Live data from Hacker News

Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

blog.google

81–90 of 165 posts

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#81
post #65
post #62

Free of charge, unless they don’t like what sort of programs you run! Google bans certain open source AI models in Colab, like Pygmalion. See https://colab.research.google.com/github/PygmalionAI/gradio-...

What's the problem here? They get to choose how they offer their free service?

The problem for users (not google) is that its an arbitrarily enforced restriction. Of course companies can do whatever they want. Google could ban all programs that import PyTorch on their free tier, too. Totally their choice. It’s also my choice to mention that people should look into alternatives like Replit if they’re worried about a cool notebook they made on Colab randomly getting them in Google TOS trouble.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone non-technical can do the requirements gathering.

In my experience, it's a complete myth that requirement gathering can be done in a box. "Requirement gathering" is almost always influenced by technical capabilities. All but the simplest projects, require back and forth with guestimates about the direction and approach.

This is because its difficult to decouple the code from the requirements. And the full requirements are never contained within a doc. So you need an engineer to look at the code to see how its done. This is going to change.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#83
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that this comment adds absolutely nothing to the conversation. It could be posted under every comment that says "AI is (not)? going to revolutionize (the world|everything|this industry|my job)" Anybody making a prediction about the future might be right or might be wrong, and we won't know until it happens. This is just a snarky way of saying "nah dude you're wrong"

No, they also said they think we'll find out "really really soon", which seems highly likely.

They may be right, they may be wrong.

Only time will tell :)

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You give it a set of requirements for an api, with edge conditions written in plain English. Test cases are provided. And the vanilla api is generated. Sometimes I wonder where some of the posters here work or if I'm working in a dystopia. > You give it a set of requirements for an api with edge conditions written in plain English This part is the job! If my job was 100% writing logic, it would be infinitely easier…

Someone non-technical can do the requirements gathering.

Again, where do you guys work? Maybe lets not use software engineering. If I asked you today, to do requirements gathering for building a bridge across the Mississippi river, could you do it? Don't you think you would have to learn about materials, regulations, land procurement, tensile and compression strengths and all the tradeoffs of the above? And once you learned all of that and you can finally present the requirements, would it be fair to call you non-technical?

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet (that is, people writing actual code). That's not a risky prediction, that's very easily going to be the case. Those people have nowhere to go to match what they're earning now. Maybe support review roles (which won't pay particularly well), where they approve decisions by the AI that are held up for human approv…

> 10-15 years out AI will be good enough to wipe out at least half of all software developers on the planet This reminds me of self driving car predictions. It also ignores that "building" software encompasses many different tasks.

That's actually a great supporting point to why AI will wipe most developers out.

What you're referring to is one of the AI systems that I mention that the top ~25% will still write code for directly. It's a governing AI system.

Most software development doesn't involve tasks that can very easily kill people with N thousand pounds of fast moving metal.

Most software development is trivial by comparison in terms of challenge/complexity. It'll be wiped out accordingly. Why would you need anything more than a human handler to sign off on AI development as it goes down a path? It'll be able to build drastically faster than a median developer can and it can do it without getting tired (its productivity won't implode after 4-6 hours). All you'll need are some human handlers to approve key decisions during the process of development (to ensure you get to the end product that is desired).

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#86
post #67

(Shamelessly spreading the word about my open source tool) You can do GPT-4 powered coding chats in your terminal today with aider. It's not free in the sense that you need a gpt-4 api key, which openai charges you for. But it's a pretty great way to collaborate with AI on code. https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

This looks great, thanks for sharing. Esp interested in: > Complex Multi-file Change with Debugging: A complex code change involving multiple source files and debugging.[0] [0] https://aider.chat/examples/complex-change.html

Thanks for checking out the chat transcripts!

Ya, that one is some real work I was doing on the tool itself by using the tool. I use aider extensively while I code now. Aider has authored 150+ commits in that repo in the last week or so.

Many of the other transcripts are more "toy problems" to help convey the experience of working with aider to folks unfamiliar with the tool.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#87
post #31

Is this another "beta" feature? It says it's available today, but I don't see it. Source: currently a Colab pro subscriber based in the U.S., but don't see the AI features in my Colab notebook

not yet available; it'll roll out sequentially in the coming weeks as we sort out capacity and polish.

How far away is the VS code plugin?

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You give it a set of requirements for an api, with edge conditions written in plain English. Test cases are provided. And the vanilla api is generated. Sometimes I wonder where some of the posters here work or if I'm working in a dystopia. > You give it a set of requirements for an api with edge conditions written in plain English This part is the job! If my job was 100% writing logic, it would be infinitely easier…

Someone non-technical can do the requirements gathering.

I have to strongly disagree with this. If someone non-technical does the requirements gathering, the requirements will be incomplete. Developers will then either assume their own requirements or, if they’re thorough and good at their job, check these assumptions with the business. Either way, this wastes the company’s time. Either the assumed requirements will require re-work or the company has paid two employees to do the same job that should’ve been done by one.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#89

I really think the current paradigm of literally typing if else logic all day into programs, and then getting paid huge money to do so will go away. Programming is going to be much higher level and accessible, though still complex. It will take five years or so. Edit: My prediction is essentially that: You give it a set of requirements for an api, with edge conditions written in plain English. Test cases are provided…

> Complex software will require human coding. But most programmers are in denial about how complex the code they’re writing actually is.

I think it's just a matter of time till all software becomes complex, e.g a codebase worked on by a few dozens people for 10 years will have a non trivial level of complexity. Not disagreeing or anything, the machines might be able to do this well, we'll see. It will have to improve by a lot, like almost no hallucinations. But there could be many shades in between. Instead of completely replacing developers in 5 years which I personally find unlikely, it can replace 50% of them.

Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features

#90
Alexa build me a Google (or is it the other way around?)

As more people use automated programmaking, most of the code will be low level spaghetti in procedural languages, because it is easier for the model to reason with it (without needing huge buffers to know about abstractions). We will see a lot of generated Javascript, PHP, even a return of Win32. Who cares if they are tedious for humans to read and fix, now the AI can do all kinds of advanced search/replace in the code. And maybe at some point they 'll be generating machine code directly

Post reply on HN