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Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

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Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#31

Post by padolsey »

dvt wrote: post #16

This is neat, but, as with all projects in this vein, I fail to see the real value add. We've had ML-powered code generation for several years now (Copilot released publicly in late 2021), and apart from a cute novelty, there's no real use case I've found. ( Maybe except for generating tests, but when dealing with a novel code base, the models really can't figure out dependency injection, mocks, weird edge cases I'd…

> I haven't seen or heard of anyone that seriously uses ChatGPT to generate code and uses it in prod

I have. And I'm sure others have too. I dare say there are many who probably _shouldn't_ be using it because of privacy/IP concerns and so you won't hear about them.

> cute novelty [...]

I thought the same not so long ago. But gpt4 for me was a game changer. It's helped me debug and fix some legitimately complex code, and has been awesome at wholesale refactoring modules to fulfil a new purpose. E.g. today I wanted help reconciling between runtime and persistent LRU cache stuff. And it understood what I wanted and assisted. After a few nudges it gave me a refactored module with comments and a few tests. It's like having a very capable junior dev in one's pocket :P

Ps. Trust me: it's not long before we have ai coding bots that grab open tickets and hammer together PRs with full testing suites. I imagine it's already happening.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#32

Post by vorticalbox »

frankgrecojr wrote: post #20
H8crilA wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're telling me you've never once pressed "TAB" to auto-fill the line or even several lines with Copilot? Because about half of the letters in my source code is now Copilot generated. The value added is that you don't send your source code to OpenAI and/or their parent org Microsoft.

I do it all of the time (with GitHub copilot). It's getting much better. If I retro my interactions with it, I think I'll usually give it a "once over" to see if what it's doing makes sense. Sometimes I'll add a comment to my PR saying what AI did/didn't write to give the reviewer a heads up.

I mostly use it for the generation of doc strings in python and js doc in typescript.

Recently I've been using git diff and asking 3.5 to write the PR description for me and so far it is doing quite well. The 16k tokens means I can feed even more into it.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#33

Post by slig »

foxbee wrote: post #29

If you're interested, there's a number of open source alternatives to Superblocks Budibase. https://github.com/Budibase/budibase Appsmith. https://github.com/appsmithorg Tooljet https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet And more (I'm sure others will comment)

I've been using Windmill and it works like a charm.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#34

Post by [deleted] »

dvt wrote: post #16

This is neat, but, as with all projects in this vein, I fail to see the real value add. We've had ML-powered code generation for several years now (Copilot released publicly in late 2021), and apart from a cute novelty, there's no real use case I've found. ( Maybe except for generating tests, but when dealing with a novel code base, the models really can't figure out dependency injection, mocks, weird edge cases I'd…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#35

Post by derwiki »

vorticalbox wrote: post #32
frankgrecojr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do it all of the time (with GitHub copilot). It's getting much better. If I retro my interactions with it, I think I'll usually give it a "once over" to see if what it's doing makes sense. Sometimes I'll add a comment to my PR saying what AI did/didn't write to give the reviewer a heads up.

I mostly use it for the generation of doc strings in python and js doc in typescript. Recently I've been using git diff and asking 3.5 to write the PR description for me and so far it is doing quite well. The 16k tokens means I can feed even more into it.

This would be a great pre-commit hook! Generate commit message and fill .commit_msg for review/further editing.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#36

Post by derwiki »

late_night_ wrote: post #30
cududa wrote: post #21

At first was excited when I clicked the link. I think for some people, this is a fantastic solution. However, for me, what I was hoping it was/ one thing I'm still looking for: Feed in my whole repo to the GPT-4 API, train on it, and ask questions about the code base/ particular functions. Has anyone seen that?

Ever heard of Cody by Sourcegraph? about.sourcegraph.com

Does it do well? How does it get around the context window limits?

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#37

Post by [deleted] »

padolsey wrote: post #31
dvt wrote: post #16

This is neat, but, as with all projects in this vein, I fail to see the real value add. We've had ML-powered code generation for several years now (Copilot released publicly in late 2021), and apart from a cute novelty, there's no real use case I've found. ( Maybe except for generating tests, but when dealing with a novel code base, the models really can't figure out dependency injection, mocks, weird edge cases I'd…

> I haven't seen or heard of anyone that seriously uses ChatGPT to generate code and uses it in prod I have. And I'm sure others have too. I dare say there are many who probably _shouldn't_ be using it because of privacy/IP concerns and so you won't hear about them. > cute novelty [...] I thought the same not so long ago. But gpt4 for me was a game changer. It's helped me debug and fix some legitimately complex code,…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#38

Post by danielbln »

dvt wrote: post #16

This is neat, but, as with all projects in this vein, I fail to see the real value add. We've had ML-powered code generation for several years now (Copilot released publicly in late 2021), and apart from a cute novelty, there's no real use case I've found. ( Maybe except for generating tests, but when dealing with a novel code base, the models really can't figure out dependency injection, mocks, weird edge cases I'd…

I feel like I live in an alternate universe to this comment. Every engineer I know (devops, software, hell even datascience) is using GPT-4 or Copilot (especially Copilot with the new chat interface) and people, myself included, use it every day. Refactor this code for me, add a function that does X, why is Y failing, align this code with a different coding pattern, I cobbled together this React app, clean it up and refactor it and factor Z functionality into a node backend, help me understand this bit of obtuse Python code, and the list goes on and on and on. I've seen tremendous value, and its not without fault mind you, LLM hallucination is a real problem, but I would be very sad and annoyed if tomorrow they'd take LLMs out of my daily engineering flow.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#39

Post by jiggywiggy »

danielbln wrote: post #38
dvt wrote: post #16

This is neat, but, as with all projects in this vein, I fail to see the real value add. We've had ML-powered code generation for several years now (Copilot released publicly in late 2021), and apart from a cute novelty, there's no real use case I've found. ( Maybe except for generating tests, but when dealing with a novel code base, the models really can't figure out dependency injection, mocks, weird edge cases I'd…

I feel like I live in an alternate universe to this comment. Every engineer I know (devops, software, hell even datascience) is using GPT-4 or Copilot (especially Copilot with the new chat interface) and people, myself included, use it every day. Refactor this code for me, add a function that does X, why is Y failing, align this code with a different coding pattern, I cobbled together this React app, clean it up and…

It's not better then me.

But I use it when I'm lazy, tired or at times drinking.

And then it's really nice. At times it costs me too much time solving it's mistakes. But then it nails something perfectly and I'm impressed again.

Re: Show HN: Superblocks AI – AI coding assistant for internal apps

#40

Post by ghughes »

padolsey wrote: post #31
dvt wrote: post #16

This is neat, but, as with all projects in this vein, I fail to see the real value add. We've had ML-powered code generation for several years now (Copilot released publicly in late 2021), and apart from a cute novelty, there's no real use case I've found. ( Maybe except for generating tests, but when dealing with a novel code base, the models really can't figure out dependency injection, mocks, weird edge cases I'd…

> I haven't seen or heard of anyone that seriously uses ChatGPT to generate code and uses it in prod I have. And I'm sure others have too. I dare say there are many who probably _shouldn't_ be using it because of privacy/IP concerns and so you won't hear about them. > cute novelty [...] I thought the same not so long ago. But gpt4 for me was a game changer. It's helped me debug and fix some legitimately complex code,…

> I imagine it's already happening.

Not quite, that I know of, but some of us are working on it :)

I have a feeling that while the glorious future you describe can probably be realized using LLMs as a foundational technology, the software engineering effort needed to get there is on par with other AI moonshot projects e.g. autonomous vehicles.

If you or others reading this are interested in this topic, see this post for some interesting discussion and links to projects in development (and in the comments there's a link to a Discord server that was set up for further discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36422730

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