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Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#51

Post by nickjj »

I like how the emphasis is on coders here because one of the article's headers of "Clear and Precise Conversations Are Key" is important.

I think this is why it will be a long time before the general masses will be able to take advantage of AI to solve general problems. Most people haven't built up a human skill level of being able to explain their problem in a clear way to another human.

Imagine if you have no other context about the problem below other than these 2 prompts. Both of them are describing the same problem which is related to entering in orders with a point of sale system. Assume that you're talking to a human doing phone support for the company that provided you the hardware:

- My orders aren't coming up at the register

- I have 2 devices to take orders, when I manually place orders into the one hanging on the wall (ID: "Wall") it doesn't show up in the list of orders at the register (ID: "Register") but when I manually place an order at the register it does sync up at the wall

The first prompt is typically what a non-technical business owner may say over the phone when trying to get support. The second prompt is what someone who has experience describing problems might say even if they have no experience with the hardware other than spending 2 minutes identifying what each device is and chatting with the business owner to understand the real root problem is one of the devices isn't pushing its orders to the other device.

The 2nd one could become more precise too, but the context here is you're speaking with another human who works for the company that provides you the hardware and service so there's a lot of information you can expect they have on hand which can be left unsaid. They also have various technical specs about each device since they know your account.

It would take many follow up questions from a human to get the same information if you only provided the first question. I wish a general AI tool good luck to extract that information out when the direct person with the problem can barely type on their phone and doesn't have a laptop or personal computer.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#52

Post by jmiskovic »

medler wrote: post #15

I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…

"Very tedious without it" doesn't sound like just 5% improvement?

I've started developing in a new language and I can hardly do any work without the LLM assistance, the friction is just too high. Even when auto-competitions are completely wrong they still get the ball rolling, it's so much easier to fix the nicely formatted code than to write from scratch. In my case the improvement is vast, a difference from slacking off and actually being productive.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#53

Post by arrowsmith »

medler wrote: post #15

I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…

I find it increases my productivity about 5-10% when working with the technologies I'm the most familiar with and use regularly (Elixir, Phoenix, JavaScript, general web dev.) But when I'm doing something unfamiliar and new, it's more like 90%. It's incredible.

Recently at work, for example, I've been setting up a bunch of stuff with some new technologies and libraries that I'd never really used before. Without ChatGPT I'd have spent hours if not days poring through tedious documentation and outdated tutorials while trying to hack something together in an agonising process of trial and error. But ChatGPT gave me a fantastic proof-of-concept app that has everything I needed to get started. It's been enormously helpful and I'm convinced it saved me days of work. This technology is miraculous.

As for my job security... well, I think I'm safe for now; ChatGPT sped me up in this instance but the generated app still needs a skilled programmer to edit it, test it and deploy it.

On the other hand I am slightly concerned that ChatGPT will destroy my side income from selling programming courses... so if you're a Rails developer who wants to learn Elixir and Phoenix, please check out my course Phoenix on Rails before we're both replaced by robots: PhoenixOnRails.com

(Sorry for the self promotion but the code ELIXIRFORUM will give a $10 discount.)

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#54

Post by dave333 »

Occurs to me as a retired 69 year old former coder that AI makes us old geezers and geezesses somewhat competitive again with our younger colleagues. Need to learn yet another new framework? Let AI do the nitty gritty bit. Capitalize on your experience and higher level know how.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#55

Post by dave333 »

medler wrote: post #15

I use LLM-based autocomplete in my IDE, and it’s not taking away my job unless/until it improves by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s good at filling in boilerplate, but even for that I have to carefully check its output because it can make little errors even when I feel like what I want should be obvious. The article is absolutely correct in saying you have to be critical of its output. I would say it improves my p…

Best way to check LLM output is to make it write its own tests and do TDD. Obviously someone has to check the tests but that is a 1% of the effort problem.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#56

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

Kiro wrote: post #10
DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These things are a matter of writing a correct prompt. No, they aren't. ChatGPT doesn't know things. It's just a very fancy predictive text engine. For any given prompt, it will provide a response that is engineered to sound authoritative, regardless of whether any information is correct. It will summon case law out of the aether when prompted by a lawyer; it will conjure paper titles and author names from thin air…

Read the next sentence after your quote. The point is that you should include code and examples in your prompt (Copilot is so good since it includes the surrounding code and open files in the prompt to understand your specific context), not that you should craft an exceptional "act as rockstar engineer" prompt.

I did read it, but the whole premise is flawed due to an apparently incomplete understanding of how LLMs work. Including code samples in your prompt won't have the effect you think it will.

LLMs are trained to produce results that are statistically likely to be syntactically well-formed according to assumptions made about how "language" works. So when you provide code samples, the model incorporates those into the response. But it doesn't have any actually comprehension of what's going on in those code samples, or what any code "means"; it's all just pushing syntax around. So what happens is you end up with responses that are more likely to look like what you want, but there's no guarantee or even necessarily a correlation that the tuned responses will actually produce meaningfully good code. This increases the odds of a bug slipping by because, at a glance, it looked correct.

Until LLMs can generate code with proofs of semantic meaning, I don't think it's a good idea to trust them. You're welcome to do as you please, of course, but I would never use them for anything I work on.

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#58

Post by ewuhic »

This article touches on llms for mostly code generation, I however would be more interested in visuals.

What are the good resources to learn about image editing AI tools, prompts and techniques?

My understanding is pretty limited, and correct me if I'm wrong, but like one would be using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, and for a "professional" tool - Photoshop with official AI plug-ins?

Re: Tips for programmers to stay ahead of generative AI

#60

Post by Animats »

Survival may require getting out of the mainstream. LLMs are going to get really good at stuff that's been done thousands of times and they can train on that data. Like web front end work.

If you're doing industrial embedded work and have an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer on your desk, and spend part of your time going into the plant and working directly with the machinery, you're in better shape.

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