend.

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

#168

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Closi wrote: post #143
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).

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 acro…

There always seems to be a lot of "We Can Do The Thing We Do Today But Faster" in these comments.

It misses that we won't be doing Old Thing. We'll be doing New Thing.

It's not a step change in an old medium. It's a qualitatively different change to a completely new medium, whose properties haven't yet been revealed.

It's like waving an iPhone at Babbage. An iPhone is so far ahead of an Analytical Engine that it offers a completely new and unimaginable set of affordances.

It's also faster, smaller, and more reliable, with much more memory - which is an interesting implementation footnote, but incidental to the fact that from a user POV it's a completely different class of device.

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

#169

Post by ak_111 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #167
ak_111 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

You don't need to kill a chasing bear to survive, you just need to run faster than your friend.

With those new interpreted language that are easy to pick and have a low-barrier of entry you are constantly having to run faster than an influx of fresh energetic high school dropouts and boot camp graduates.

With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of entry are much higher and this will mean you have to outrun fewer people in the long run to survive.

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

#170

Post by deafpolygon »

koonsolo wrote: post #156
deafpolygon wrote: post #16

> This doesn’t just make me more productive: it lowers my bar for when a project is worth investing time in at all. This is the real benefit here. AI isn't taking jobs, it's going to enhance them - once we learn how to use the tools we have available to us.

Exactly. Let say AI makes us 100x more productive. What would happen? 1. 99% of devs will be out of work and the current work will be done by 1%. 2. More and better software will be developed. About 100x effort more. I'm pretty confident the 2nd will happen. I already have lots of work that will take a long time, and more after that. 100x improvement on productivity would mean more, faster and better (because of more…

I'm of the thought that #2 will happen. #1 will never happen - there are simply not enough developers to go around.

To use a relatively modern analogy, AI-enhanced development is to developers what Photoshop is to photographers. No one ever said Photoshop would put photographers out of business. Now Photoshop is a requirement for photographers. The pictures still need to get taken; likewise, for developers - the business requirements need to be captured.

AI [in its current iteration] cannot do that.

As developers, our jobs are safe. Jobs will not be lost at a massive scale; only those unwilling to learn a new tool will be replaced.

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