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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#341
post #312

Award for most ambiguous headline. (“cuts” can mean “initiates” or “terminates”!)

“Cut a deal” is a standard phrase with only one meaning

But when you make it "cut AI deal", that breaks the standard phrase and opens the door to alternative explanations. I initially thought this was a news article about the deal breaking up.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#342
post #221

I use cursor and its tab completion; while what it can do is mind blowing, in practice I’m not noticing a productivity boost. I find that ai can help significantly with doing plumbing, but it has no problems with connecting the pipes wrong. I need to double and triple check the updated code - or fix the resulting errors when I don’t do that. So: boilerplate and outer app layers, yes; architecture and core libraries,…

I'm actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. I've used AI to move multi thousand line codebases between languages. I've created new apps from scratch with it. My theory is the willingness to baby sit and the modality. I'm perfectly fine telling the tool I use its errors and working side by side with it like it was another person. At the end of the day it can belt out lines of code faster than I…

I agree. I am in a very senior role and find that working with AI the same way you do I am many times more productive. Months of work becomes days or even hours of work

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#343
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Cut a deal” is a standard phrase with only one meaning

But when you make it "cut AI deal", that breaks the standard phrase and opens the door to alternative explanations. I initially thought this was a news article about the deal breaking up.

I thought the same indeed.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#344
post #221

I use cursor and its tab completion; while what it can do is mind blowing, in practice I’m not noticing a productivity boost. I find that ai can help significantly with doing plumbing, but it has no problems with connecting the pipes wrong. I need to double and triple check the updated code - or fix the resulting errors when I don’t do that. So: boilerplate and outer app layers, yes; architecture and core libraries,…

I'm actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. I've used AI to move multi thousand line codebases between languages. I've created new apps from scratch with it. My theory is the willingness to baby sit and the modality. I'm perfectly fine telling the tool I use its errors and working side by side with it like it was another person. At the end of the day it can belt out lines of code faster than I…

My theory is grammatical correctness and specificity. I see a lot of people prompt like this:

"use python to write me a prog that does some dice rolls and makes a graph"

Vs

"Create a Python program that generates random numbers to simulate a series of dice rolls. Export a graph of the results in PNG format."

Information theory requires that you provide enough actual information. There is a minimum amount of work to supply the input. Otherwise, the gaps will get filled in with noise, working, what you want, or not.

For example, maybe someday you could say "write me an OS" and it would work. However, to get exactly what you want, you still have to specify it. You can only compress so far.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

You. Can. Write. Tests.

Tests haven’t saved us so far, humans have been writing tests that passed for software with bugs for decades.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#348
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but o1-preview/o1-mini has been able to solve many moderately challenging programming tasks that would've taken me 30 mins to an hour. No other models earlier could've done that.

It's an improvement but...I've asked it to do some really simple tasks and it'll occasionally do them in the most roundabout way you could imagine. Like, let's source a bash file that creates and reads a state file to do something for which the functionality was already built-in. Say I'm a little skeptical of this solution and plug it into a new o1-preview prompt to double check the solution, and it starts by critiqu…

> I've asked it to do some really simple tasks and it'll occasionally do them in the most roundabout way you could imagine.

But it still does the tasks you asked for, so that's the part that really matters.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

You. Can. Write. Tests.

Tests aren't a full solution for all the considerations of the above post.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

You. Can. Write. Tests.

Just let the LLM do that too.
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