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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#361

Post by doitLP »

Robotbeat wrote: post #342
ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

It reminds me of the boundless optimism of Mr Meeseeks: https://youtu.be/qUYvIAP3qQk GPT-3/4 is like a Meeseeks box for computer and internet tasks. Keep your task simple, and it will quickly and happily solve it for you before ceasing to exist. (Well, that’s how I use it via the API, at least. ChatGPT will preserve the state, but of course the context window is still limited anyway.)

Remember, existence is pain to a Meeseeks. So treat your AI with care!

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#362

Post by danielbln »

Tade0 wrote: post #186

I can take care of the coding part - after all that's where the fun is. What usually drains most of my energy, as someone in the JS ecosystem, is the sheer volume of modules I need to sift through to find one that does what I want. The other day I wanted to find a library for handling zlib in the browser - eventually I stumbled on `pako`, which is great. Seeing this post I asked ChatGPT a somewhat vague question, nam…

Also check out https://phind.com which is combines search with LLM and gives you more up-to-date information with less hallucination.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#364

Post by awb »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

It’s taken some getting used to.

Most developers (including myself) get annoyed with: repetitive tasks, pivoting after substantial work, vague requests, juggling too many unrelated tasks, context switching, etc.

With Chat-GPT I’ve had to learn a new paradigm: any request is OK at any time

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#365

Post by layer8 »

simonw wrote: post #340
layer8 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You build a correctness proof in your head by thinking through all the details. That what takes most of the time, and the AI doesn’t relieve you from that. Of course one doesn’t always get everything right, but testing alone is no substitute for deductive thinking about the code’s correctness. And it’s also less fun having to do that for someone else’s code.

ChatGPT can help you that process if you ask it to. I often paste chunks of code into it just to get a detailed line-by-line explanation of exactly what that code is doing. It's really helpful, especially for convoluted code that you're trying to get a good feel for.

That’s true, but you still have to follow and think through all the steps of what the code is doing. With regard to new code, I don’t see the sometimes cited 5-10 times increase in productivity if you’re actually diligent about code correctness.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#366

Post by Grimburger »

pknerd wrote: post #363

Off topic: it'd be interesting to know whether chatGPT decreased the traffic of stack overflow?

Anecdotally, I've avoided quora as much as possible when clicking but was pleasantly surprised the last time I did, they offered an LLM answer over the top human one which seemed reasonable enough to give an overview of the matter without bias.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#367

Post by acadapter »

andreasley wrote: post #345
ihatepython wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

Please don't do this here. The topic deserves serious discussion.

Humor is a very sophisticated form of communication. Think of how much was said in so few words, by just poking at shared common knowledge.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#368

Post by throwthrowuknow »

sokoloff wrote: post #248
w4ffl35 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think maybe you're using ai wrong. its not akin to stackoverflow answers, its more akin to a jr programmer that can bang out some code for you while you go to the kitchen or bathroom and then you fix a few mistakes and integrate it with your larger project

I have played with it a small amount. If I need to center a div in CSS, it’s faster than me remembering how to do that. For anything significantly higher complexity, I don’t find that typing is anywhere near the rate-limiting factor. Figuring out how to decompose the problem, how the code should be structured overall, and other high-level concerns take far time/effort than banging out boilerplate. Now, if I wanted to…

Have you tried giving it the problem statement and asking for a high level outline of the code and then iterate on that until it’s right and then ask it to generate pseudo code for one item at a time, correct that and then generate the code?

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#369

Post by gbasin »

spyder wrote: post #243
ThePhysicist wrote: post #30

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

Another trick I have found interesting and somewhat useful: asking it to give you his confidence score for it's statements, and a lot of the time his confidence are lower for his wrong statements but also lot of the times has high confidence in some wrong answers too (for example gets simple math wrong with 100% confidence), so not sure it's really that useful just an interesting thing to try.

The RLHF process performed on that chat models actively confuses their ability to estimate confidence. The raw models are quite well calibrated though

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#370

Post by chasd00 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #176
ak_111 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With those new interpreted language that are easy to pick and have a low-barrier of entry you are constantly having to run faster than an influx of fresh energetic high school dropouts and boot camp graduates. With less fashionable language that require significant expertise and experience in picking them up like C (understanding the hardware level) and Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts) the barriers of en…

"Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts)" I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial? But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform. But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from…

> I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM

yeah that was the whole point of object oriented programming and Java to begin with. You don't need to know the details of the underlying implementation, focus on the problem you're trying to solve.

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