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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

#171

Post by zvmaz »

ihatepython wrote: post #60
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 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!

I couldn't have guessed it was a joke without Therac 25 mentioned.

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

#172

Post by ashitlerferad »

Honestly, I keep secret some of the amazing uses of ChatGPT. I feel selfish but also I feel as if everyone is respsible for what they get out of it. We have many people and the media spending hours and tons of prompts trying to create funny or eyebrow raising headlines. I just keep my head down an marvel at the growing array if uses, many complex, that chatgpt can perform. It has been making me tons more money for just $20 a month. I could hire 10 developers and assistants and they would not be able to come close to it's technical, coding and general abilities and in 1 to 5% of the time it would usually take!

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

#173

Post by latexr »

AJRF wrote: post #147
withinboredom wrote: post #39

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.

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 fi…

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

Yes, yes they are! HN is now inundated with examples and the situation is only going to get worse. People with zero understanding of code, who take hours to convert a single line from one language to another (and even then don’t care to understand the result) are shipping and selling software.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35128502

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

#174

Post by dandellion »

Technotroll wrote: post #128
throwaway049 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where I'm from most cars are also stick, but I got my license years ago but since then I've only driven twice: once with stick and once automatic, and I have to say, automatic is so much easier to learn that I don't know why we're all still getting licenses or buying manual cars. It must be stubbornness and the slight price difference because in reality automatic is just much more practical.

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

#175

Post by latexr »

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…

> Not as many ads

Yet. They got to get you hooked first.

At least with Google and Stack Overflow ads are identifiable and can blocked.

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

#176

Post by hutzlibu »

ak_111 wrote: post #169
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

"Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts)"

I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial?

But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform.

But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from boot camps.

Edit:

I know what a pointer is, so I can work closely with wasm libaries. I know algorithms and how to structure data and why I am structuring data this way in this case, so I can adopt in another case. I know how to achieve performant simple code. I know how to debug layers of code with sideeffects over sideeffects. Raceconditions, memory leaks, etc. (All a thing in js, too). Using and understanding the profiler etc.

Someone coming from a coding bootcamp, does not know this. He or she might learn it after years of practice, which is allright by me - but they are no direct threat to me, despite that I don't even really know react for example.

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

#177

Post by opportune »

withinboredom wrote: post #28
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…

It’s crazy to think about. We are nearing the end of the age where people who have been programming for “20 years this year” and self-taught probably learned to program from books. In the next few years, people who have been “programming for 20 years” might start to include YouTube learners and boot campers. As someone who learned to program from two gigantic tomes of C/C+ with a Borland Compiler, there was no copy/p…

I’ve been programming for 10 years, and as you’d expect know a lot of people with a few more or less years programming.

I think all the “kids these days” gripes only apply to people’s first few years. You can argue they’re formative, but most professional programmers will quickly need to evolve beyond “take message literally, ask online for help, paste error message into google/SO” to be good at their jobs. I don’t know anybody beyond entry level who operates like that.

I rarely take things literally like you said (though I may start by giving it the benefit of the doubt), I always just check the actual code from the thing emitting the error message, read the source of libraries I’m using, seek out documentation. It just so happens I can do all of that from my computer rather than doing some of it with a book.

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

#178

Post by abnercoimbre »

braveyellowtoad wrote: post #75
geraneum wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but without much value in the broader tech industry. Not talking about AI; but if you want to work on compilers, linux kernel, game engine optimization, GPU optimized code and many many other things than web development you need to be more than familiar with how to work with machine instructions, albeit not working with it every single day. These are significant parts of the industry which make the rest possible.

I agree with you. However, it’s worthwhile also noting these represent a very small proportion of all jobs in software development.

I'm not sure how you quantify "very small" here? I'm running low-level conferences [0] and they're big enough for me to be a full-time organizer for them: with a job fair that's included Mozilla, real estate, nuclear defense and various game studios.

[0] https://handmadecities.com

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

#179

Post by newshorts »

I’m kind of excited now.

I used to build random weird things all the time (mostly centered around connecting physical devices up to the internet to accomplish something silly) - but lost my mojo once I had kids and didn’t the ability to pull all nighters to “hack” something together.

Now I feel like the barrier might be low enough that I could create again. Will have to try this out and see how it goes.

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

#180

Post by danielbln »

roel_v wrote: post #107
skybrian wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using ChatGPT a bit with the GPT4 model and it seems quite promising, but also very slow. When it's writing out the same function again with a change I asked for, it reminds me of the old days when connecting to a BBS with a 300 baud modem. Am I doing it wrong somehow?

No, that's how it is. My MO is now I type in the question to the chat; go to another tab to google a bit on the background of the problem; by the time ChatGPT is done, I already know enough to have a reasonable idea about whether what it came up with is in the general direction of where I want to go. And if it is, I'm usually confident enough that it gets the details then mostly right. One meta comment is that I woul…

Check out alternatives like ChatWithGPT[0] or just the OpenAI chat playground[1], especially if you've gotten access to the GPT4 API. Populating the system message really makes a difference and you can enforce a lot of style of both code and output. The third party UIs also have a lot more bells and whistles.

[0] https://github.com/cogentapps/chat-with-gpt

[1] https://platform.openai.com/playground?mode=chat

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