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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

#351

Post by simonw »

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…

That's why I included that 80% accuracy estimate: to hint that these tools are massively less useful if you don't know what you're doing with them.

If you have years of expertise already they give you wings.

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

#352

Post by sumtechguy »

latexr wrote: post #173
AJRF wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why people say stuff like this. Are people writing code then just blindly shipping it to production? The process goes; 1. Write some code 2. Get AI assistance with some part 3. Check it's right, make changes 4. Write tests 5. Put up for code review 6. CI runs checks 7. Release Candidate 8. Release Testing There are many, many chances to catch errors. If you don't have the above in place, i'd focus on that fi…

> I wonder why people say stuff like this. Are people writing code then just blindly shipping it to production? Yes, yes they are! HN is now inundated with examples and the situation is only going to get worse. People with zero understanding of code, who take hours to convert a single line from one language to another (and even then don’t care to understand the result) are shipping and selling software. https://news.…

People are already cut and pasting solutions off random webpages and stackoverflow. That they would grab stuff right out of chatgpt does not surprise me in the least. I would ask back 'why would this be any different this time?'

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

#353

Post by kossTKR »

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible but the usage-cap at the moment makes it annoying to work with.

8 questions per hour (25 per 3 hours), is not a lot to work with for paying users - it started being like 10x higher and they've announced it may go down even further.

I wonder if Azure can scale with the insane adoption rate and if it's profitable at the moment?

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

#354

Post by htrp »

kossTKR wrote: post #353

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible but the usage-cap at the moment makes it annoying to work with. 8 questions per hour (25 per 3 hours), is not a lot to work with for paying users - it started being like 10x higher and they've announced it may go down even further. I wonder if Azure can scale with the insane adoption rate and if it's profitable at the moment?

API it .... 20 bucks a month buys you a metric fuck ton of api calls.

If you need the frontend, there are a bunch of open source front ends.

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

#356

Post by danielbln »

htrp wrote: post #354
kossTKR wrote: post #353

GPT-4 is absolutely incredible but the usage-cap at the moment makes it annoying to work with. 8 questions per hour (25 per 3 hours), is not a lot to work with for paying users - it started being like 10x higher and they've announced it may go down even further. I wonder if Azure can scale with the insane adoption rate and if it's profitable at the moment?

API it .... 20 bucks a month buys you a metric fuck ton of api calls. If you need the frontend, there are a bunch of open source front ends.

Gotta apply to the GPT4 waitlist first though, by default the API only gives you gpt3.5.

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

#357

Post by htrp »

eloff wrote: post #335
Aeolun wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot step in one of those machines without wondering if there is a hardware cutoff.

I went with a mechanic in a chair lift once. He was very nervous, saying he knows the kind of people who maintain these things, and he knows the kinds of things that can go wrong. I feel the same way about automation, whether it be self driving cars or an X-ray machine. I know the kind of people that program them, and the vast number of ways things can go wrong.

How many CV engineers own a self driving car becomes the AI equivalent question?

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

#358

Post by CharlieDigital »

thfuran wrote: post #237
CharlieDigital wrote: post #206

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.

I'm sure all the time; all people and processes are fallible.

But that's also why documentation is so important in this space.

I spent 15+ years building software for pharmas that was subject to GxP validation so I know the effort it takes to "do it right", but also that it's never infallible. The main point of validation is to capture the evidence that you followed the process and not that the process is infallible.

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

#359

Post by thatwasunusual »

grph123dot wrote: post #160

Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it. It gave me about 10 different results but all were wrong, it seems the number five mislead the algorithm. Another question was computing the variance of the sum of 60 dices but omitting the results where the sum was greater than 200, the reasoning was incorrect in all c…

> Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it.

IMO, this is irrelevant, because "normal people" would never ask this question. Because it has never been asked, there's also not a ChatGPT answer to it, because its answers are based on already existing information.

This thinking that ChatGPT is AI is just wrong. It's not AI, nor GI, so stop comparing it with that.

As a human, I can destroy your problem/question with one claim: you claim that the words must be built on the English alphabet. Let's throw some Æ, Ø and Å in there, shall we?

Can YOU solve that problem?

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

#360

Post by hombre_fatal »

withinboredom wrote: post #39
ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

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.

You're apparently not concerned about good developers who can just evaluate the code, so you must be talking about bad developers.

Bad developers don't even know if the code they write themself is close to correct. AI doesn't make that situation any worse. It actually improves the situation.

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