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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

#371

Post by latexr »

politician wrote: post #323
latexr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

This is no different from the NFT hustlers. Scam artists and get rich quick types exist everywhere.

I agree.¹ And you might agree that making scamming easier is an undesirable outcome.

¹ Last paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35133929

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

#372

Post by mcgannon2007 »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #125
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…

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…

Sort of off topic - but Django was actually created by the author of this post! But in Lawrence, KS to run a small little newspaper's site (Lawrence Journal-World). WaPo then adopted it, which was obviously a huge boon to the growth of the framework.

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

#373

Post by ak_111 »

weatherlite wrote: post #330
ak_111 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

I find it hard to believe people who learned Java don't have to learn new things every now and then. Yeah maybe they stuck to Java but the whole backend ecosystem looks way different than even 10 years ago. Even C is debatable.

Of course, everyone is always learning, you can't remain static. But you could afford to become more and more of a specialist in Java and growing your job opportunities that you can apply to.

If you became more and more of a specialist in Perl on the other hand you would have had to completely relearn something new by now to find as many opportunities as you used to in the late 90s.

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

#374

Post by sounds »

PaulHoule wrote: post #294

Upwards of 80% of the effort in commercial software development is maintenance. You could speed up the remainder dramatically and make very little progress on the rate progress happens and have people scratching their heads about why.

That may not be true in this case. Cheaper "second system syndrome" may allow maintenance to be perceived as a cost center.

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

#375

Post by latexr »

sumtechguy wrote: post #352
latexr wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?'

> random webpages and stackoverflow.

Crucially, those have context around them. And as you navigate them more and more you develop an intuitive sense for what is trustworthy or not. Perhaps you even find a particularly good blog which you reference first every time you want to learn something from a particular language. Or in the case of Stack Overflow, your trust in an answer is enhanced by the discussion around it: the larger the conversation, the more confident you can be of its merits and limitations.

When you get all your information from the same source and have no idea what it referenced, you lose the all the other cues regarding the validity, veracity, or usefulness of the information.

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

#376

Post by chasd00 »

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…

I've been putting it off and then finally signed up and started playing aroudn with chatgpt. I'm pretty amazed so far but i've only been asking it pretty easy stuff. "write a program that blinks an led on pin 13 in circuitpython", "write a rest api in Java using Spring" stuff like that. I wonder if people will start running to chatgpt for an algorithm instead of searching for a library for an implementation of said algorith.

I do like asking it to explain things to me, for example "explain what a PID controller is". It reminds of like a real-time wikipedia.

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

#377

Post by ripperdoc »

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.

I've used ChatGPT a lot lately when developing some half-advanced Python code with async, websockets, etc. And I've been a bit underwhelmed to be honest. It will always output plausible code, but almost every time it will hallucinate a bit. For example, it will invent APIs or function parameters that don't exist, or it will mix older and newer versions of libraries. It never works to just copy-paste the code, it usually fails on something subtle. Of course, I'm not planning to just copy paste without understanding the code, but I often have to spend a fair amount of time checking the real docs to check how the APIs are supposed to be used, and then I'm not sure how much time I saved.

The second shortcoming is that that I have to switch over to ChatGPT and it's messy to give it my existing code when it's more than just toy code. It would be a lot more effortless if it was integrated like Copilot (if we ignore the fact that this means sending all your code to OpenAI...).

Still, it's great for boilerplate, general algorithms, data translanslation (for small amounts of data). It's a great tool when exploring.

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

#378

Post by ChatPGT »

nibbleshifter wrote: post #268
ChatPGT wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The outputs usually about half right when its usable. For data projects/pocs/mvps using python its saving me lots of hours, you have some tiny mistakes, but once I have the idea in my head I just iterate and in 30min or less I have "written" the code for what would take me many hours.

I think over the weekend I'll see how it handles some trivial-but-annoying/tedious data mangling tasks. There's a few small projects I have been procrastinating for ages that just will require a lot of "tedious but trivial" hand jamming of 90% boilerplate that may be well suited to LLM generated code.

That's it. And it also helps with self-awareness: I found out that I much like prefer solving problems than writing code!

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

#380

Post by mordymoop »

I can definitely relate to your experience. Just last week, I leveraged AI tools to develop some data processing code. Estimating how long it would have taken me to write that code without these tools is a challenge because, to be honest, a year ago I wouldn't have even considered attempting such a project. It might have required a week or even two of my time, which I simply cannot spare for this kind of undertaking. In the absence of these powerful AI tools, I would have opted for a more manual approach, like analyzing the data using Excel. It's fascinating to witness the impact AI has on our productivity and the expansion of possibilities it brings.
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