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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

#201

Post by pineaux »

opportune wrote: post #181
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…

I’m thinking of things like the invention of the automobile, typewriters, calculators, even writing. Before those were invented people did things very differently - they walked or rode a horse, wrote manually, used slide rules or basic arithmetic algorithms like long division, memorized things and persisted them through story telling rather than persisting them in writing. People are still actively acquiring the know…

Socrates: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words.

This time its different... The written word might be able to write back. As a matter of fact, I already use chatgpt to learn new skills. Its a better way of acquiring knowledge. The job of teachers will change within 5 years.

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

#202

Post by mikrotikker »

dandellion wrote: post #174
Technotroll wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think manual gearboxes are more durable. Especially when most autos today are the CVT type which break quite often I heard. Mind you the newer manual gearboxes are usually 8 or 10 speed which is going to be less reliable because all the cogs are smaller thus weaker, and you have to change gear twice as much.

One of my vehicles even has the tranny cooler and the radiator in one unit and is prone to cracking, leading to running radiator fluid through your gearbox, destroying it. The first thing I did was install an external cooler, as the market was big enough for an aftermarket kit for such a part.

Cars are getting so much worse.

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

#203

Post by AJRF »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #184
AJRF wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Are people writing code then just blindly shipping it to production? Of course they do. Ship fast, break things, look cool, cash out, leave someone else to fix the mess you have created, it's the new black.

And AI makes this...worse?

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

#204

Post by mistercow »

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…

I don’t think the code we consider “grunt work” should necessarily be eliminated. When communicating, it’s useful to have a certain amount of obvious stuff spelled out in order to ground the audience and let them understand the basic context in which the non-obvious stuff is happening.

For example, if you have a configuration, and a particular default would often (say 30% of the time) be overridden, I think it’s typically not a good idea for the default to exist in the first place. Having those defaults will certainly reduce the average config size, but they’ll also create more cognitive load for readers, who now not only don’t know what the default is, but don’t necessarily know that the choice is being made in the first place.

This is one of the things I think is so powerful about AI as a solution. It saves you from the work, but still conveys the basic context to readers without requiring them to understand a bunch of opinions baked into the language or framework.

The same applies to writing prose. When you give a bulleted list to ChatGPT and ask it to turn it into prose, a lot of the work it’s doing is filling in obvious text. But that obvious text is important to communication, and where you have to go and edit that obvious text for correctness will be some of the most important communication in the final product.

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

#205

Post by Aeolun »

zachthewf wrote: post #69
ihatepython wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

Heh, is this a Therac 25 joke?

I cannot step in one of those machines without wondering if there is a hardware cutoff.

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

#206

Post by CharlieDigital »

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.

Medical software has to go through a validation process.

As long as that validation process is still as rigorous, I don't see much difference.

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

#207

Post by CharlieDigital »

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…

In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the new staff starts from cooking rice perfectly first and perfecting roasted seaweed before moving on to preparing an egg sushi and then graduating to fish.

It's not grunt work.

It's how new engineers learn the ropes and gain experience doing low risk work; it's part of the learning process that only feels like grunt work to a senior dev.

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

#208

Post by precompute »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #146
precompute wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think unless there's a reward system for contributing to LLMs, the internet will mostly be devoid of new content. People will move to walled gardens. All you need is a short demo showing how something like GPT-4 with the internet access plugin can make a profile of you based on your publically available comments.

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

#209

Post by ChatGTP »

hallqv wrote: post #35
ChatGTP wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is funny because there was an article on here with some pretty hard data which showed not much difference or maybe worse performance from GPT4 than 3.5-turbo. You'll likely refute that as your mind is already made up, but there you go, another conflicting and confusing data point.

What are talking about? Just compare the output of a 3.5 vs 4 yourself for a problem you are interested in, it’s a single click in the interface.. Do you always need a study or an “expert“ to make up your mind?

Benchmarks are good. You may be a less experienced software engineer than others (or maybe more experienced?), then you will tell me “ChatGPT x is insane bro", but that's only a matter of perspective. A benchmark gives us facts, outside of our own experience, not opinions.

I'm sure ChatGPT4 would likely agree :)

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

#210

Post by capableweb »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #191
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…

Electron is still an abomination. I've gone from hating PHP for most of my career, to now having a grudging appreciation for it. Its a clusterfuck, but it works really well, and deployment barely gets simpler than "untar into webroot, done".

There is still required setup for things like PHP, like what reads from the webroot and serves the requests. Other things, like binaries, can be almost completely self-contained and do everything, and then you just move the binary to the server and run it, and you get the full environment needed, no Apache with mod_php required (or what the kids use nowadays)
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