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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

#431

Post by digging »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #339
pc86 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that nobody saw their coworkers as competition for a promotion, or bonus, or face-time with the boss in the past, and that there are no teams that stick together and work together today, is fanciful at best.

These are "Because I can find an exception, your position is invalid." arguments. Not sure I can recall the exact fallacy title, but it's a fairly typical debating tactic.

I disagree that there's a fallacy at play here. The GP (GGP) should support their bold claim that "times have changed" and "people/teams aren't the same as they used to be." If anything, that's an extremely common fallacy and is not to be believed without sufficient evidence.

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

#432

Post by xwdv »

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

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

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

This joke is how you separate people who know what they’re talking about from the hopeless optimistic crowd.

People who just take that joke as serious clearly haven’t thought through the consequences of using code you don’t completely understand and has no real author. Therac 25 is often a key topic in any rigorous computer science education.

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

#433

Post by waboremo »

latexr wrote: post #407
waboremo wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Crucially, those have context around them Often incorrect context, incredibly biased context (no you don't know what you want, here's a complete misdirection), or just plain outdated. So basically the same thing as ChatGPT. People who blindly copy and paste and ship are always going to do that. Everyone else isn't. It's really that simple.

> Often incorrect context, incredibly biased context And as you learn more from different sources, you get better at identifying them. > or just plain outdated Which you can plainly see by looking at the date of publication. In the case of Stack Overflow, it is common that popular questions have newer answers which invalidate old ones and replace them at the top. > People who blindly copy and paste and ship are alway…

Sure, but do you have a solution to the problem that doesn't also hinder those who are using both StackOverflow and ChatGPT for "good"?

Without a solution we're just whining about bad actors existing.

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

#434

Post by timbeccue »

Herval_freire wrote: post #420
elicksaur wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to think about comments sections not being a random sample of the site’s users. Likely, a month ago, anyone was interested in commenting on AI threads, so more skepticism was evident. Now, most people who are AI-skeptic are probably tired of AI news and have said their piece in other threads, so don’t bother. fwiw, I’ve tried to use ChatGPT to make a new, useful Elixir library and it failed miserably. I…

No there is reasoning in LLMs. This is actually proven through several scientific papers. I can't say whether it's using reasoning for specific answers. I'm sure many times it just regurgitates something that is known... But saying that LLMs in general can and do reason is categorically true. LLMs do attempt to extract actual mental models of the subject of the text. See here: - GPT style language models try to build…

Is this the type of reasoning that could be used to basic math without errors (without using a dedicated math engine)? I wonder why that type of reasoning seems to struggle.

I think chatgpt is interesting in its ability to highlight the subtle variations in a concept we tend to think of as more of a single attribute (e.g. reasoning) because humans tend to do certain types of reasoning tasks at the same relative proficiency as others. No human can write complex code without being able to add large numbers, so they are often lumped into the same skill category.

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

#435

Post by notahacker »

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…

I've worked with people who say "Certainly, let's start by..." to absolutely everything regardless of whether they know how to solve it or merely wish to leave you with the impression they do, and much prefer working with people who have a scale of "Certainly, let's start by" to "you should probably ask someone else".

Even better if they have an "Are you sure this is a good idea?" mode, possibly even with suggested alternatives

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

#436

Post by furyofantares »

withinboredom wrote: post #39
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…

How do you know it is even close to correct? When I’ve asked it for code, it has been subtly wrong, or worse, correct but missing important edge cases that it doesn’t even seem to be aware of.

Because I can read code.

In fact I read every piece of code I write, right after I write it, and probably more times after. It's a good practice, because as an human, my first take at a piece of code is often subtly wrong, or correct but missing important edge cases.

Speaking of, I didn't deliberately insert that typo in the above paragraph, but I did notice it when I read this post before submitting it, and would normally have corrected it.

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

#437

Post by wankle »

postexitus wrote: post #162
ak_111 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are sort of ignoring the bias in your own AI extremist prediction. People who have decided to go all in in learning an interpreted language like Perl or even PHP, had to continuously also learn react, js, ruby,... and gazillions of other languages and frameworks to remain in business over the last two decades. While people who invested in learning C, Java or SQL have as much healthy opportunities to pursue today…

There are no perl jobs.

Dice lists 10 times more Perl jobs than Rust jobs and almost 3 times more than Kotlin.

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

#438

Post by danielvaughn »

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…

This is an interesting point. I haven't felt this kind of optimism since...maybe way back when browsers were first becoming powerful? Like 2009-ish? Right around when I started, there was a huge amount of interest in how to leverage browser tech to make better app experiences.

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

#439

Post by psygn89 »

Elte wrote: post #423
ren_engineer wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one that's been disappointed with GPT for coding? It's good at using common libraries and frameworks but for stuff using more niche libraries it fails miserably almost every time, to the extent that by the time I've debugged and written prompts to try and get it to do it properly I've spent more time than needed still good for handling a lot of grunge work and really useful for doing the stuff where I'm…

I've started to use ChatGPT for semi high-level questions only this week, and I'm with you. It has hallucinated quite a few nonexistent functions, and it's generally unhelpful slightly more often than it is helpful. Just now I asked it why an ` ` and a ` ` with the same CSS had different heights (I've managed to avoid CSS for a while, shoot me XD), and gave it the CSS applied. It suggested the default browser styling…

I remember asking it how to remove hidden files with rm and it hallucinated an -a option. Sometimes the hallucination makes more sense than reality.

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

#440

Post by speedylight »

lelanthran wrote: post #142
speedylight wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly have issue with using ChatGPT to write medical software. I don’t know what your exact process is like but I hope you’re giving the code it generates extra scrutiny to make sure it really does what you put in the prompt. It kinda feels like the judge who used ChatGPT to determine whether to deny or grant bail.

> I honestly have issue with using ChatGPT to write medical software. GP is talking nonsense. No developer is ever going to be able to say "not my fault, I used what ChatGPT gave me" because without even reading the OpenAI license I can all but guarantee that the highly paid lawyers made sure that the terms and conditions include discharging all liability onto the user. GP appears to think that if he sells a lethally…

Yep I just realized he’s not actually being serious, let’s just hope there aren’t any people who are actually serious about doing something similar.
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