How do people feel about uploading code to GitHub now that you know that you're essentially working to have yourself replaced with a robot without being compensated for the effort?
GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
481–490 of 742 posts
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do tests account for cases where I'm looking at a 100 line function that could have easily been written in 20 lines with just as much, if not more, clarity? If the function is fast to evaluate and you have thorough coverage by tests, you couod iterate on an LLMs that aims to compress it down to a simpler / shorter version that behaves identical to the original function. Of course brevity for the sake of brevity…
Finally found a comment down here that I like. I'm also with the notion of tests and also iterating until you get to a solution you like. I also don't see anything particularly "terrifying" that many other comments suggest. At the end of the day, we're engineers that write complex symbols on a 2d canvas, for something that is (ultimately, even if the code being written is machine to machine or something) used for som…
> a bunch of people trying to use a hammer when they needed a screwdriver and then complaining that the hammer didnt work like a screwdriver
When it's being sold as a screwdriver, that's hardly their fault.
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#483Earlier 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…
> But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible I heard a similar thing from a dude when I said I use it for bash scripts instead of copying and pasting things off StackOverflow. He was a bit "get off my lawny" about the idea of running any code you didn't write, especially bash scripts in a terminal. It is obviously the case that I didn't write most of the code in t…
Multiple times in my s/w development career, I've had supervisors ask me why I am not typing code throughout the work day.
My response each time was along the lines of:
When I write code, it is to reify the part of a solution which
I understand. This includes writing tests to certify same.
There is no reason to do so before then.Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#484I 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,…
honestly. I hate it. I find myself banging my head on the table because of how much endless cycles it goes through and not give me the solution haha. I probably started projects over multiple times because the code it generated was so bad lol.
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#485I 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'm perfectly fine telling the tool I use its errors and working side by side with it like it was another person.
This is key. Traditional computing systems are deterministic machines, but AI is a probabilistic machine. So the way you interact and the range, precision, and perspective of the output stretches over a different problem/solution space.
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#486So "cut a deal" means to make a deal rather than sever a deal?
There's a similar problem with the word "cleave" which can mean both cut apart or stick together.
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#487Earlier 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…
> But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. I think this is where the bimodality comes from. When someone says "I used AI to refactor 3000 loc" some take it to mean they used AI in small steps as an accellerator, and others take it to mean a direct copy/paste, fix compile errors and move on. Treat AI like a mid level engineer that you are pair programming with,…
It’s really far from mid level. It’s a weird mix of expert at things it trained on, and complete misleading idiot at anything outside.
For a bash script or the first steps of something simple it’s great.
For anything complex at all it’s worse than nothing.
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The more time I spend in a codebase the better idea I have of what the writer was trying to do. This whole thing of using LLMs to Code reminds me a bit of when Google Translate came out and became popular, right around the time I started studying Russian. Yes, copying and pasting a block of Russian text produced a block of english text that you could get a general idea of what was happening. But translating from en…
> the intention of coding should never to be to belt out as many lines as possible That’s such an underrated statement. Especially when you consider the amount of code as a liability that you’ll have to take care later.
I think this is a bit short sighted, but I’m not sure how short. I suspect in the future, code will be something in between what it is today, and a build artifact. Do you have to maintain bytecode?
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#489Reviewing these conversations is like listening to horse and buggy manufacturers pooh-poohing automobiles: 1. they will scare the horses. a good team of horses is no match for funky 'automobile' 2. how will they be able to deal with our muddy, messy roads 3. their engines are unreliable and prone to breaking down stranding you in the middle and having to do it yourself.. 4. their drivers cant handle the speed, too ma…
Prospective and retrospective analysis are fundamentally different. It’s easy to point to successes and failures of the past, but that’s not how we predict the concrete future potential of one specific thing.
Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic
#490Reviewing these conversations is like listening to horse and buggy manufacturers pooh-poohing automobiles: 1. they will scare the horses. a good team of horses is no match for funky 'automobile' 2. how will they be able to deal with our muddy, messy roads 3. their engines are unreliable and prone to breaking down stranding you in the middle and having to do it yourself.. 4. their drivers cant handle the speed, too ma…
Except the automobile in this case only reaches the destination correctly sometimes. They are less likely to reach the destination as the path becomes longer or more complex.