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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

#311

Post by [deleted] »

Nition wrote: post #166
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 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.

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by weatherlite »

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?

Didn't know this story. Wow that sucks.

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

#313

Post by F_J_H »

ihatepython wrote: post #115
worldsayshi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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…

Does chatGPT now have a Reddit plugin?

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

#314

Post by Yoric »

withinboredom wrote: post #28
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…

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…

Ah, I almost had a knee-jerk response to remind you that the Turbo Vision IDE very much had copy and paste 30+ years ago – and then I understood what you meant.

One of my cousins learnt to program as a teenager in Argentina, before the web. He told me about the difficulty of finding programming information over there. Apparently, people who knew any kind of programming had paid dearly to get that knowledge and in turned charged others for that knowledge. Needless to say, there were not many programmers in the country at the time.

In comparison, today's generation has access to vast libraries of knowledge.

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

#315

Post by nevertoolate »

esalman wrote: post #218
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.

Interesting! I’d love to see an analysis of the rewrite

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

#316

Post by Yoric »

barrkel wrote: post #264
nicky0 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the ones who learned to program from colorful 1980s Usborne BASIC books. (Also with no copy/paste, and having to use a tape cassette to save the listing.)

The Amstrad CPC 464 had a "copy cursor" and a "copy" key. Holding down shift and using the arrow keys let you navigate a second cursor to text you wanted to copy, then the "copy" key would insert the letter under the copy cursor at your insert cursor and advance both cursors forward one character. The C64 wasn't as good a BASIC environment. You can overwrite text in a program listing and press ENTER to update a line,…

Oh, I'm not the only person on Earth who remembers the CPC 464!

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

#317

Post by gavinhoward »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #178
braveyellowtoad wrote: post #75

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

Hey Abner, programmer with much the same philosophy here.

I'm interested in being an instructor, but not sure I would have anything useful to add. If you've read my blog [1], do you think I would?

If you haven't read it, feel free to ignore this.

Edit: I was specifically thinking about a course on fuzzing.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/

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

#318

Post by Yoric »

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…

It's possible that all this research in programming language safety, specification, static analysis that most of us have been safely ignoring for the past... well, forever... will finally become a staple requirement, instead of programming itself.

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

#319

Post by c-fe »

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…

Hi, do you mind revealing some of these uses? Or, lets put it differently, I have been using ChatGPT for

- writing simple functions: e.g. I used it to generate a function that receives a name and then removes any dutch name particles ("van de", "van der", ...). ChatGPT also generated the list of dutch name particles of dutch name particles.

- solving tricky bugs: e.g. I used it to solve a tricky but in SwiftUI that nobody on stackoverflow was able to solve.

- generating ideas for apps I could develop that would make use of the ChatGPT API.

- as a replacement for google when debugging code based on error messaged received.

I feel like this is how the typical programmer uses ChatGPT, but im intrigued by your comment what kind of uses you have for it. If you dont mind, could you hint at some ways you use it?

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

#320

Post by sarojmoh1 »

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…

Thank you for this. The last month has been scary as a dev. Not necessarily bc of employment outcome, but just philosophy of why we do what we do
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