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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

341–350 of 519 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medical software has to go through a validation process. As long as that validation process is still as rigorous, I don't see much difference.

You might want to look into how often recalls are issued for medical software. Or not, if you prefer pisces of mind.

Fishy

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

#342

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…

It reminds me of the boundless optimism of Mr Meeseeks: https://youtu.be/qUYvIAP3qQk

GPT-3/4 is like a Meeseeks box for computer and internet tasks. Keep your task simple, and it will quickly and happily solve it for you before ceasing to exist. (Well, that’s how I use it via the API, at least. ChatGPT will preserve the state, but of course the context window is still limited anyway.)

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

#343
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…

They will call us back in 2038 when shit will hit the fan.

Same year as Unix datetime underflow. Nice

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

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

#344

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…

[deleted]

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

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly have issue with using ChatGPT to write medical software. I don’t know what your exact process is like but I hope you’re giving the code it generates extra scrutiny to make sure it really does what you put in the prompt. It kinda feels like the judge who used ChatGPT to determine whether to deny or grant bail.

> I honestly have issue with using ChatGPT to write medical software. GP is talking nonsense. No developer is ever going to be able to say "not my fault, I used what ChatGPT gave me" because without even reading the OpenAI license I can all but guarantee that the highly paid lawyers made sure that the terms and conditions include discharging all liability onto the user. GP appears to think that if he sells a lethally…

The GGP was making fun of the OP, but looks like the comment was not absurd enough to pop-out in our current hyper-hyped climate.

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

#347

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…

I would trust ChatGPT code about as much as I trust the code produced by any human. All the Therac-25 code was written by a human, so what is the argument here exactly? At least when you tell ChatGPT that its code is wrong it agrees and tries to fix. Ok, it usually fails at fixing it, but it doesn't refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem at all, unlike the case of the Therac-25.

I like to think that it is not about who (or what) writes the code in the first place, it is about the review and testing procedures that ensure the quality of the final product. I think. Maybe it is just hopeless.

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

#348
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to look into how often recalls are issued for medical software. Or not, if you prefer pisces of mind.

Fishy

Yeah. All the talk about thinking computers, but I agree that intelligent fishes are a much larger threat.

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

#349
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…

Highly unlikely.

If every single person with that coding experience only coded, that's likely, but not every person who got their start that way focused on coding to the exclusion of everything else. There are at least a couple of us who are more oriented towards teaching, archiving, and knowledge preservation. Right now, people like us but don't tend to prioritize giving us their resources. Once those greybeards are in their 60s/70s/80s and looking at their work being lost forever, I imagine that will change. (Much in the same way that there's way more discussion now in tech spaces about raising kids now that more programmers are old enough to confront that issue).

That knowledge will likely be preserved by another greybeard cohort and it'll be specialized knowledge that only some people know, but it will be known. Some stuff will be lost because we'll prioritize money and copyright up until there's a crisis, but there are people prepping for this time period. It's not like trade knowledge loss is a new problem. It's just not a sexy one right now.

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

#350

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…

> It's clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language design or libraries, but we need to do better at the core.

What do you mean "at the core"?

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