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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

#211

Post by precompute »

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…

I agree, but that's a long time away, maybe five or six years. Until then (and even after) we'll need people that can interface with lower-level systems and also have prior experience. This also doesn't take into account countries that will effectively ban usage of companies like "Open"AI (which "Open"AI will be more than willing to enforce), and on top of a possible thin-client revolution, we'll see demand for human coders in the new tech-ghetto parts of the world.

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

#212

Post by capableweb »

soco wrote: post #195
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.

Technically very true, stick driving will give you a better feeling of what your engine actually can deliver. However this knowledge does very little to improve road safety, so my bet is still on AI support. Not sure of the English terminology but "basic" stuff like lane protection or tiredness detection helped me a few times - and finally taught me a lesson.

> However this knowledge does very little to improve road safety

I think this would depend on the environment. If you live in a dry, relatively flat area and you mostly drive there, you're probably right, marginal difference in road safety.

But if you live in a country that has long winters or lots of mountains, having control over the engine is a integral part of staying safe on the roads.

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

#213

Post by capableweb »

opportune wrote: post #177
withinboredom wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 k…

I've had the unfortunate luck of working with a couple of people with "senior" in their title that once faced with an error message from a open source library, starts their troubleshooting with searching for the error message and if nothing comes up, opens a issue on the issue tracker and then wait. They didn't even consider digging into the source code of the library to figure things out themselves.

I haven't worked with a lot of people like that, but enough to guess that there is quite a bit of people who work that way.

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

#214

Post by sokoloff »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #189
jsty wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Have you tried it yet? It is significantly better than a stackoverflow answer. I've been using copilot since release and have now integrated chatgpt into that workflow (thankfully copilot using chatgpt 4 and some tricks I figured out to treat copilot more like a chat bot are making it so I can avoid the chatgpt browser).

It may be significantly better than a random stackoverflow answer, but I haven’t seen it as being better than the top-voted stackoverflow answer (at least not without significant curation/prompting).

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

#215

Post by flir »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #185
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…

"Teenage" lol. I have not stopped messing with Stable Diffusion and llms for like 7 months now and I've been a software engineer for 20 years. I use copilot and chatgpt and my own brain and have released two compiled python apps on itch ( first real apps I've ever built and released from the ground up on my own) - both are ai tools, one for stable diffusion one for flan-t5. I'll be releasing a unity solitaire game so…

> This is the most fun I've had creating things since I started programming.

Definitely getting that vibe over here. I've been revisiting the exploration-style programming I was doing when I was young - Mandelbrot sets, Truchet tiles, all the old Computer Recreations columns stuff. Things you code up just to see what they look like.

Being able to say "Turn this pseudocode into a Processing sketch" is a joyous thing.

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

#216

Post by flir »

jsty wrote: post #148
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…

> 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

I get a lot of "ok, I've changed this, this and this because X, Y and Z" style answers even without prompting. It really wants to explain what it's doing, to the point where I have to sometimes say just shut up and give me the code. (But politely. Gotta be polite to our future AI overlords).

My theory is that people working inside frameworks (like me) are getting significantly better answers than people doing "freehand" coding because the training data's so much better in framework-world.

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

#217

Post by tbran »

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.

This sounds like how most of us develop anyway. Then we fix that stuff.

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

#218

Post by esalman »

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…

One of my colleagues at my previous lab is porting multiple Matlab toolboxes to Python. These would probably require months for couple of Master's students, but with ChatGPT it is a few weeks work for a postdoc.

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

#219

Post by nibbleshifter »

hutzlibu wrote: post #176
ak_111 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of the Java programmers I know professionally know fuck all about JVM internals, etc. Its largely unnecessary unless you have to chase down some extremely subtle bug most of the time.

A lot of them are senior or principal product engineers at companies you will have heard of.

Whereas with C, its extremely necessary to get into the weeds - otherwise your code just crashes or suffers some memory corruption issue, race condition, etc etc.

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

#220

Post by esalman »

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…

I was never a graphics/3D designer but ChatGPT basically unlocked a potential new skillet for me.
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