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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

#491

Post by spookybones »

andreyk wrote: post #468
spookybones wrote: post #452

I’ve found that AI prompting has been nearly as time consuming as doing it myself from the get-go. This includes content writing and visual art. Maybe I’m an edge case. I’m not a skilled programmer. However, I’m a decent writer and painter. At most, it generates quick, solid, though generic ideas. Unfortunately, I have to do a lot of reverse engineering and curation to make any valuable changes. Try writing a tech ar…

I've definitely found this to be the case with writing. ChatGPT gets you a "valid" output, but usually a bland and lame one. I think it's better for editing and brainstorming, or for simple tweaks. Specialized tools like SudoWrite are actually more useful as part of a writing work flow. Pardon the plug, but I co-wrote a little blog post about this with concrete examples, if it is of interest: https://open.substack.co…

I haven't tried SudoWrite. I'll check it out as well as your post.

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

#492

Post by Herval_freire »

timbeccue wrote: post #434
Herval_freire wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No there is reasoning in LLMs. This is actually proven through several scientific papers. I can't say whether it's using reasoning for specific answers. I'm sure many times it just regurgitates something that is known... But saying that LLMs in general can and do reason is categorically true. LLMs do attempt to extract actual mental models of the subject of the text. See here: - GPT style language models try to build…

Is this the type of reasoning that could be used to basic math without errors (without using a dedicated math engine)? I wonder why that type of reasoning seems to struggle. I think chatgpt is interesting in its ability to highlight the subtle variations in a concept we tend to think of as more of a single attribute (e.g. reasoning) because humans tend to do certain types of reasoning tasks at the same relative profi…

I think there just isn't enough mathematical data. English language data is magnitudes more and longer then mathematical data so there is a correlation here.

The more data the better the LLM can formulate a realistic model. If it has less data then the resulting output is more of a statistical guess.

There is an argument that can be made here that the more data the more things chatgpt can copy and regurgitate but given how vast the solution space is I think data at best covers less then 1 percent.

Basically I think that if your data covers say 2 percent of the solution space you can generate a better model then if the data covered 1 percent.

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

#493

Post by tjr »

astrange wrote: post #474
xseparator wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above two comments show the difference between software "engineers" vs "developers"...and none of the major social media platforms (and other consumer-level applications) employ engineers.

Other projects can't use waterfall development because they would like to actually produce something useful instead of what was decided at the start of the project. This isn't the way pharmaceuticals are developed; we don't require the pharma companies to know how they work (and we shouldn't, because we don't know how many common safe drugs work). We validate them by testing them instead.

Other projects can't use waterfall development because they would like to actually produce something useful instead of what was decided at the start of the project.

It's a whole different world of software development. If you set out to build flight control software because it is needed to run on a new airplane, you're not going to pivot midstream and build something else instead.

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

#494

Post by Fanmade »

Nition wrote: post #166
ihatepython wrote: post #115

Earlier 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't believe people are taking your comment seriously. How far has reality moved into parody, if a comment saying you'll be happy to blame ChatGPT when people die doesn't go far enough to give it away? Maybe they're just replying without having properly read your post, but that's not great either.

Sad but true; these days you read so many news stories that you first think are satire, but turn out to be true, that sarcastic comments are increasingly difficult to recognize as such without the appropriate notice.

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

#495

Post by blep_ »

worldsayshi wrote: post #87
graeber_28927 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's a feature. If I ask any human, often I get "no" as an answer, but with ChatGPT I can be confident that it will produce something, whether it's right or wrong. If it constantly said "I'm nut sure, I'd rather decline this one", I'd be tempted to ask it to go on anyway. If it's wrong, it's wrong, but let me decide. It might be close!

Would be a nice feature if it could add annotations or text coloring to denote uncertainty though! Edit: Hmm, maybe it can add uncertainty markers if I just ask...

I tried it. It took some iteration and explaining to get it to do what I wanted, but here was the final result:

--

Building a bridge over a lake using only toothpicks would be extremely challenging due to the limited strength of toothpicks. (70%) However, it is possible to build a toothpick bridge by using a truss structure. A truss structure involves using triangles to distribute the weight of the bridge evenly across the structure. (80%)

To build a toothpick bridge over the lake, the first step would be to create a design using a truss structure. The design should take into consideration the width of the bridge, the width of the lake, and the strength of toothpicks. (90%) The toothpicks should be laid in layers to increase their strength. (70%)

To estimate how many toothpicks would be needed, we would need to determine the spacing between each toothpick and the number of toothpicks needed to create the truss structure. The number of toothpicks required would also depend on the thickness and quality of the toothpicks used. (80%)

Given the width of the bridge is 20 meters and the width of the lake is 200 meters, the toothpick bridge would require approximately 10 layers of toothpicks to span the distance. However, without a detailed design, it is impossible to estimate the exact number of toothpicks needed to build the bridge. (60%)

Overall, I would say I am 70% confident in the correctness of this answer, as it is based on theoretical principles and assumptions about the strength of toothpicks.

--

It's... okay, not great. The blatantly wrong part is marked 60%, which is the lowest certainty it assigned to anything, but that's still really high for how wrong it is.

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

#497

Post by [deleted] »

ak_111 wrote: post #154
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#498

Post by satvikpendem »

Thorentis wrote: post #94
ThePhysicist wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can read the code and verify it. Sometimes there are small mistakes but overall the architecture and approach are mostly correct. It won't produce 100 % production-grade code, but that's not expected for a PoC. And personally I also get stuff subtly wrong at times, I just iterate and test to find these cases and fix them. So I guess we're not fully replacable yet.

You can't read API calls and know if they're real, or if the function names are plausible but non existent. This is the problem with GPT. It creates great sounding possible APIs, but has no idea which APIs actually exist.

If you use a dynamically typed language like Python or Ruby, sure. I use it for Rust and the compiler immediately catches any errors. Just one more reason I don't use dynamically typed languages.

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

#499

Post by satvikpendem »

IanCal wrote: post #222
Thorentis wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't read API calls and know if they're real, or if the function names are plausible but non existent. This is the problem with GPT. It creates great sounding possible APIs, but has no idea which APIs actually exist.

> You can't read API calls and know if they're real, or if the function names are plausible but non existent Why not? And if I miss them, my editor, compiler or general testing should pick that up.

Yeah, I think many people are using them for dynamically typed languages like Python or Ruby, not Rust or TypeScript. If it's the latter, your compiler will automatically find the errors for you.

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

#500

Post by itissid »

Yesterday I was writing some Selenium IDE script that could warn me when 5 year CDs at more than a given APY appear on my Schwab, fidelity or Vanguard broker. CDs available there, especially after a rate hike speculation, are not available online to the general public outside of brokers and certain market makers.

ChatGPT certainly shortened a lot of the scripting head time. Though it was not quite always accurate it did help me a lot.

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