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Devin: AI Software Engineer

cognition-labs.com

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Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#471

Post by Retric »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #443
Retric wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all jobs are the same. The Real Median US income in 2019 was 78,250$/year in 2022 it had fallen to 74,580. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N The only way that happens is if millions of people are significantly worse off. Most people can find work in the big economy, that doesn’t mean replacing a 100k/year job with a 25k/year job is equivalent. Across a long enough time horizon technology tends to m…

A 5% decrease is "significantly worse off"? And it's still higher than 2018--it's not really reasonable to expect an increase every single year, you should look at the longer-term trend.

The median isn’t a simple average. The minimum difference is 5%, people who lost 50+% only count as one more person below the old average. So that 5% represents a great deal of pain for millions not simply a slight haircut.

And sure the long term trends reverse things as I mentioned, but it took 15 years to recover where it was in 2019. Most Americans are simply cut off from wider economic growth and recovery.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#472

Post by andruby »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #67

Humans seek work that provides satisfaction and meaning in their life. For every technological advancement, artisans are the first to be made obsolete. Sure we have landfills full of unworn textiles, the market says its good, but overall, we keep destroying what allows humans to seek meaning. Our governments and society have made it clear, if you don't produce value, you don't deserve dignity. We have outsourced art…

Long ago most humans spent their time and energy on farming so they wouldn't starve. We automated that with a couple of Agricultural Revolutions.

Then the majority of us spent our time and energy in factories. That got automated during the Industrial Revolution. So we moved to service and knowledge jobs.

And now we're potentialy seeing the start of automation in those knowledge jobs. Will this be a painful revolution as the Industrial one? Where will we spend our time and energy on next?

> Where will we be in the future?

A German named Karl wrote a book with an answer to that question 150 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#473

Post by ethanwillis »

x-complexity wrote: post #398
ethanwillis wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody stops you from paying $1000 for a shirt made by artisans right now. Do you want to? If you don't do then your point is invalid. /s. Look, you dont have to pay $1000 for a shirt made by an artisan to get a quality shirt. It can be a bit more expensive, but much cheaper than that. And this can be true while being fair/reasonable to the artisan and also to the person acquiring it. > It's not somebody else who d…

> > Nobody stops you from paying $1000 for a shirt made by artisans right now. Do you want to? > If you don't do then your point is invalid. /s. > Look, you dont have to pay $1000 for a shirt made by an artisan to get a quality shirt. It can be a bit more expensive, but much cheaper than that. And this can be true while being fair/reasonable to the artisan and also to the person acquiring it. In the ideal case, this…

The point is being missed. The comment above mine was simply trying to make some strawman (i know, i know) about what the author's intent was. The author surely wouldn't suggest we should be paying $1000 for a shirt. I don't think it was a reply in good faith, even though we're not supposed to suggest as such here.

Aside from that I do think you make a good point and I'll need to think about it.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#474

Post by infecto »

ThalesX wrote: post #267
epolanski wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you examples of how it helps me: 1) copilot is a terrific auto complete, and writes tremendous amounts of repetitive boilerplate 2) copilot can help me kickstart writing some complex functions starting from a comment where I tell it what is the input and expected output. Is the implementation always perfect or bug free? No. But in general I just need to review and check rather than come up with the instruct…

> 1) copilot is a terrific auto complete, and writes tremendous amounts of repetitive boilerplate I agree. I have it active on VSCode and enjoy it. It has introduced subtle bugs but the souped up autocomplete is nice. > 2) copilot can help me kickstart writing some complex functions starting from a comment where I tell it what is the input and expected output. Is the implementation always perfect or bug free? No. But…

Something I have had issues with too. Copilot chat does indeed suck. I never enjoyed using it within VSCode and they never released it for Jetbrains.

The sweet spot for me is using a plug-in within the IDE that utilizes an API key to the model API. That coupled with the ability to customize the system prompt has been amazing for me. I truly dislike all of the web interfaces, just allow me to pick from some predefined workflows with a system prompt that I create and let me type. Within the IDE I generally have it setup so that it stays concise and returns code when asked with minimal to no explanation. Blazing efficient.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#475

Post by newalexandria »

epolanski wrote: post #227
ThalesX wrote: post #73

As a developer but also product person, I keep trying to use AI to code for me. I keep failing, because of context length, because of shit output from the model, because of lack of any kind of architecture etc etc etc. I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful, more than helping me with leetcode. Just yesterday I tried to feed it a simple HTML page to extract a selector, I…

I'll give you examples of how it helps me: 1) copilot is a terrific auto complete, and writes tremendous amounts of repetitive boilerplate 2) copilot can help me kickstart writing some complex functions starting from a comment where I tell it what is the input and expected output. Is the implementation always perfect or bug free? No. But in general I just need to review and check rather than come up with the instruct…

thanks, was looking for the sane and verbose reply.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#476

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

renonce wrote: post #435
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, and I think that many of the problems that people think LLMs will become capable of, in fact require AGI. It may well turn out that LLMs are NOT the path to AGI. You can make them bigger and better, and address some of their shortcomings with various tweaks, but it seems that AGI requires online/continual learning which may prove impossible to retrofit onto a pre-trained transformer. Gradient descent may be t…

At least in theory we can achieve incremental learning by training from scratch every time we got some new training data. There are drawbacks with this approach such as inconsistent performance for different training runs and significantly higher training cost but it's achievable. Now the problem is if there exist methods more efficient than gradient descent? I think it's very clear now that there are no other algori…

The obvious alternative to gradient descent here would be Bayes Formula (probabalistic Bayesian belief updates), since this addresses the exact problem that our brains evolved to optimize - how to utilize prediction failure (sensory feedback vs prediction) to make better predictions - better prediction of where the food is, what the predator will do, how to attract a mate, etc. Predict next word too (learn language), of course.

I don't think pre-train for every update works - it's an incredibly slow and expensive way to learn, and the training data just isn't there. Where is the training data that could train it how to do every aspect of any job - the stuff that humans learn by experimentation and experience? The training data that is available via text (and video) is mostly artifacts - what someone created, not the thought process that went into creating it, and the failed experiments and pitfalls to avoid along the way, etc, etc.

It would be nice to have a generic college-graduate pre-trained AGI as a starting point, but then you need to take that and train it how to be a developer (starting at entry level, etc), or for whatever job you'd like it to do. It takes a human years to practice to get good at jobs like these, with many try-fail-rethink experiments every day. Imagine if each of those daily updates took 6 months and $100M to incorporate?! We really need genuine online learning where each generic graduate-level AGI instance can get on-the-job training and human feedback and update it's own "weights" continually.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#479

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

sohzm wrote: post #428
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #231

Let's get realistic here - I just beat GPT-4 at tic tac toe, since it failed to block my 2/3 complete winning line ... Sure, one day we'll have AGI, and one day AGI will replace many jobs that can be done in front of a computer. In the meantime, SOTA AI appears to be an airline chatbot that gets the company sued for lying to the customer. This is just basic question answering, and it can't even get that right. Would…

Well, I'll bring the perspective of a recent college graduate from India. Most students who started jobs in software aren't writing software for aeroplanes. They're writing crud apps, doing third-party API integrations or doing basic debugging. I worry that although not some specialized software devs but a lot will still have problems due to stuff like this. I'm not talking today, but say 2-3 years down the line, who…

Certainly some software jobs are easier than others, and anything that is more just coding (e.g. crud apps) than designing would be easier to automate. It's interesting though why this hasn't been done a long time ago? I remember a piece of software called "The Last One" from the 1980's that was meant to automate creation of simple business apps like these, and here we are 40 years later with people still creating "no/low code" solutions, and people still manually writing crud apps! Why?

I don't think AI will replace jobs until it can do the entire job (full lifecycle from requirements to bug fixes, etc) and be interacted with in the same way a boss or team lead could interact with a developer. If you still need a person in the loop then it's not a person replacement - it's a productivity tool.

Re: Devin: AI Software Engineer

#480

Post by jprete »

mym1990 wrote: post #430
jprete wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of AGI is to be able to do everything a human can do, so this argument doesn't apply in the same way it did for mechanical automation.

You seem to be really dumbing down AGI, considering AGI will likely do everything a human can do, as well as many things a human cannot do, and all of those things will be done vastly faster and better.

Your statement augments my point. All human beings should be concerned about their place in a system that doesn't need them, to the extent it's constructive to think about.
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