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To AI or not to AI

antropia.studio

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Re: To AI or not to AI

#31

Post by matula »

jmkni wrote: post #4

I can relate to a lot of this. Where I find AI most useful is getting it to do tasks I already know how to do, but would take time. If you understand the problem you are trying to solve well enough to explain it to the LLM, you can get good results, you can also eyeball the outputted code and know right away if it's what you are after. Getting it to do things you don't know how to do is where it goes off the rails IM…

This post (aside from the title) is fairly nuanced, with the reality that "let an LLM do all the things" is going to be fraught with problems... but "let an LLM do some very specific things that saves me an hour or so from boilerplate code or tests" is very nice. Of course, I doubt a blog post titled "Sometimes AI is ok, sometimes it's not" would get the clicks.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#32

Post by meowface »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

As a programmer I have noticed this problem much more with command help than with code. Maybe partly because the training data has way more, and more diverse, code examples than all the relevant permutations and use cases for command argument examples.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#33

Post by BryanLegend »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

I've recently been misled by ChatGPT a lot as well. I think it's the router. I'm on the free plan so I assume they're just being tight with the GPU cycles.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#34

Post by wintermutestwin »

erichocean wrote: post #27
wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

Ask Gemini Pro 2.5 to build the rsync command and then give it the man page for your version of rsync. It should succeed the first time. Here's a command to copy the man page to the clipboard than you can immediately paste into aistudio (on a Mac): man rsync | col -b | pbcopy As a general rule, if you would need to look something up to complete a task, the AI needs the same information you do—but it's your job to pro…

So I paste the man page into llm and tell it to only give me parameters that are in that page? Even if it obeyed, it would still choke on how to exclude hidden MacOS kruft files from the copy...

Re: To AI or not to AI

#35

Post by righthand »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #9

I recently spent over an hour trying to get ChatGPT to give me some pretty simple rsync commands. It kept giving me command line parameters that didn't work on the version of rsync on my mac. With ~50% of the failures, it would go down troubleshooting rabbit holes and the rest of the time it would "realize" that it was giving incorrect version responses. I tell it to validate each parameter against my version moving…

What is the cost (in tokens/$$$) of spending an hour restating questions to a chat bot vs typing `man rsync`?

Re: To AI or not to AI

#37

Post by zenmac »

>There is never enough context. We learned quickly that the more context we provided and the smaller the issues, the better the results. However, no matter how much context we provided, the AI would still mess things up because it didn’t ask us for feedback. AI would just not understand if it didn’t have enough information to finish a task, it would assume, a lot, and fail.

Is it me or does it feels like the genie in the bottle thing. Remember a TV show where the guy and his friend sat down with the Genie like a lawyer to make sure every angle is covered (going to spare you the details here). That is what it feels like interacting to a LLM sometimes.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#38

Post by righthand »

chrischen wrote: post #3

I don't understand why people take bad coding practices and just let AI run with it and then expect nothing but poor quality code. Nothing about the AI revolution here changes how good software has always been written. Write tests, use a typed language, review code. If you have good patterns, good procedures, AI fits right in and fills in the blanks perfectly. Poor AI results tend to be the pot calling the kettle bla…

I think bad practices will always be around as most code on Guthub was probably written with bad practices. The well is poisoned.

Re: To AI or not to AI

#40

Post by mnky9800n »

zenmac wrote: post #37

>There is never enough context. We learned quickly that the more context we provided and the smaller the issues, the better the results. However, no matter how much context we provided, the AI would still mess things up because it didn’t ask us for feedback. AI would just not understand if it didn’t have enough information to finish a task, it would assume, a lot, and fail. Is it me or does it feels like the genie in…

I think the AI acts like that shitty coworker that is super smart but never tells you what they are thinking so they are likely capable of doing whatever you want them to do but working on a team is asking too much and they are apparently not capable of doing that. Because AI promises that you can interact with it like it is human because of it's chat capabilities but it never ever does something like, "hey, i don't understand this part, can you tell me more of what you mean here?"
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