Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 319 posts

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#81

Post by amusingimpala75 »

anotherpaulg wrote: post #25
ehutch79 wrote: post #21

I mean, right now the only thing at risk is the todo.app industry... I've yet to see anything maintaining legacy apps, or generating line of business apps with requirements... even simple stuff, like departure needs to be before arrival, etc. I do see a whole bunch of youtube videos about generating a whole codebase, but it's the kind of stuff that there's a hundred tutorials covering.

My open source command line tool aider [0] is specifically for this use case of working with GPT on an existing code base. Let me know if you have a chance to try it out. Here is a chat transcript [1] that illustrates how you can use aider to explore an existing git repo, understand it and then make changes. As another example I needed a new feature in the glow tool and was able to make a PR [2] for it, even though I…

This is an instance of the dangers of LLM. Because you (self-admittedly) know nothing about the language or codebase, you have no idea the semantically correct way to do things, so if GPT tells you to metaphorically jump off a cliff, you won’t know that it isn’t the right thing to do.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#82

Post by coliveira »

moonchrome wrote: post #74
Filligree wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest benefit, I’ve found, is it makes me comment my code. If I can make the AI understand what I want, then it turns out that three months later I’ll also be able to understand the code.

That's the worst part about generative AI IMO - it makes writing new code faster - it barely helps with editing existing code. So when someone eventually updates the code and forgets to update the comments I wouldn't be surprised if the misleading comments made AI hallucinate.

I believe that AI will get so good at creating new code that a lot of existing libraries will be let unused. What is the point of using lots of libraries if AI can generate the code we need directly? The AI will be the library itself, and the generated code will embed the knowledge about doing lots of things for which we used libraries.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#83

Post by coliveira »

dave333 wrote: post #54

Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.

Yes, this is my thinking too. No need to learn tons of new frameworks, just ask ChatGPT what framework we can use to do a particular task and ask for sample code. You can learn from that much more easily.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#84

Post by lumb63 »

gfodor wrote: post #37
claytongulick wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too. I'm not an expert, but I'd say I'm a strongly average vim user. But even at that skill level with vim, I haven't seen an area where LLMs would increase my velocity. Quite the opposite. It would completely interrupt my flow to have to constantly stop and do a code review while I'm writing. With good plugins, templates and macros in vim/vscode - velocity writing code isn't the issue. The stuff that takes all th…

Have you actually tried it? Copilot + vim for me is faster, and less frustrating tbh, than vim without Copilot. Typing obvious things is a PITA, and in code we type a lot of obvious things.

The hype around AI coding assistants has recently inspired me to improve my efficiency in writing code. I started using NeoVim instead of vim to get access to LSP, for autocomplete. I’ve found it actually slows me down because I can type nearly anything faster than the LSP can synthesize a response and I’m able to visually process the options, select one, and input it into the computer. I’ve never compared against an AI coding assistant, so maybe that’s different, but my experience has been that fast typing speed combined with understanding of the task at hand and what code must be written nullifies almost all benefit of a coding assistant.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#85

Post by riwsky »

dave333 wrote: post #54

Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.

I’m reminded of those pro StarCraft players who retire at like 30 because, while their strategy is perfect, their fingers simply can’t click or hotkey as fast as the twenty somethings.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#86

Post by mattkevan »

yieldcrv wrote: post #69
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is the hallucinations, I also wasted few hours trying to work on solutions with GPT where it just kept making up parameters and random functions.

Yeah it can give you something that works out of the box, but fixing it requires even more effort Better to ask it for a bunch of small things and piece them together

Yes. Start small and build up.

I’ve found it to be very forgetful and have to work function-by-function, giving it the current code as part of the next prompt. Otherwise it randomly changes class names, invents new bits that weren’t there before or forgets entire chunks of functionality.

It’s a good discipline as I have to work out exactly what I want to achieve first and then build it up piece by piece. A great way to learn a new framework or language.

It also sometimes picks convoluted ways of doing things, so regularly asking whether there’s a simpler way of doing things can be useful.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#87

Post by pessimizer »

firebirdn99 wrote: post #43
oldstrangers wrote: post #39

My fear isn't that I'll be replaced, it's the technology becoming so good that it'll be kept far out of reach of the common person. I genuinely believe OpenAI knows what a GPT 5+ type world looks like, and they're probably having a lot of debate on how best to monetize it. They could practically charge anything in the world for it assuming it still undercuts the cost of hiring a human. One Nvidia super cluster runnin…

this is one underrated point. Altman talks about democratizing this technology. But if the leading LLMs concentrate at a few companies, unless governmentally mandated, they could keep guardrails from regular folks accessing it, and also with regulation capture.

"democratizing this technology" = working closely with government

> unless governmentally mandated, they could keep guardrails from regular folks accessing it

That's not what's going to happen. Government will mandate that regular folks can't access it. Government will also do its best to make sure LLMs concentrate at a few companies, which it will often refer to as "partners."

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#88

Post by mattkevan »

coliveira wrote: post #83
dave333 wrote: post #54

Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.

Yes, this is my thinking too. No need to learn tons of new frameworks, just ask ChatGPT what framework we can use to do a particular task and ask for sample code. You can learn from that much more easily.

I built an ebook reader in Vue with ChatGPT the other day, never having used Vue before. Took about a day.

Learned absolutely loads - far more than sitting down with a book and trying to learn from that. Not least because I’ve tried before and quickly lost interest.

Instead I’ve learned the basics and made a working web app, which I’m pretty pleased with.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#89

Post by pessimizer »

samsk wrote: post #38

I'll start to be afraid, when ChatGPT or anything similar will take a vague Jira issue, simulate described bug and then make a fix for it ;-) But seriously, what developers do most of their time is maintanace, they spend a day searching for a bug, just to write maybe one line of code to fix it.

It will do that now, it will just be buggy and wrong. But that's obviously just a stage that you don't even need more AI to fix. Tell it how to write tests, tell it how to justify those tests and how to make sure they make sense, tell it how to look for the bug, tell it how to attempt a fix for the bug, tell it to evaluate whether that fix satisfies the bug report, tell it how to read the errors after it tries the fix, and to iterate on that fix or to abandon it and try something else, when it reaches all standards for success, tell it how to report what it did on the ticket.

If one doubts that all this can be done by an LLM, use a different LLM for each step. Use committees of LLMs that vote on proposals made by other LLMs.

I don't know, I feel like the sky's the limit, especially if they can be made significantly more power efficient. I think that if they never get any better than they are now, and they just get more power efficient, they'll be useful for almost anything.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#90

Post by jiggawatts »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #78
jiggawatts wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only widely available LLM-based autocomplete is GitHub Copilot, which is based on GPT 3. Notably, it's not GPT 3.5, it's 3.0, which is pretty stupid as far as the state of the art goes. The upcoming Copilot X will be based on GPT 4, which has "sparks of AGI". In my experience there is no comparison. GPT 3 is barely good enough for some trivial tab-complete tasks. GPT 4 can do quite complex tasks like generating d…

LLMs no matter how clever have no agency or creativity or ability to innovate, anticipate beyond what they’re prompted, etc. It’s crucial to realize that LLM chat interfaces disguise the fact they’re still completing a prompt. This isn’t AGI as AGI requires agency. GPT4/5 or whatever successor might be a key building block, and I suspect we’ve already discovered the missing elements in classical AI and the challenge…

> “No agency or creativity or ability to innovate, anticipate beyond what they’re prompted, etc.”

Sadly, you’ve just described the majority of the developers I’ve had to work with recently.

Most have no agency, write boilerplate code with no creativity, need their hand held every step of they way, and won’t do anything they’re not explicitly ordered to do.

You probably work in an SV startup with a highly skilled workforce. Out there in the real world there are armies of low-skill H1Bs and outsourcers that will soon be replaced with automation.

It’s a recurring theme in economics. Outsource to low cost labour, insource with automation, repeat.

Post reply on HN