Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember, existence is pain to a Meeseeks. So treat your AI with care!
I should ask ChatGPT if it can take 2 strokes off my game.
That sounds hard…try for making yourself a more complete woman first
AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
401–410 of 519 posts
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#402@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…
> Software which is 20% bugs is software you can’t rely on.
No one is saying to take the output and immediately ship it. It still needs to be finished and tested. What's important is what is ultimately delivered; less important is what steps brought you to that point.
That said I suspect good testing will become more highly-valued as AI use increases. Maybe there's a form of TDD that can develop, with the human mostly writing tests and AI prompts?
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#403I am going back and picking up old projects that I had semi-abandoned and now have the confidence to continue using ChatGPT as a second pair of eyes and it seems to work much better with GPT-4 than the previous models.
By old projects do you mean telling ChatGPT to go and look at your codebase first? Or it's just a matter of knowing what topic you wanted to pursue and just asking those questions and shaping it through further questions?
Both!
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#404Earlier 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…
Let me provide a counterpoint - ChatGPT made the code base more readable, it was able to integrate a few useful solutions the devs didn't know about, it helped write tests and even came up with a few good ones on its own.
Going meta for a bit: before you can use a tool to produce medical device software, that tool must be qualified for use. I'd really like to see what the qualification process for ChatGPT would look like.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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?
Even if they're not, I find "scouring code I didn't write for potential errors of any magnitude" to be much harder than "writing code". I admit there's a sweet spot where errors would be easy to spot or where the AI is getting you unstuck, but it's not trustworthy enough at the moment for me to take the risk.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#406Earlier 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 assure you, as a former quality engineer at a medical device development facility, that there is absolutely, positively zero chance that anyone there will use any AI-powered coding tools to write code that goes onto any device that is ISO-13485, CE, or otherwise compliant to some existing medical device regulations (I speak in the USA and European markets; I cannot speak for other markets). There is literally a…
I would offer similar sentiment for aerospace.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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:…
>Crucially, those have context around them Often incorrect context, incredibly biased context (no you don't know what you want, here's a complete misdirection), or just plain outdated. So basically the same thing as ChatGPT. People who blindly copy and paste and ship are always going to do that. Everyone else isn't. It's really that simple.
> Often incorrect context, incredibly biased context
And as you learn more from different sources, you get better at identifying them.
> or just plain outdated
Which you can plainly see by looking at the date of publication. In the case of Stack Overflow, it is common that popular questions have newer answers which invalidate old ones and replace them at the top.
> People who blindly copy and paste and ship are always going to do that.
Yes, they will. You seem to agree that is bad. So wouldn’t it follow that it is also bad that the pool of people doing that is now increasing at a much larger rate?
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humor is a very sophisticated form of communication. Think of how much was said in so few words, by just poking at shared common knowledge.
Tragedy is for those that feel and comedy is for those that think.
Lots of comedy more or less proves it needn't be thoughtful as opposed to emotional. Laugh tracks, or the particular speaking style of a standup comic, are riding on the feelings they invoke. Being surrounded by real laughter also makes things "feel" funnier. Laughter is contagious. Fart jokes and home-video genital injuries get laughs with no real "thinking" component.
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Software which is 20% bugs is software you can’t rely on. No one is saying to take the output and immediately ship it. It still needs to be finished and tested. What's important is what is ultimately delivered; less important is what steps brought you to that point. That said I suspect good testing will become more highly-valued as AI use increases. Maybe there's a form of TDD that can develop, with the human mostl…
> No one is saying to take the output and immediately ship it.
On the contrary, that is exactly what is happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35384604
Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
#410What 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…
Am I the only one that's been disappointed with GPT for coding? It's good at using common libraries and frameworks but for stuff using more niche libraries it fails miserably almost every time, to the extent that by the time I've debugged and written prompts to try and get it to do it properly I've spent more time than needed
still good for handling a lot of grunge work and really useful for doing the stuff where I'm weaker as a "full stack" developer