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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

#501

Post by ummonk »

SanderNL wrote: post #258
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a polymath is generally very advantageous.

In this AI age I'm seeing it coming to fruition. Fullstacks have (IMO) more potential now than narrow specialists because they can now get away with high-level remarks and letting the AI fill in the details.

Yeah I’d say more specifically that general first principles understanding of different areas and the ability to think about systems / architecture / general logic is very useful.

Unlike traditional polymaths, detailed knowledge / familiarity with APIs and libraries is less needed.

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

#502

Post by throwaway689236 »

ihatepython wrote: post #60
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 many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus? I couldn't agree more. I work as a software engineer in the medical field (think MRI's, X-rays, that sort of thing). I've started using ChatGPT all the time to write the code, and then I just fix it up a bit. So far it's working great!

Are you using ChatGPT Plus?

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

#503

Post by cutemonster »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #445
zikduruqe wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragedy is for those that feel and comedy is for those that think.

Perhaps you're making a point (that eludes me, BTW) by writing clever sounding twaddle. I hope so.

At least we can conclude: Dark humor is for those who both feel and think

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

#504

Post by the_cramer »

manicennui wrote: post #484
tinyprojects wrote: post #188

100% this. I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix. The day before I bu…

How is it possible that any task could take a week or more with this library? It looks extremely straightforward and the documentation contains lots of examples.

Not sure what your background is, but in my experience, some tinkering takes ages. Some tasks you deem to be a lot of work are relatively fast in the end. And some tasks produce errors that send you on a journey for hours. Straight forward looks and good docs may not help here.

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

#505

Post by barking_biscuit »

zikduruqe wrote: post #399
doitLP wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember, existence is pain to a Meeseeks. So treat your AI with care!

I should ask ChatGPT if it can take 2 strokes off my game.

What's awesome is we can now watch interdimensional cable through text-to-video too :P

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

#506

Post by [deleted] »

ren_engineer wrote: post #410
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#507

Post by pknerd »

Grimburger wrote: post #366
pknerd wrote: post #363

Off topic: it'd be interesting to know whether chatGPT decreased the traffic of stack overflow?

Anecdotally, I've avoided quora as much as possible when clicking but was pleasantly surprised the last time I did, they offered an LLM answer over the top human one which seemed reasonable enough to give an overview of the matter without bias.

You can always exclude quora or any other website by writing "Search Word" - quora

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

#508

Post by andreasley »

acadapter wrote: post #367
andreasley wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Humor is a very sophisticated form of communication. Think of how much was said in so few words, by just poking at shared common knowledge.

Humor is fine, but when several readers don't recognize it as such, the joke obviously isn't based on shared common knowledge. Some people walk away with wrong information, and that isn't helpful.

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

#509

Post by andreasley »

xwdv wrote: post #432
andreasley wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, but is it a good thing to separate people into groups? How does that help?

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

#510

Post by mthoms »

eloff wrote: post #335
Aeolun wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot step in one of those machines without wondering if there is a hardware cutoff.

I went with a mechanic in a chair lift once. He was very nervous, saying he knows the kind of people who maintain these things, and he knows the kinds of things that can go wrong. I feel the same way about automation, whether it be self driving cars or an X-ray machine. I know the kind of people that program them, and the vast number of ways things can go wrong.

>he knows the kinds of things that can go wrong

Sounds like he didn't know nearly as much as he thought. Chairlifts are remarkably safe.

https://newtoski.com/are-chairlifts-safe/

I get the point you're making though.

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