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What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

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Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#101

Post by jprete »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #87
sanderjd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I would have felt this way when I was younger. But after writing code for over twenty years, I'm very happy to let computers do the boring half of the thinking, so that I can think about more interesting things. It is not intellectually stimulating for me to think about what the syntax for a dict comprehension is, or what exactly I'm supposed to do to map over the values of an array in javascript without scre…

That's what's been so striking for me -- the stuff that is fun and playful for me I get to do; and a bunch of stuff that I hated I can now offload, with the net result that I get to work at the level of abstraction that is most interesting and most human, vs acting like a human robot trying to unearth documentation, API examples, etc. There's no question about this being the right way to use it for me, but I wonder i…

I think a lot of the drudgery is lack of language quality. But this is still a better argument than I’ve seen before for using it.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#102

Post by throwuwu »

j-a-a-p wrote: post #40

My prediction: knowledge will start to be reformatted into an LLM directly and knowledge providers will stop publishing it otherwise. Thus the chat interface will both improve and protect knowledge access once the traditional formats are not published anymore. This will come together with the downfall of search, a prime driver why so much knowledge was published on the web. Search will start to drown in an explosion…

If you can sell your knowledge to an existing audience and then add a special category with a higher price for companies training LLMs why would you take the financial hit of selling to a single customer where they can now make demands of you as your only source of revenue?

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#103

Post by timacles »

gumballindie wrote: post #50
ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

It’s good at a beginner, early intermediate level when you need help with syntax and structuring basic things. It’s an excellent helper tool at that stage.

But it’s obvious outside of jr dev work and hobby projects there’s no way it could possibly grasp enough context to be useful.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#104

Post by jprete »

sanderjd wrote: post #91
shanusmagnus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's been so striking for me -- the stuff that is fun and playful for me I get to do; and a bunch of stuff that I hated I can now offload, with the net result that I get to work at the level of abstraction that is most interesting and most human, vs acting like a human robot trying to unearth documentation, API examples, etc. There's no question about this being the right way to use it for me, but I wonder i…

Yeah, I've said a bunch that I'm worried about people starting out from scratch. So much of what I do after I get responses from LLMs is best described as "taste", but how would I have developed that taste without the years of slogging through? But I also think this is probably just a classic geezer's concern about kids being on my lawn, and it will probably work out just fine for these youths :)

Eh. I think the peak of computer ability was GenX. I’m not in that group but made up for it with sheer intensity. If you grow up on a phone you’re not getting any of the mental modeling to get close to what the machine is doing and you’re only going to be able to work with the limited tools of that level until you deliberately dive deeper.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#105

Post by 6510 »

alluro2 wrote: post #42

I was hoping for some clever ideas about direction of software / UIs, and new use-cases for LLMs / AI, since for now I'm still struggling and have a lack of vision, it seems. For example, I work on developing a logistics management and route optimization platform. If I try to envision new features that could be unlocked through AI or just LLMs, I basically get nothing back from my feeble brain, that I would fit into…

Turn the company jingle into a heavily distorted guitar track, make a database with 3d models of drivers, locations and drone footage, from departure to delivery including the people driving desks, then have the llm generate a movie with narration in a dark voice. Dealing with broken down vehicles is an opportunity to brag and show off.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#106

Post by amelius »

Take over simple system administration tasks such as (of course giving it full shell access):

- install this nVidia driver and make it work with pytorch

- get this ethernet connection to $IP working

- schedule a daily cron job to make an incremental backup of this harddrive, don't store duplicate files

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#107

Post by jprete »

sanderjd wrote: post #85
n4r9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't beat yourself up. As a mathematically-oriented software engineer I also have little to no interest in using LLMs to help with coding. It feels like the people that do are the builders, i.e. interested in quickly knocking up something that works most of the time. Which is great from a business perspective. I can't help but see my programming output as an artistic expression of my thought, and therefore find it d…

I think the division is along a different axis than this one (or probably it's along multiple axes). I've always been more of a fastidious crafter than a "just get it built" person, but I also struggle with a blank page. I thrive on editing more than writing. Since forever, I like to get out something that works or mostly works, and then start carving on it until I like it. LLMs have been helping me get some ink on t…

I’ve observed for a long time that there’s a lot of value in making a seed, a starting point, for the thing a group needs to create. And that’s exactly the reason - new text is harder than criticism of the old.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#108

Post by jprete »

corethree wrote: post #61
n4r9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't beat yourself up. As a mathematically-oriented software engineer I also have little to no interest in using LLMs to help with coding. It feels like the people that do are the builders, i.e. interested in quickly knocking up something that works most of the time. Which is great from a business perspective. I can't help but see my programming output as an artistic expression of my thought, and therefore find it d…

Mathematically oriented software engineers have the most to benefit off of software assistance due to algebraic designs. As one myself LLMs don't feel like giving up control it feels like collaboration. You probably don't like collaboration.

Claiming that someone doesn’t like collaboration because they don’t want to use ChatGPT is a very unreasonable and biased take.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#109

Post by yayitswei »

depletedgherkin wrote: post #47
ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

Bit of an aside, but I wonder if the rise of LLMs will lead to new programming languages being much slower to be adopted. Like you said, you might have given up on F# without ChatGPT assistance, and the main way ChatGPT is able to help with F# is because of all of the example code it's been trained on. If developers rely more and more on LLM aid, then a new language without strong LLM support might be a dealbreaker t…

I heard somewhere that ChatGPT is surprisingly good for human language translations even though it's not specifically trained for it. There seems to be just enough examples of e.g. Japanese that Japanese researchers use it to translate papers. I suspect that's largely true for programming languages too. I've had great success working with it in Clojure, even though there's relatively little published code compared to more popular languages.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#110

Post by makestuff »

Clippy is going to make a triumphant return as the AI assistant of the future. Clippy will be on every phone/tablet/computer just talking to other instances of itself.

In 5-10 more years models will all run locally on device with weight updates being pushed OTA.

Advertisers will somehow figure out how to train ads into these models so you get subtle references to new products.

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