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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

#251

Post by w4ffl35 »

sokoloff wrote: post #248
w4ffl35 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think maybe you're using ai wrong. its not akin to stackoverflow answers, its more akin to a jr programmer that can bang out some code for you while you go to the kitchen or bathroom and then you fix a few mistakes and integrate it with your larger project

I have played with it a small amount. If I need to center a div in CSS, it’s faster than me remembering how to do that. For anything significantly higher complexity, I don’t find that typing is anywhere near the rate-limiting factor. Figuring out how to decompose the problem, how the code should be structured overall, and other high-level concerns take far time/effort than banging out boilerplate. Now, if I wanted to…

interesting takes. i guess if you're using ai for basic things like that it makes sense to not like it

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

#252

Post by galleywest200 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #207
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.

I do not think that OP is arguing you should not learn the basics.

Tools like Copilot are very useful because if you need to create a function that takes a FLOAT in addition to the one you just wrote that takes an INT then its right there already. Sometimes I am just trying to bang together something quick for testing just so I can continue on with the actual project.

When I learned to write I did not just paste from Wikipedia into my essays, I would distill words from the articles I read into my own thoughts and writing. These tools are absolutely useful, but it is what you make of it.

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

#253

Post by nibbleshifter »

consp wrote: post #24
blueorange8 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this seems to be true of a lot of people that don't have tesla's as well ;)

Even if you have proper training to get your license (most people here didn't even get that) you only learn to drive while actually doing it.

Where I live now, getting a licence is pretty hard.

You take a theory exam (which you actually do have to study a bit for) on the rules of driving.

This gets you a learning permission, that allows you to drive but only with a fully licences driver in the car supervising.

You then have to take a minimum of 12 driving lessons with an approved instructor, recorded in a log book, before you can take the driving practical exam.

You then take the driving practical exam, which involves driving in the approved fashion around a public area. This has a surprisingly high failure rate - "wrong hand position" on wheel, not looking around enough, looking around too much, etc all will get you a fail.

Assuming you pass, you are then a "novice" driver (have to display "N" plates) for two years and pay an incredibly high insurance premium.

Despite all this "barriers to entry", most people here are terrible drivers lol

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

#254

Post by throwthrowuknow »

lelanthran wrote: post #130
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…

> 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". Not iteratively forever, the only feedback it will (eventually) get is it's own feedback, because humans will be using the AI best practices, and what it deems as best practice is almost certainly going to be too opaque to us…

Training data is key, a lot of people will be employed in creating, curating, and labeling it. They will utilize AI to help them but it will be a partner. If AI reaches the point of creating and using its own training data then you can hang up your hat and call it a day because no human input or work will be needed at that point.

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

#255

Post by sokoloff »

w4ffl35 wrote: post #251
sokoloff wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have played with it a small amount. If I need to center a div in CSS, it’s faster than me remembering how to do that. For anything significantly higher complexity, I don’t find that typing is anywhere near the rate-limiting factor. Figuring out how to decompose the problem, how the code should be structured overall, and other high-level concerns take far time/effort than banging out boilerplate. Now, if I wanted to…

interesting takes. i guess if you're using ai for basic things like that it makes sense to not like it

Enlighten me, please. What’s the killer use case where you’ve seen significant leverage from an AI tool? What was the business problem and what were the resulting prompts to your AI junior dev?

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

#256

Post by pc86 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236
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.

Which pretty much sums up today's work culture. I was just talking about this same exact thing, yesterday. That's absolutely heartbreaking. In the old days, we would have a team, that would compete, as a team, against other corporations. Our team would stick together, work together, and, quite often, function as a unit; leveraging each others' strengths, and compensating for each others' weaknesses. Nowadays, we look…

The idea that nobody saw their coworkers as competition for a promotion, or bonus, or face-time with the boss in the past, and that there are no teams that stick together and work together today, is fanciful at best.

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

#257

Post by fnimick »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236
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.

Which pretty much sums up today's work culture. I was just talking about this same exact thing, yesterday. That's absolutely heartbreaking. In the old days, we would have a team, that would compete, as a team, against other corporations. Our team would stick together, work together, and, quite often, function as a unit; leveraging each others' strengths, and compensating for each others' weaknesses. Nowadays, we look…

Given how quickly income inequality is rising, can you blame people for taking any advantage possible to try to stay ahead of the curve? If it means throwing your teammates under the bus to get more money, that's unfortunate but it's going to happen.

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

#258

Post by SanderNL »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #158
SanderNL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was all they were doing, sure.. but if they wrote language parsers, understood computing from the nand-gate up and worked their way up and down the stack over-and-over.. these types of guys will blow past all of us. The understanding you get from going up and down stacks is ridiculous.

Being a polymath is generally very advantageous.

In this AI age I'm seeing it coming to fruition. Fullstacks have (IMO) more potential now than narrow specialists because they can now get away with high-level remarks and letting the AI fill in the details.

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

#259

Post by ZeroGravitas »

What's the state of the art for combining these two types of AI (super auto complete and "ask a question you'd otherwise have to Google") in vim?

Ideally I want to be able to highlight some code and then run an AI command on it and also provide it as context to a query without leaving vim or losing syntax highlighting.

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

#260

Post by swader999 »

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.

If your friend is faster, you just wack them in the knee before you start running from the bear.
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