That's an interesting finding so far! > The provided code is quite complex, but I'll break it down into a more understandable format, explaining its different parts and their functionalities. Reading the above statement generated by ChatGPT, I asked myself: Will we live to the day where these LLMs could take a large binary executable as input, read it, analyze it, understand it, then reply with the above statement? >…
OpenAI is good at unminifying code
201–210 of 321 posts
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#202I recognized this a few months back when I wanted to see the algorithm that a website used to do a calculation. I just put the minified JS in ChatGPT and figured it out pretty easily. Let's take this a few steps out. What happens when a LLM can clone a whole SAAS app? Let's say I wanted to clone HubSpot. If an LLM can interact with a browser and figure out how a UI works and take code hints from un-mimified code I think we could see all SAAS apps be commoditized. The backend would be proprietary, but it could figure out API formats and suggest a backend architecture.
All this makes me think AI's are going to be a strong deflationary force in the future.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even that is true in my knowledge. For example a particular benchmark [1] demonstrates that many popular libraries benefit much from minification even after gzip compression, with the saving ranging from 35% to 75%. Sure, a small library would be fine without any minification or even compression, but otherwise minification is clearly beneficial. [1] https://github.com/privatenumber/minification-benchmarks
I think you have to look at this in the context of an entire bundle or project, and then you have to weigh it against the download speeds you’re generally expecting for the users of your site or app. I agree that as a blanket statement “gzip is enough” is not technically correct, but I think it’s largely correct in spirit, in that people tend to reach for minification by default, without really thinking about what th…
I wonder if 200 KB is small enough that TCP slow start will be the constraint on a download over a new connection, rather than the bandwidth.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#204That's an interesting finding so far! > The provided code is quite complex, but I'll break it down into a more understandable format, explaining its different parts and their functionalities. Reading the above statement generated by ChatGPT, I asked myself: Will we live to the day where these LLMs could take a large binary executable as input, read it, analyze it, understand it, then reply with the above statement? >…
You should give it a try and report back! One easy way would be to take an open-source Android app, compile the APK, then decompile it and feed the bytecode to an LLM and ask it to write the java/kotlin equivalent and compare the source and LLM decoded one.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#205Author of HumanifyJS here! I've created specifically a LLM based tool for this, which uses LLMs on AST level to guarantee that the code keeps working after the unminification step: https://github.com/jehna/humanify
Would it be difficult to add a 'rename from scratch' feature? I mean a feature that takes normal code (as opposed to minified code) and (1) scrubs all the user's meaningful names, (2) chooses names based on the algorithm and remaining names (ie: the built-in names).
Sometimes when I refactor, I do this manually with an LLM. It is useful in at least two ways: it can reveal better (more canonical) terminology for names (eg: 'antiparallel_line' instead of 'parallel_line_opposite_direction'), and it can also reveal names that could be generalized (eg: 'find_instance_in_list' instead of 'find_animal_instance_in_animals').
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#206Is there any reason why it’s ‘OpenAI’ in the title rather than ‘ChatGPT’?
It's the title of the blog post.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#207I recognized this a few months back when I wanted to see the algorithm that a website used to do a calculation. I just put the minified JS in ChatGPT and figured it out pretty easily. Let's take this a few steps out. What happens when a LLM can clone a whole SAAS app? Let's say I wanted to clone HubSpot. If an LLM can interact with a browser and figure out how a UI works and take code hints from un-mimified code I th…
I was with you until:
>If an LLM can interact with a browser and figure out how a UI works and take code hints from un-mimified code I think we could see all SAAS apps be commoditized. The backend would be proprietary, but it could figure out API formats and suggest a backend architecture.
whoooha! that's a lot of probing and testing of the SAAS that would be required in order to see how it behaved. SAAS aren't algorithms, they operate over data that's unseen on the front end as well...
>All this makes me think AI's are going to be a strong deflationary force in the future.
I don't get this. I've literally never worked anywhere which had enough software engineers, we've been going on about software crisis for about 50 years and things are arguably worse than ever. The gap between the demand for good software (in the sense that allocating capital to producing it would be sensible) and the fulfillment of that demand is bigger than ever. We just don't have the mechanisms to make this work and to make it work at an economically viable level.
Then we get AI to help us and everyone thinks that the economy will shrink?
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you have to look at this in the context of an entire bundle or project, and then you have to weigh it against the download speeds you’re generally expecting for the users of your site or app. I agree that as a blanket statement “gzip is enough” is not technically correct, but I think it’s largely correct in spirit, in that people tend to reach for minification by default, without really thinking about what th…
I wonder if 200 KB is small enough that TCP slow start will be the constraint on a download over a new connection, rather than the bandwidth.
I think probably not, if the assets are coming from the same place, since the connection will be reused in most modern situations. Maybe if you’re loading the JS from a CDN though, and there are no other large resources, or those resources come from a different server.
Re: OpenAI is good at unminifying code
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a rule of thumb, like anything else. In most code, "why" is the hard part; I see that you are incrementing that account by a penny from out of the blue, but why? When you are in code where "what" is the hard part, like an implementation of a book algorithm or some tricky performance optimization, then by all means comment that. Really all this rule amounts to is // Increment by a penny accountValue += 1 is…
I do agree that documenting the why is way more important than the how/what. But having a short comment to summarize a block of code like: // Parse the filename and remove the extension let fext_re = Regex::new(r"(.\*)\.(.+)$").unwrap(); let page_cap = fext_re.captures(fname).unwrap(); let page_base_filename = page_cap.get(1).unwrap().as_str(); Is still useful. Instead of having to read the next few line of code, I a…
You can put these comments into the name of a function, getting rid of the redundancy and having them read by whoever would just be reading the code not to be distracted by the comments.