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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#361

Post by warkdarrior »

njtransit wrote: post #92
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> interest rates go up This is kind of a cynical tech startup take: - ragging on VC's - calling something a bubble Interest rates are on their way back down btw. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone... https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bank-england-cut-bank-rate-... Funding has looked to be running out a few times for OpenAI specifically, but most frontier model development is reasonably well f…

If interest rates are on their way down, why has the 10Y treasury yield increased 50 points over the last month? https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US10Y

It also dropped 40 points over the last six months.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#362

Post by big_jimmer »

imafish wrote: post #233
thih9 wrote: post #221

I use cursor and its tab completion; while what it can do is mind blowing, in practice I’m not noticing a productivity boost. I find that ai can help significantly with doing plumbing, but it has no problems with connecting the pipes wrong. I need to double and triple check the updated code - or fix the resulting errors when I don’t do that. So: boilerplate and outer app layers, yes; architecture and core libraries,…

I rarely use the tab completion. Instead I use the chat and manually select files I know should be in context. I am barely writing any code myself anymore. Just sanity checking that the output and “piping” is correct. My productivity (in frontend work at least) is significantly higher than before.

Out of curiosity, how long have you been working as a developer? Just that, in my experience, this is mostly true for juniors and mids (depending on the company, language, product etc. etc.). For example, I often find that copilot will hallucinate tailwind classes that don't exist in our design system library, or make simple logical errors when building charts (sometimes incorrect ranges, rarely hallucinated fields) and as soon as I start bringing in 3rd party services or poorly named legacy APIs all hope is lost and I'm better off going it alone with an LSP and a prayer.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#363

Post by sbarre »

__float wrote: post #320
ianbutler wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. I've used AI to move multi thousand line codebases between languages. I've created new apps from scratch with it. My theory is the willingness to baby sit and the modality. I'm perfectly fine telling the tool I use its errors and working side by side with it like it was another person. At the end of the day it can belt out lines of code faster than I…

I'm not sure how many people are like me, but my attempts to use Copilot have largely been the context of writing code as usual, occasionally getting end-of-line or handful-of-lines completions from it. I suspect there's probably a bigger shift needed, but I haven't seen anyone (besides AI "influencers" I don't trust..?) showing what their day-to-day workflows look like. Is there a Vimcasts equivalent for learning th…

Have you tried the chat mode?

The autocomplete is somewhere between annoying and underwhelming for me, but the chat is super useful. Being able to just describe what you're thinking or what you're trying to do and having a bespoke code sample just show up (based on the code in your editor) that you can then either copy/paste in, cherry-pick from or just get inspired by, has been a great productivity booster..

Treat it like a pair programmer or a rubber duck and you might have a better experience. I did!

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#364

Post by Yodel0914 »

thih9 wrote: post #221

I use cursor and its tab completion; while what it can do is mind blowing, in practice I’m not noticing a productivity boost. I find that ai can help significantly with doing plumbing, but it has no problems with connecting the pipes wrong. I need to double and triple check the updated code - or fix the resulting errors when I don’t do that. So: boilerplate and outer app layers, yes; architecture and core libraries,…

I find chatgpt incredibly useful for writing scripts against well-known APIs, or for a "better stackoverflow". Things like "how do I use a cursor in sql" or "in a devops yaml pipeline, I want to trigger another pipeline. How do I do that?".

But working on our actual codebase with copilot in the IDE (Rider, in my case) is a net negative. It usually does OK when it's suggesting the completion of a single line, but when it decides to generate a whole block it invariably misunderstands the point of the code. I could imagine that getting better if I wrote more descriptive method names or comments, but the killer for me is that it just makes up methods and method signatures, even for objects that are part of publicly documented frameworks/APIs.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#365

Post by geysersam »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #329
ianbutler wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. I've used AI to move multi thousand line codebases between languages. I've created new apps from scratch with it. My theory is the willingness to baby sit and the modality. I'm perfectly fine telling the tool I use its errors and working side by side with it like it was another person. At the end of the day it can belt out lines of code faster than I…

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

I'll take a stab at changing your mind.

AIs are not able to write Redis. That's not their job. AIs should not write complex high performance code that millions of users rely on. If the code does something valuable for a large number of people you can afford humans to write it.

AIs should write low value code that just repeats what's been done before but with some variations. Generic parts of CRUD apps, some fraction of typical frontends, common CI setups. That's what they're good at because they've seen it a million times already. That category constitutes most code written.

This relieves human developers of ballpark 20% of their workload and that's already worth a lot of money.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#366

Post by warkdarrior »

atomic128 wrote: post #62
rnmaker wrote: post #32

If you want to destroy open source completely, the more models the better. Microsoft's co-opting and infiltration of OSS projects will serve as a textbook example of eliminating competition in MBA programs. And people still support it by uploading to GitHub.

Yes. Thank you for saying it. We're watching Microsoft et al. defeat open source. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often mo…

> This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation.

GitHub hosts a lot of source code, including presumably the code it trained CoPilot on. So they satisfy any license that requires sharing the code and license, such as GPL 3. Not sure what the problem is.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#367

Post by hansonkd »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #329
ianbutler wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. I've used AI to move multi thousand line codebases between languages. I've created new apps from scratch with it. My theory is the willingness to baby sit and the modality. I'm perfectly fine telling the tool I use its errors and working side by side with it like it was another person. At the end of the day it can belt out lines of code faster than I…

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

> The more time I spend in a codebase the better idea I have of what the writer was trying to do.

This whole thing of using LLMs to Code reminds me a bit of when Google Translate came out and became popular, right around the time I started studying Russian.

Yes, copying and pasting a block of Russian text produced a block of english text that you could get a general idea of what was happening. But translating from english to russian rarely worked well enough to fool the professor because of all the idioms, style, etc. Russian has a lot of ways you can write "compactly" with fewer words than english and have a much more precise meaning of the sentence. (I always likened russian to type-safe haskell and english to dynamic python)

If you actually understood Russian and read the text, you could uncover much deeper and subtle meaning and connections that get lost in translation.

If you went to russia today you could get around with google translate and people would understand you. But you aren't going to be having anything other than surface level requests and responses.

Coding with LLMs reminds me a lot of this. Yes, they produce something that the computer understands and runs, but the meaning and intention of what you wanted to communicate gets lost through this translation layer.

Coding is even worse because i feel like the intention of coding should never to be to belt out as many lines as possible. Coding has powerful abstractions that you can use to minimize the lines you write and crystalize meaning and intent.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#368

Post by FactKnower69 »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #83
xyst wrote: post #45

Got to cut deals before the AI bust pops, VC money and interest vanishes and interest rates go up. Also diversifying is always a good option. Even if one cash cow gets nuked from orbit, you have 2 other companies to latch onto

> interest rates go up This is kind of a cynical tech startup take: - ragging on VC's - calling something a bubble Interest rates are on their way back down btw. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone... https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/bank-england-cut-bank-rate-... Funding has looked to be running out a few times for OpenAI specifically, but most frontier model development is reasonably well f…

>Interest rates are on their way back down btw.

completely wrong, where have you been the past month? 10Y t-notes are actually UP after the fed's hysterical 50 basis point cut lol

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#369

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

sbarre wrote: post #359
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

I think it depends on the stakes of what you're building. A lot of the concerns you describe make me think you work in a larger company or team and so both the organizational stakes (maintenance, future changes, tech debt, other people taking it over) and the functional stakes (bug free, performant, secure, etc) are high? If the person you're responding to is cranking out a personal SaaS project or something they won…

> A lot of the concerns you describe make me think you work in a larger company or team and so both the organizational stakes (maintenance, future changes, tech debt, other people taking it over) and the functional stakes (bug free, performant, secure, etc) are high?

The most financially rewarding project I worked on started out as an early stage startup with small ambitions. It ended up growing and succeeding far beyond expectations.

It was a small codebase but the stakes were still very high. We were all pretty experienced going into it so we each had preferences for which footguns to avoid. For example we shied away from ORMs because they're the kind of dependency that could get you stuck in mud. Pick a "bad" ORM, spend months piling code on top of it, and then find out that you're spending more time fighting it than being productive. But now you don't have the time to untangle yourself from that dependency. Worst of all, at least in our experience, it's impossible to really predict how likely you are to get "stuck" this way with a large dependency. So the judgement call was to avoid major dependencies like this unless we absolutely had to.

I attribute the success of our project to literally thousands of minor and major decisions like that one.

To me almost all software is high stakes. Unless it's so trivial that nothing about it matters at all; but that's not what these AI tools are marketing toward, are they?

Something might start out as a small useful library and grow into a dependency that hundreds of thousands of people use.

So that's why it terrifies me. I'm terrified of one day joining a team or wanting to contribute to an OSS project - only to be faced with thousands of lines of nonsensical autogenerated LLM code. If nothing else it takes all the joy out of programming computers (although I think there's a more existential risk here). If it was a team I'd probably just quit on the spot but I have that luxury and probably would have caught it during due diligence. If it's an OSS project I'd nope out and not contribute.

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