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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

301–310 of 519 posts

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

#301

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…

ChatGPT 5 runs its own team of ChatGPT 4s which get weaker hardware because they are lower ranking and don’t deserve the same resources

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

#302

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…

While maybe it does sum up our work culture it shouldn't influence how you work. Rarely have I seen someone who "runs faster" be more valued (monetarily or among senior peers) than someone who churns out quality and runs "a little slower".

Team is still very much a thing and if your team members are looking at each other as competition then that sounds like a culture thing, maybe the norm, still not acceptable.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the link. This is really awesome!

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

#304

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.

Well that just sounds like StackOverflow with fewer steps.

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

#305

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.

Unlikely. GPT-4 wasn't as game changing as chatGPT. People are less hyped up and have a more realistic expectation of what they should see out of an LLM.

The extreme positive reaction to gpt4 is imo not driven by hype fuel.

In fact, if you recall the hype fuel surrounding the initial chatGPT was in both parts positive and negative. There were equal portions of people praising it and people vehemently dismissing it as a stochastic parrot. That's not what I see here.

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

#306
post #221
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And AI makes this...worse?

Yes, it speeds it up considerably. More heaps of messy software produced much faster.

Doesn't that get the people who aren't doing due diligence fired faster?

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well my team wins more than most others and we've replaced teams and fixed many failed projects so that helps too. And if the company is dense there's others that aren't and lots that will follow where I go to next.

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

#308
post #166

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 can't believe people are taking your comment seriously. How far has reality moved into parody, if a comment saying you'll be happy to blame ChatGPT when people die doesn't go far enough to give it away? Maybe they're just replying without having properly read your post, but that's not great either.

I think it's satire

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

#309

100% this. I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix. The day before I bu…

What interface are you using? I've so far only used ChatGPT through the web interface. (I pay for plus). I just ask it for things that are standalone snippet-like things. Perfect functions on the standard library, or an emacs lisp snippet for converting a unix epoch to an ISO timestamp. I'm not sure I could allow it to read my company's code, but is that what you're doing when you're using as part of a large project like that?

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

#310
post #166

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 can't believe people are taking your comment seriously. How far has reality moved into parody, if a comment saying you'll be happy to blame ChatGPT when people die doesn't go far enough to give it away? Maybe they're just replying without having properly read your post, but that's not great either.

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