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

311–319 of 319 posts

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#311

Post by dumpsterdiver »

dave333 wrote: post #55
medler wrote: post #15

I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…

Best way to check LLM output is to make it write its own tests and do TDD. Obviously someone has to check the tests but that is a 1% of the effort problem.

One percent? Are you really suggesting with a straight face that generated code could provide the other ninety-nine percent? If not, say what you actually mean. Don't bullshit us with trash numbers.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#312

Post by starbugs »

vidyesh wrote: post #309
starbugs wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think in any form using it alongside you workflow is helping No, it is not. It can confuse and mislead you which wastes a lot of time. I lost multiple hours on different occasions figuring out subtle mistakes that it had made. It's sometimes harder (and slower) to understand someone else's code than writing the code yourself completely from scratch. Also, if you aren't working alone, be prepared to answer code re…

I didn't mean that using it alongside means blindly trusting it. I think its far quick to read the code than write those 15 lines of code generally, especially for those type of code snippets. It also is a less stressful and takes very little mental energy to do so (if you already are familiar with the language and codebase) > I am still learning how to distinguish the cases in which it is not even a good idea to inv…

> Interesting, can comments of that code block being generated by some AI tool be more helpful in your case?

Those would be misleading as well?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#313

Post by dave333 »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #311
dave333 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best way to check LLM output is to make it write its own tests and do TDD. Obviously someone has to check the tests but that is a 1% of the effort problem.

One percent? Are you really suggesting with a straight face that generated code could provide the other ninety-nine percent? If not, say what you actually mean. Don't bullshit us with trash numbers.

Let me guess, ENTJ right?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#314

Post by ralphc »

gonzo41 wrote: post #258
twodave wrote: post #121

Is 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 am currently uplifting a 30 year old code to a somewhat newer codebase to try and give it another 20-30 years. I spend a lot of time talking with humans to rediscover the context of the system. AI is not going to each my lunch. But it sure is handy being able to make sense of some old logic and syntax. It literally saves me hours in having to figure out strange code snippets and such. GPT is very impressive. But we…

How does this work & which GPT are you using? So you upload a bunch of code somehow and ask questions about it?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#316

Post by rkuykendall-com »

padolsey wrote: post #160
twodave wrote: post #121

Is 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…

> the code can almost write itself My 2c: I've been an eng for around 15 yrs. I semi-recently had a brain injury so haven't been able to dedicate anywhere near as much mental cognition to programming recently. That's why I've been unable to maintain full-time work. I started using chatgpt around 3 months ago. Initially skeptical, I started giving it fun and weird logical/semantic puzzles to satisfyingly "prove" my in…

It's funny to me that you have such an incredibly thoughtful series of prompts and responses to yield optimal results as if you are truly leveraging AI and I am just yelling at it like it's a junior dev on a Slack that I don't like. "Chat! Take this code and make it do X instead! I wanna do Y, do it. Nah, not like that, do it with this thing here."

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#317

Post by dumpsterdiver »

dave333 wrote: post #313
dumpsterdiver wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One percent? Are you really suggesting with a straight face that generated code could provide the other ninety-nine percent? If not, say what you actually mean. Don't bullshit us with trash numbers.

Let me guess, ENTJ right?

No, I was just drinking at the time (so for a bit I may have been an alcohol induced ENTJ)... My reply was a little rude. I apologize for that. That wasn't a productive way for me to express my disagreement, and I should have chosen my words more thoughtfully.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#319

Post by gonzo41 »

ralphc wrote: post #314
gonzo41 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently uplifting a 30 year old code to a somewhat newer codebase to try and give it another 20-30 years. I spend a lot of time talking with humans to rediscover the context of the system. AI is not going to each my lunch. But it sure is handy being able to make sense of some old logic and syntax. It literally saves me hours in having to figure out strange code snippets and such. GPT is very impressive. But we…

How does this work & which GPT are you using? So you upload a bunch of code somehow and ask questions about it?

I just read it carefully and put the clangers into chatgpt for some suggestions on different approaches. There's a mix of Perl, old PHP, Aspx and mssql plsql all interacting. So it's less about getting it to do all the work, and just keeping me from getting bogged down in the trivial stuff.
Post reply on HN