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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#491

Post by afro88 »

nwienert wrote: post #487
afro88 wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For anything complex, move in small steps.

For anything truly novel, or on a codebase with a very bespoke in house architecture or DSL, yeah you won't get much out of it.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#492

Post by hackable_sand »

kortilla wrote: post #276
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in practice I’m not noticing a productivity boost. How can this be possible if you literally admit its tab completion is mindblowing? Isn't really good tab completion good enough for at least a 5% producitvity boost? 10%? 20%? Select line of code, prompt it to refactor, verify they are good, accept the changes

If someone can eat 20 golf balls that’s impressive but it doesn’t improve my golf game

That is actually very impressive.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#493

Post by amake »

eru wrote: post #458
hansonkd wrote: post #367

Earlier 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…

I had the opposite experience lately: I was helping translate some UI text for a website from English to German, my mother tongue. I found that usually the machine came up with better translations than me.

Perhaps you are not a translator. Translating is a skill that is more than simply being bilingual.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#495

Post by bushbaba »

gavin_gee wrote: post #386
thenobsta wrote: post #8

I wonder what the rationale for this was internally. More OpenAI issues? competitiveness with Cursor? It seems good for the user to increase competition across LLM providers. Also ambiguous title. I thought GitHub canceled deals they had in the work. The article is clearly about making a deal, but it's unclear from the article's title.

cursor is kicking vscode's butt because it has multi models. also MS is hedging bets against OpenAI. that relationship is not easy

Or, anti trust fears.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#496

Post by hi_hi »

Every single one of these discussion, at some point, devolves to some version of

- is by far the best. In my extensive usage it is consistently outperforms by at least 2x. The difference is night and day.

Then the immediate child reply:

- What!? You must be holding it wrong. The complete inverse is true for me.

I don't know what to make of this contradiction. We're all using the same 2 things right? How can opinions vary by such a large amount. It makes me not trust any opinion on any other subject (which admittedly is not a bad default state, but who has time to form their own opinions on everything).

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#497

Post by frank_nitti »

hhdhdbdb wrote: post #466
AIorNot wrote: post #427

Reviewing 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…

I dont see a young/old divide when it comes to AI. Altough there is a young/old divide in familial responsibilies and willingness to be a chip on the VC's roulette table.

Absolutely true. The oldest devs I work with are some of the most enthusiastic about using LLM chat to develop. Among the younger devs, they all seem to use it but the amount that can actually produce working code are few.

Now I get a lot of calls from team asking for help fixing some code they got from an AI.. Overall it is improving the code quality from the group, I no longer have to instruct people on basics to set up their approach/solution. Will admit there is a little difficulty dealing with pushback on my guidance because e.g. “well chatgpt said I should use this library” when the core SDK already supports something more recent than the AI was trained on

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#498

Post by slimsag »

hi_hi wrote: post #496

Every single one of these discussion, at some point, devolves to some version of - is by far the best. In my extensive usage it is consistently outperforms by at least 2x. The difference is night and day. Then the immediate child reply: - What!? You must be holding it wrong. The complete inverse is true for me. I don't know what to make of this contradiction. We're all using the same 2 things right? How can opinions…

Lots of possibilities here.

People are learning to prompt LLMs in ways that produce better results for their LLM of choice, so switching to another one they find their approach no longer works as well.

Or.. LLMs have different personalities in terms of output; some being more or less direct/polite than others, or sounding more or less confident; and that is causing people to perceive a difference that in terms of factual answers may not be different.

Or just personal preference masquerading as intelligence - a classic among software engineers.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#499

Post by eyegor »

xk_id wrote: post #390
ianbutler wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. My conspiracy theory is that the positive experiences are exaggerated and come from investors in the Nvidia stock.

Have you tried using chatgpt/etc as a starting point when you're unfamiliar with something? That's where it really excels for me, I can go crazy fast from 0 to ~30 (if we call 60 mvp). For example, the other day I was trying to stream some pcm audio using webaudio and it spit out a mostly functional prototype for me in a few minutes of trying. For me to read through msdn and get to that point would've taken an hour or two, and going from the crappy prototype as a starting point to read up on webaudio let me get an mvp in ~15 mins. I rarely touch frontend web code so for me these tools are super helpful.

On the other hand, I find it just wastes my time in more typical tasks like implementing business logic in a familiar language cause it makes up stdlib apis too often.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#500

Post by hackable_sand »

gitaarik wrote: post #448
hackable_sand wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to find out where programmers are learning this idea: that writing code fast is ideal. If it takes 30 years to write one loc, it takes 30 years. Ideally, it takes 30 years to write zero lines of code.

The best programmers are no programmers!

Alternatively,

more logic does not validate the truth.

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