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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

#441

Post by xxswagmasterxx »

tinyprojects wrote: post #188

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…

Imo the chartjs docs are not very good. Or i'm just used to rust's docs.rs, where the whole api surface is documented. I couldn't find something like this for chartjs.

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

#442

Post by still_grokking »

ihatepython wrote: post #60
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 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!

Jesus!

I hope this is some US fad, and I never ever come across those devices!

Instead of using formal methods as they should they use AI, which is more or less the complete contrary.

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

#443

Post by weatherlite »

ak_111 wrote: post #373
weatherlite wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it made a huge difference in most of these guys careers. I'm sure Perl "specialists" were able to move stacks if they wanted to...and you learn most of it on the job anyway so its not like you had to take a year off to catch up learning Java. So yeah it was a time investment for people but I don't think its as dramatic as you're making it seem.

I'm saying this based on the fact the job market was amazing for software developers in the last decade or more. Things now might be different.

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

#444

Post by olkingcole »

ihatepython wrote: post #60
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 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!

Funny but I have to say that satire has lost a lot of its appeal in these times. It is far too apparent how vulnerable we are to people who don't get it and who will walk away happily unaware and, in this example, MORE confident about using AI for just anything. But surely out institutional safeguards will protect us, right? /s

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

#445

Post by _a_a_a_ »

zikduruqe wrote: post #400
acadapter wrote: post #367

Earlier 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.

Perhaps you're making a point (that eludes me, BTW) by writing clever sounding twaddle. I hope so.

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

#446

Post by digging »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #146
precompute wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, stackoverflow required competent users to participate. There's no need for that any longer. The "gap" will probably be addressed by LLM-designed tools that are only usable via LLMs and bigtech will be more than happy to put their own LLM-designed tools at work for their products, which means there'll be vendor lock at scale, so in the vein of the "digital realm emulating the analog realm" there'll be companies…

> There's no need for that any longer. I don't think so: LLMs have used Stackoverflow's answers for training. Now, if people would stop going there for questions, people would stop giving answers, so LLMs would have no data to train on for new problems.

> LLMs have used Stackoverflow's answers for training

have used, perfect tense. But future tense? who knows.

We shouldn't assume future LLMs won't be able to parse documentation of new libraries and extrapolate full, detailed implementations.

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

#447

Post by gibolt »

zikduruqe wrote: post #399
doitLP wrote: post #361

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.

Should be achievable, as long as you're not Jerry

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

#448

Post by clnq »

ihatepython wrote: post #60
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 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!

A strong agree as well. This is going to help me a lot in writing software for large passenger aircraft. The integer types GPT gives me aren't the largest, but I think it knows what it's doing.

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

#449

Post by famahar »

sokoloff wrote: post #255
w4ffl35 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting takes. i guess if you're using ai for basic things like that it makes sense to not like it

Enlighten me, please. What’s the killer use case where you’ve seen significant leverage from an AI tool? What was the business problem and what were the resulting prompts to your AI junior dev?

I see a lot of skepticism like this on hackernews. People constantly downplaying how impressive this technology is. It's great to be critical. But most of the criticism is too stuck in the present. If it's already as good as many stackoverflow answers, what kind of potential will we see in 1 year, 3 years, a decade. This is massive paradigm shift in the way we program and this conversation thread will be look outdated in a year. So much of the tedium of programming has been eliminated in my day to day. I actually have ideas I pursue now that I know so much friction in the setup process is gone and I won't be severely blocked by bugs.

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

#450

Post by kreeben »

doitLP wrote: post #401
zikduruqe wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A robotic brain would know that we've taken this premise as far as we can and reached perfection. Absolute perfection, even. Now, pass me the butter.
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