Yes, let's devise a more precise way to give AI instructions. Let's call it pAIthon. This will allow powers that be, like Zuckerberg to save face and claim that AI has replaced mid-level developers and enable developers to rebrand themselves as pAIthon programmers. Joking aside, this is likely where we will end up, just with a slightly higher programming interface, making developers more productive.
man, pAIthon was just sitting right there for the taking
I'm surprised that the article (and comments) haven't mentioned Cursor. Agreed that copy pasting context in and out of ChatGPT isn't the fastest workflow. But Cursor has been a major speed up in the way I write code. And it's primarily through a chat interface, but with a few QOL hacks that make it way faster: 1. Output gets applied to your file in a git-diff style. So you can approve/deny changes. 2. It (kinda) has…
Yeah, the OP has a great idea, but models as-is can't handle that kind of workflow reliably. The article is both a year behind, and a year ahead at the same time.
The user must iterate with the chatbot, and you can't do that by just doing a top down 'here's a list of all features, get going, ping me when finished' prompt. AI is a junior engineer, so you have to treat it like a junior engineer, and that means looking through your chat logs, and perhaps backing up to a restore point and going a different direction.
I'm surprised that the article (and comments) haven't mentioned Cursor. Agreed that copy pasting context in and out of ChatGPT isn't the fastest workflow. But Cursor has been a major speed up in the way I write code. And it's primarily through a chat interface, but with a few QOL hacks that make it way faster: 1. Output gets applied to your file in a git-diff style. So you can approve/deny changes. 2. It (kinda) has…
I think the wildly different experiences we all seem to have with AI code tools speaks to the inconsistency of the tools and our own lack of understanding of what goes into programming. I’ve only been slowed down with AI tools. I tried for a few months to really use them and they made the easy tasks hard and the hard tasks opaque. But obviously some people find them helpful. Makes me wonder if programming approaches…
I think it's about what you're working on. It's great for greenfield projects, etc. Terrible for complex projects that plug into a lot of other complex projects (like most of the software those of us not at startups work on day to day)
I think the wildly different experiences we all seem to have with AI code tools speaks to the inconsistency of the tools and our own lack of understanding of what goes into programming. I’ve only been slowed down with AI tools. I tried for a few months to really use them and they made the easy tasks hard and the hard tasks opaque. But obviously some people find them helpful. Makes me wonder if programming approaches…
I think it's about what you're working on. It's great for greenfield projects, etc. Terrible for complex projects that plug into a lot of other complex projects (like most of the software those of us not at startups work on day to day)
It’s been a headache for my greenfield side projects and for my day to day work.
Leaning on these tools just isn’t for me rn.
I like them most for one off scripts or very small bash glue.
I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…
Yes, agree. Chatting with a computer has all the worst attributes of talking to a person, without any of the intuitive understanding, nonverbal cues, even tone of voice, that all add meaning when two human beings talk to each other.
Yeah, this is something I didn't make clear on my post. Chat between people is the same bad UI. People read in the aggression that they bring to their reading. And get mad at people who are legit trying to understand something.
You have some of the same problems with email, of course. Losing threading, in particular, made things worse. It was a "chatification of email" that caused people to lean in to email being bad. Amusing that we are now seeing chat applications rise to replace email.
After using Cursor and Copilot for some time, I long for a tool that works like a "real" collaborator. We share a spec and make comments, resolve them. We file issues and pull requests and approve them. We use tests and specs to lock down our decisions. We keep a backlog up to date, maintain our user docs, discuss what assumptions we have to validate still, and write down our decisions.
Like with any coworker - when ideas get real, get out of chat and start using our tools and process to get stuff done.
I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…
Yes, agree. Chatting with a computer has all the worst attributes of talking to a person, without any of the intuitive understanding, nonverbal cues, even tone of voice, that all add meaning when two human beings talk to each other.
I would also call it having all the worst attributes of a CLI, without the succinctness, OS integration, and program composability of one.
I call it 'structured prompting' [think pseudo-code]. It strikes a nice balance between human-readable logic and structured programming, allowing the LLM to focus on generating accurate code based on clear steps. It’s especially useful when you want to specify the what (the logic) without worrying too much about the how (syntax and language-specific details). If you can create an effective system that supports this k…
Why not just give it the desired function signature and comments in the function body, in Python?
I'm growing to the idea that chat is a bad UI pattern, period. It is a great record of correspondence, I think. But it is a terrible UI for doing anything. In large, I assert this is because the best way to do something is to do that thing. There can be correspondence around the thing, but the artifacts that you are building are separate things. You could probably take this further and say that narrative is a terribl…
I like the idea of having a chat program, the issue is that it's horrible to have a bunch of chat programs all integrated into every application you use that are separate and incompatible with each other.
I really don't like the idea of chatting with an AI though. There are better ways to interface with AIs and the focus on chat is making people forget that.