Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Replit's in-browser coding AI

replit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 87 posts

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#51

Post by minraws »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools? - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code? - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much abo…

I would like to give some context, still not onboard with these tools but we have a lot of chore like work of adding some very similar things but with some changes, complicated or otherwise.

So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It's gotten very annoying and our pace is far slower than what we would like, here something like this makes quite a lot of sense.

Though the problem with such specific tools is they can't generate any customized code for our codebase, we can finetune other codegen models and that's what we plan to do down the line, but this specific tool just not really useful if it can't specialized for our codebase.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#52

Post by mr_cyborg »

googlryas wrote: post #30
sithlord wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

any interns on that team who are going to get bullied by replits lawyers in the near future?

Interesting, sithlord is an anagram for shitlord. While the behavior of the CEO wasn't cool, the issue seems to have been resolved between all involved parties and everyone has moved on - we don't need to bring it up every time repl.it is mentioned.

To be fair, since then I’ve heard of them ghosting people after final round interviews and meeting with the CEO. It’s a pattern at this point.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#53

Post by mradek »

nerdponx wrote: post #27
eachro wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very impressive. Hats off to them! I dont think this is too out of the ordinary either though. I'd guess they started off with a LLM from hugging face, set up some pipeline to ingest code from replit repos to finetune the LLM. The ML aspect of this is not terribly hard given that they probably dont need to train a LLM from scratch. Figuring out how store and serve from replit repos (or publicly available code…

8 weeks is impressive for something like that, and it goes to show just how powerful our off-the-shelf tools have become. I think it's also a bit scary, because 8 weeks is very little time for testing, tuning, and validation of something as opaque as a machine learning model. If it worked right the first time, that's great. But there is still a lot of inherent uncertainty in ML projects. Decision makers need to take…

In 2022 you test live in production lol

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#54

Post by sdevonoes »

minraws wrote: post #51
sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools? - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code? - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much abo…

I would like to give some context, still not onboard with these tools but we have a lot of chore like work of adding some very similar things but with some changes, complicated or otherwise. So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It'…

So, does your team then spend considerable amount of time writing boilerplate/chore code? Isn't that a sign of: "Hey, we actually need to improve our code base guys!". I don't know, if your solution to "I don't want to write chore code" is "let's use Copilot to do the boring stuff"... well, I have bad news for you: "chore code" needs to be maintained and/or fixed, and I don't think Copilot maintains code (for now... :D)

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#55

Post by minraws »

sdevonoes wrote: post #54
minraws wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to give some context, still not onboard with these tools but we have a lot of chore like work of adding some very similar things but with some changes, complicated or otherwise. So we have been considering using Codex or something for generating the code in a more streamlined version, the key reason of it being a benefit is we are a small team with each person owning more than one large repositories. It'…

So, does your team then spend considerable amount of time writing boilerplate/chore code? Isn't that a sign of: "Hey, we actually need to improve our code base guys!". I don't know, if your solution to "I don't want to write chore code" is "let's use Copilot to do the boring stuff"... well, I have bad news for you: "chore code" needs to be maintained and/or fixed, and I don't think Copilot maintains code (for now...…

yeah we work on linters, tooling and the like highly specific single page, highly similar code.

you can't get around it. We have pretty low boilerplate in all the codebases I happen to manage but the sad part is there is no getting around porting of specific rules, setting up better metric analysis and reporting systems and such.

If you have been involved in programming professionally for a while, you would know you just can't get around the chore like works sometimes. Ofc it's not a long term goal to keep going this way but we needed a solution to simplify our challenges as we move on.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#56

Post by m00x »

maep wrote: post #26

If this tool was trained on open source code, what license does the generated code have? At least with Codepilot people were able to generate verbatim GPL code with typos and everything. More importantly, I wonder if companies behind these type of tools offer legal or financial protections in case GPL code sneaks in and leads to expensive law suits.

If you look at licensed code, then write new code, do you also bring in those licenses?

It's been proved in court that AI does not infringe on copyright or licenses since it generates things from an understanding of the whole, instead of directly stealing, just like the human brain does.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#57

Post by poulpy123 »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #4
luxurytent wrote: post #3

Does this differ from GitHub's CoPilot in any user-noticeable way? (outside of the platform it's available on)

One thing I noticed is it seems to have an "Explain code" feature, giving you a textual explanation of a block of code you select, which I'm not aware of GitHub having.

TBH the example wasn't convincing at all

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#58

Post by selykg »

googlryas wrote: post #42
selykg wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the type of thing where goodwill is burned and it takes time to earn it back. I don't think we just brush it under a rug either. In my opinion, you don't just get to "resolve it" and then everyone forgets about it. For me, future decisions and importantly, actions, will help me personally move past this and "move on" as you say.

Ok, sounds good about it taking time - assuming perfect behavior, how long will it be before you stop referencing the affair whenever an unrelated repl.it story comes up?

Can I ask why you're so defensive about it?

I feel like, if there's ANYTHING we have learned in the past decade or two it's that people who defend a company tend to be doing so for the wrong reasons. See Sony or Microsoft, or Apple or Android, etc. Defending a company is just weird.

I look at replit as a tool, run by people. The tool might be cool, but the CEO made a bad decision and now I judge the product on that CEOs actions. There's no definitive time frame or action that just magically makes it better.

But in general, I'll stop thinking about the stupid actions of the CEO when my brain stops reminding me "Oh, no matter how cool this is, the actions of the CEO were incredibly poor." When will that be? No idea, but maybe sometime down the road he does enough good things that I will suddenly stop and think "cool, looking back, he's done enough good that I can probably forget about the poor decision he made and start looking at this again, because he's proven he isn't that one stupid action."

Goodwill is earned, it's not simply given. It's often hard won, but incredibly easy to lose.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#59

Post by isoprophlex »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools? - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code? - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much abo…

I love writing code, but I don't love searching the docs for the sixtieth time to find the correct combination of brackets, .groupBy's and .agg calls that gets the baroque horrorshow that is python's Pandas lib to wrangle some data for me.

See it as a better autocomplete for people who don't want to or can't learn by diligently doing the boring parts.

Re: Replit's in-browser coding AI

#60

Post by dr_kiszonka »

sdevonoes wrote: post #49

Who's the real target audience of these kind of tools? - Developers who work at a company (e.g., as employee) and need to spit out features every sprint? Velocity is important, so I imagine these kind of developers need to squeeze every minute they are in front of the screen in order to produce working code? - Developers who think of written code as one way to solve (tech) problems, so they don't really care much abo…

For me, not a senior dev, Copilot is useful for: discovering API, generating parts of docstrings, and generating bits of code that don't require too much thinking but go beyond simple copy and paste. It is really quite useful and helps to keep my RSI in check.

My primary UX issue with copilot is that it is trying too hard to be helpful, often suggesting code that I don't need. You also can't trust it with more complex cases but that's actually pretty reassuring : - )

Post reply on HN