Hopefully the AI knows how to update Colab to newer Python versions!
3.10 is supported. I suspect it's others [1] preventing 3.11.
Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
131–140 of 165 posts
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#132> Democratizing machine learning for everyone: Anyone with an internet connection can access Colab, and use it free of charge. Millions of students use Colab every month to learn Python programming and machine learning. Under-resourced groups everywhere access Colab free of charge, accessing high-powered GPUs for machine learning applications. Ugh, cringe. Just say this is a panic swing at an existential threat (Open…
lol been working on this since 2021; I have a small team and we do our best.
then i take it all back, thanks for your work, the outcome looks very useful, looking forward to using it :)
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#133I 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…
I've been using ChatGPT to generate scripts I sometimes need(ed) to write for testing and troubleshooting purposes.
For example parsing files, pulling data from a table and dumping it in a CSV, monitor performance counters or network activity, backing up and copying files etc.
I don't consider this part of my job, but it's stuff I need to do often and I'm glad it can now be delegated to a bot.
It also means new hires and co-ops have more interesting things to do.
Today for the first time I used code from ChatGPT in a working solution.
Nothing too advanced, a small routine to interpolate a vector.
It took me literary a minute to write the prompt and another maybe 5-10 to adapt it and test it.
I see myself using ChatGPT more and more for this type of things, automation scripts and very specific, simple routines in production code.
However this is not 5% of the stuff I do, for the other 95% there's simply no AI advanced enough to do it and there won't be any for several years or decades or maybe ever.
Now those working purely in CRUD applications from functional specs given my others, better to start switching to something that demands design skills and process know-how.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having played a bit with coding with AI I like this view, it's powerful, but context will always be an issue, turning real world problems into working code is a skill in it's own right, that will not change, superpowered yes, for me it's all the 'dull' parts of typing stuff out that I look forward to missing, from an early study on impact in the workplace, using a 2 year study of a call centre, the result was large i…
Jesus, this just triggered another nightmare scenario I should have thought of earlier. People are going to have it write and/or comment a function whose purpose is non-trivial and not straight-forward. It will be not or imperfectly checked that the comment actually says what it should and the functionality matches. There will be no indication of what was written by AI, so the only option is to guess that both were w…
> will be no indication of what was written by AI
I feel like companies will start using watermarking to avoid the AI dumping GPL into their codebase.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a different 10-year prediction. AI will become good enough to be useful for programmers but not good enough to run on its own and will remain an assistant. Given that there is a shortage of programmers, more software will be written than ever. More software will beget more software engineers. Because the output of software engineers will rise, each individual software engineer will become more valuable to thei…
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…
> wipe out at least half
I'm not sure if I've ever seen a situation where all the code for a company gets written and then the engineers just pack up and leave. Typically the more code you write the more code you plan to write.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's the case. This is the official announcement of a product, with details on how the product works, and I doubt they'll be writing anything particularly more meaty when they proceed through various rollout stages. The way I've understood the "announcement of an announcement" rule in the past is that it is for reports/rumors that somebody is company to release something, or a company sending a teaser…
Ok, I've rolled back that penalty. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35978216 confirms what you've said. The comments in this thread are nearly entirely generic, though.
I like you, dang.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that what they call "full stack" programming?
"full stack" programming is actually incredibly hard since you can no longer push new items once the stack is full. If this happens you better go the route of "stackoverflow" programming.
The days of full stack programmers are over. Soon they’ll end up on the heap.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by “higher level”? AI code generation tools are extremely useful to people who know how to code, but how is it useful if you can’t understand the code it spits out. They are far from bug free and prompting it to handle complex business logic is tricky. If the higher level paradigm is simply English, then I don’t see it. If something else, I’m curious what you foresee.
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. We aren’t that far from this. It’s going to happen. Complex software will require human coding. But most programmers are in denial about how complex the code they’re writing actually is
Current AI isn’t smart enough to point out the errors in the requirements. And current humans aren’t smart enough to generate error free requirements.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#139Earlier 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…
> or if I'm working in a dystopia Going to guess you're both young and working at a tech company as opposed to a big company that also does some tech things. Prior to the rise of Agile and the decrease in waterfall-style development the role of Business Analyst was very popular. It still is at many companies that do need to do waterfall development, but less so these days. The Business Analyst (BA) role is semi-techn…
In my experience, most of these aspects – requirements gathering, wireframing, test case specification, even bug logging – have a business side and a technical side.
I think Product Managers often take on a lot of these BA responsibilities, they've got the domain knowledge, but there's another step of translation from "build an X that does Y" to "build an X, in A, that does Y, but not Z, in B time, integrating with systems I, J, K". I think that takes an engineering perspective.
I've not worked with anyone titled Business Analyst that does the role you've described, but working with PMs, BI people, and others, there's a large gulf between requirements and tests that they would specify at their level, and requirements and tests that a programmer could work from.
Re: Google Colab will soon introduce AI coding features
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find VS-code running notebooks with Colab plugin installed pretty helpful for this type of thing already. I think you meant "with the Github Copilot plugin installed".
I got excited for a moment to run Colab in vscode. I was sad to see it was typo
Wow, me too. Coding without copilot is incomprehensible to me, let alone outside of vscode or pycharm.