Interesting, why does chatgpt insist on having your phone number even if you want to register with another identity provider?
Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
231–240 of 319 posts
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#232[deleted]
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#233I see a lot of writing like this about LLM's ability to generate code, but I'm a lot more interested/optimistic about their ability to provide value by reading code.
Being able to point to a github repo and say something like "explain this codebase, highlighting key functions and potential refactoring routes" would be really helpful. I've trialled that a little bit with codebases I know well and the results aren't yet helpful beyond a very high level.
I think it's a pretty reasonable goal to aim for though, and this kind of codebase parsing would be much more of a net gain than just generating a tonne of functional but suboptimal code.
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#234>> One of the most integral programming skills continues to be the domain of human coders: problem solving. Analyzing a problem and finding an elegant solution for it is still a highly regarded coding expertise.
Yeah right. I'm on windows 11 now, with English (Europe) as the system language and a double English and Greek layout. Windows continues to shit itself and randomly add two new languages and two new keyboard layouts to my machine for reasons unfathomable: English (US) and English (United Kingdom).
To clarify, this has been happening since Windows 10. You can find posts about it on the internet, like this one from seven years ago:
https://superuser.com/questions/1092246/how-to-prevent-windo...
The user who posted this says:
Please help, I'm desperate, this is my third computer with Windows 10 and they
all do the same thing.
Nah, the truth is that nobody gives a shit about "elegant solutions" or problem-solving ability. Not in the software industry. And that's why LLMs _will_ eventually take over, even though they can't code themselves out of a paper bag. They can spew out code faster than you can type "public void integer FixKeyboardBug()". Why they fuck would anyone care if they can't actually fix any bugs, or create new ones at the same high rate they generate code?
It's going to suck so much having to use software ten years from now. You think it sucks now, but oohoho, just you wait.
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#235Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…
> Is programming even the hard part about programming?
Exactly!
Figuring out Programming challenges isnt really ever part of the work I do. Which is mostly business process stuff.
Comprehending APIs is often a pain. A few times CoPilot has helped by auto-completing the incantation I needed when my brain wasnt working and I couldn't get an understanding from the docs.
So as you say, good autocomplete is all I really need.
That and decent documentation!
There is never a moment where I think I'll break my flow and have a chart conversation to write some code for me. Never.
One thing I did think would be useful: If AI could abstract my already written and duplicated code into testable and robust reusable Classes/Methods for me!
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#236Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…
i'm honestly not worried at all about LLMs because most of my jobs have consisted of fixing problems in other peoples' code, and i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future. I have, however, seen evidence that chatgpt will create many more problems and make my job harder.
I wouldn't be so sure. Combine current capability levels with the larger context windows and they can probably already point out most of the problems with code.
I recently fed a very large file into GPT4 and it handed me a few serious bugs that I hadn't noticed after a few self-reviews.
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#237Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…
> Is programming even the hard part about programming? Exactly! Figuring out Programming challenges isnt really ever part of the work I do. Which is mostly business process stuff. Comprehending APIs is often a pain. A few times CoPilot has helped by auto-completing the incantation I needed when my brain wasnt working and I couldn't get an understanding from the docs. So as you say, good autocomplete is all I really n…
> Comprehending APIs ... good autocomplete ... decent documentation
The ability to ask questions about contents of the documentation as opposed to inefficient RTFM is one of the possibilities for which I recognize LLMs as potentially especially useful. (They should also be able to point to the source like actual "search" though.)
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm honestly not worried at all about LLMs because most of my jobs have consisted of fixing problems in other peoples' code, and i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future. I have, however, seen evidence that chatgpt will create many more problems and make my job harder.
> i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future Or ever, given that the level of abstraction LLMs work at is completely wrong. They can approximate the syntax of things in their training corpus, but logic? The lights are off and nobody's home.
I've already had the GPT3.5-Turbo model walk through and step-by-step isolate and diagnose errors. They 100% can troubleshoot and correct issues in the code.
Literally you give it the code and the error and it can walk you through finding the solution.
When I say walk you through, I generally mean when you provide it a function but the error is caused by some input that doesn't conform to expectations. If the error were just a defect in the code it can generally point that out instantly.
Obviously GPT4 is even better.
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#239Is programming even the hard part about programming? In all seriousness, what we would really need from an AI to start really saving me time would be for it to interview all the customers/partners involved on the project, determine the scope of function needed, boil all that down to a set of sensible domain models that make sense to everyone, identify where/when messages need to be passed, determine which things can…
i'm honestly not worried at all about LLMs because most of my jobs have consisted of fixing problems in other peoples' code, and i haven't seen any evidence that an LLM will be capable of doing that on a non-trivial program any time in the near future. I have, however, seen evidence that chatgpt will create many more problems and make my job harder.
I remember >10 years ago thinking that learning another language was probably pointless because google translate is 90% there already and soon will obsolete that knowledge. Or all the people saying trucking is on the verge of being automated.
Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI
#240>> One of the most integral programming skills continues to be the domain of human coders: problem solving. Analyzing a problem and finding an elegant solution for it is still a highly regarded coding expertise. Yeah right. I'm on windows 11 now, with English (Europe) as the system language and a double English and Greek layout. Windows continues to shit itself and randomly add two new languages and two new keyboard…
That isn't the slam dunk you think it is. Just because they won't doesn't mean they can't. MS have decided it isn't important enough to fix.
Fwiw I view MS as a terrible (software) product company. All of their products fall short of delivering, in my opinion. I think of them as the "80 percenters" - their prpduxts do 80% of what any user reasonably expects as UX of their products, or of what their competition offers.
Teams: 80% of Slack. Azure: 80% of AWS.
Etc.
Have discovered a bug within their product(s)? Unless you have an account manager on speedial (and thus are paying the kind of fees that get you an account manager) good luck getting any kind of response that isn't some cut/paste job by a community "MVP"