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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

#281

Post by w4ffl35 »

sokoloff wrote: post #255
w4ffl35 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

i am trying to solve many business problems as I am building apps that allow people to use stable diffusion and LLMs locally on their own hardware without the need to install anything and i'm doing it with compiled python that I have to ensure runs on various machines. this means i have to support customers. I'm also making a couple of small games. I also have to handle marketing.

the killer use case is augmenting my own workflow. i have fully integrated ai into my development pipeline. i am using chatgpt and i am using copilot. I almost never find myself turning to any other resource for information other than occasionally having to reference documentation for very obscure libraries. I also use an IDE.

this gives me time to concentrate on things such as my ci/cd pipeline, architecture, UX, testing, solving how to install bitsandbytes and triton on windows and other difficult problems related to build processes that don't have clear cut solutions.

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

#282

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

worldsayshi wrote: post #80
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!

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?

I've been gravitating towards projects that wouldn't have to care what a court thought anyway. Like if it can't operate in the presence of that kind of adversary then I'm better of treating that like a bug and fixing it instead of worrying about the particulars of why they're upset in the first place.

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

#283

Post by Herval_freire »

swader999 wrote: post #262
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I never publish or react to individual velocity as a manager. It's all about what the dev and QA team gets across as a whole to the Done pile each week, and I use a rolling ten week average. I know what each person is doing still but if they spend four hours collaborating on something nobody loses points.

You're a good manager. But not everyone/company is like this.

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

#284

Post by deafpolygon »

Herval_freire wrote: post #273
deafpolygon wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 busi…

>To use a relatively modern analogy, AI-enhanced development is to developers what Photoshop is to photographers. Photography as a job has been hit heavily by modern smart phone advances. Heavily. It's now very hard to get paid a living wage as a photographer. With mid journey it's now even harder. Photographers weren't completely replaced. I would say they were mostly replaced because now every Tom dick and Jane can…

I see you take a pessimistic view.

The way I see it: smart phones just made photography more accessible to everyone rather than for those who can afford $5k photography kit and a darkroom. Stock and news media photography went the way of the dodo, but there's still plenty of room for photography as a creative endeavor.

No matter how much you throw at it, you cannot replace the human behind it. It is too difficult.

Our jobs as developers are safe for current and future iterations of AI. The way we develop software may very well change, but we will still be developers. It's very well possible that software will go the way of photography. But that only means software is in the reach of everyone who wants to try their hand at it. It is a net good.

But that's not likely to happen anytime soon. So yes, our jobs are safe. Mine is quite safe. For quite a long, long time.

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

#285

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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…

It certainly makes me feel like a teenager lol.

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

#286

Post by mrleinad »

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 was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see a code generator until I was already a man."

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

#287

Post by widg3t »

ashitlerferad wrote: post #172

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 ju…

Did you use any publicly available resources to learn how to leverage these LLMs in new ways?

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

#288

Post by swader999 »

latexr wrote: post #161
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…

Yes, good productivity will be amplified and so will bad. There's people on my team that are super productive but cut corners, don't code in as a maintainable way etc. I usually get a slow senior dude to gate their PR until it passes. But it might just be less hassle to let the senior dudette to get more productive with an AI. We'll see...

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

#289

Post by rsolva »

nuc1e0n wrote: post #267

I too look forward to being able to tackle larger projects in the future with AI. However, I don't trust sending my code to a third party over the internet so would want to host any AI I use locally.

Have you experimented with gpt4all? It runs localy on commodity hardware.

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

#290

Post by lolinder »

Herval_freire wrote: post #278

The evolution of comments here on HN are telling. 1 month ago people were saying there was no way AI could do their job and many were telling everyone to calm down as nothing would happen. Now one month later this entire thread is about how chatGPT is an integral part of the development process. There are people even saying it replaces junior developers completely. Can anyone venture to guess what the thread will loo…

This is about what the comments looked like immediately after ChatGPT came out the first time. Give it a few weeks for the GPT-4 hype to settle and I think we'll be right back to where we were.
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