111–120 of 152 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That happens sometimes when you move up an abstraction level. I bet "self.count += 1" is a lot longer than the machine code it generates.
Falls apart when we get down to binary, but holds across most levels of abstraction
The first comment asks Copilot to import all the libraries needed for a toxicity classifier, and it imports libraries such as re (regex engine) and nltk (natural language toolkit). But what if I wanted a classifier for toxic chemicals and not toxic speech? That was my first thought when I saw "toxicity" in the title. I'm now imagining a very frustrated junior developer a few years from now trying to argue with Copilo…
Like googling is an essential skill for developers. In few years if Copilot deliver its promise, navigating it would be treated the same. You may also have an interview round wherein optimization would be how quickly can you get Copilot to write the expected code.
That's ages ago in AI time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wrote a comment outlining exactly what I wanted, and immediately Copilot generated the code I was after. How do you know it was what you were after? Like you said, it could be .toLocaleTimeString or .toLocaleString (or something else). How do you verify that the AI isn't giving you broken/incorrect code? I guess you could check the docs, or run the code yourself, but at that point what's the value add for copilot…
The negative comments seem to assume an open loop development strategy where if copilot fails to give the 100% correct result it is a fail. Rather, even if it is wrong it can get you close and if not close it can give you ideas. You have to close the loop and use your own intelligence as well. For example I can't draw faces but I can recognize a badly drawn face. If I ask an AI: Please draw me a 35 year old man with…
But code is not a face: you can't easily judge if it's correct or not, if you could you wouldn't need copilot in the first place, so now you have to trust it's correct and, if it isn't, you need to search for the correct answer anyway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this is what software engineering turns into, put a bullet through my head please.
I haven't tried Copilot, and based on what I've read, I don't think I'd want to use it in its current form, but I'd love for software development to evolve to the point that I never have to write any boilerplate code again. Even with DSLs, code generation, autocompletion, snippets, and countless libraries and frameworks to draw upon, the bulk of what I do as developer is write the same boring code over and over again…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With this, I don't need to memorize the syntax OR be bottlenecked on looking at documentation or stack overflowing the commands I need. In other words: you're celebrating the fact that a tool allows you to become more and more incompetent. I don't have much hope for future generations at this point.
People said that during the switch from assembly to C, and then again from C to managed languages. Yet, at each point, there are more and better software engineers, solving more and more challenging problems at each step - the modern web would not exist if all we had at our disposable was 80's era assembly. Aren't you at least a bit curious what new possibilities this technology could enable? What new discoveries cou…
Also, while the programming languages you mentioned did evolve to higher levels of abstraction, one thing that didn't change was that you still were telling the computer what it should do. Of course, you could still run into problems when the abstractions you were relying on didn't do quite what you were expecting, but now you have Copilot giving you globs of code that supposedly do what you want to do. How are you supposed to check if it really does that if you haven't got the slightest idea about programming?
Not really no-code. Let's be honest. The OP is taking steps just like how an experienced SW developer would. Copilot simply cut the need for reading through documentations. This doesn't really say that Copilot can replace programmers. p.s. Does anyone know when Copilot will update the insecure example on their website? Or are they just trying to be honest with the possible quality issues with the generated code?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a very important thing to experience. There’s not always a quick fix or easy path. You can’t always patch existing stuff together or just wait until the problem goes away. And when a tool helps you too much, then is there really a point in what you’re doing? It’s not even a learning experience anymore.
> And when a tool helps you too much, then is there really a point in what you’re doing? It’s not even a learning experience anymore. Have you seen the documentary about AlphaGo? After watching it, and seeing Lee Sedol just utterly devastated by losing to a computer, I felt like I too would surely feel the same thing in my life. I mean, surely Lee Sedol is a far more skilled Go player than I am a skilled programmer.…
Reminds me of this post by Scott Aaronson: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6288 "Forget all that. Judged against where AI was 20-25 years ago, when I was a student, a dog is now holding meaningful conversations in English. And people are complaining that the dog isn’t a very eloquent orator, that it often makes grammatical errors and has to start again, that it took heroic effort to train it, and that it’s unclear how…
Technology that can only make you go ooh and ahh is pretty useless.
"In the name of what's Good & Right, you have to behave how we want you to ... or else."