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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#511

Post by willtemperley »

thih9 wrote: post #221

I 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've found explaining boilerplate code to Claude or ChatGPT has been very worthwhile, the boring code gets written and the prompt is the documentation.

OTOH tab completion in Intellij and Xcode has been useful occasionally, usually distracting and sometimes annoying. A way to fast toggle this would be good, but when I know what I want to code, good old code completion works nicely thanks.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#512

Post by jkestner »

abadpoli wrote: post #459
balder1991 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This presumes that it will be real humans that have to “take care” of the code later. A lot of the people that are hawking AI, especially in management, are chasing a future where there are no humans, because AI writes the code and maintains the code, no pesky expensive humans needed. And AI won’t object to things like bad code style or low quality code.

All you got to do is write the unit tests and let the AI evolve the code, right??

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#514

Post by mikeshi42 »

scubbo wrote: post #479
dools wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Me reviewing AI code is no different from me reviewing anyone else's code. I take your point, and on the whole I agree with your post, but this point is fundamentally _not_ correct, in that if I have a question about someone else's code I can ask them about their intention, state-of-mind, and understanding at the time they wrote it, and (subjectively, sure; but I think this is a reasonable claim) can _usually_ dete…

I'm assuming by bullshitting you mean differentiating between LLM hallucinations and a human with low confidence in their code.

I've found that LLMs do sometimes acknowledge hallucinations. But really the check is much easier than a PR/questioning an author - just run the code given by the copilot and check that it works, just as if you typed it yourself.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#515

Post by Tiktaalik »

ehnto wrote: post #433
sbarre wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on the stakes of what you're building. A lot of the concerns you describe make me think you work in a larger company or team and so both the organizational stakes (maintenance, future changes, tech debt, other people taking it over) and the functional stakes (bug free, performant, secure, etc) are high? If the person you're responding to is cranking out a personal SaaS project or something they won…

I am quite interested in how LLMs would handle game development. Coming to game development from a long career in boutique applications and also enterprise software, game development is a whole different level of "boutique". I think both because of the coupled, convoluted complexity of much game logic, and because there are fewer open source examples of novel game code available to train on, they may struggle to be a…

Yeah I think the lack of game code available to train on could be a problem. There's a fair amount of "black art" type problems in games too that a LLM may struggle with just because there's not a lot to go on.

Additionally the problems of custom engines and game specific patterns.

That being said there's parts of games with boilerplate code like any application. In a past game as I was finishing it up some of this AI stuff was first becoming useable and I experimented with generating some boilerplate classes with high level descriptions of what I wanted and it did a pretty decent job.

I think some of the most significant productivity gains for games is going to be less on the code side and more in the technical art space.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#516

Post by downrightmike »

mnau wrote: post #225
lofaszvanitt wrote: post #184

Thank you people for contributing to this free software ecosystem. Oh, you can't monetize your work? Your problem, not ours! Deals are made, but you, who provide your free code, we have zero monetization options for you on our github platform. Go pay for copilot which was trained on your data. I mean, this is the worst farce ever concocted. And people are oblivious what's happening...

We are not oblivious. We are powerless. Oracle could go toe to toe with Google and threaten multibillion fines over basically API and 11kLOC. As a open source developer, there is no way to match that.

That's a monopoly

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#518

Post by faangguyindia »

thih9 wrote: post #221

I 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,…

Zed AI is much better than cursor I've found.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#519

Post by chii »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #475
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…

Reading this comment is like listening to Tesla in 2014 tell me about how their cars will be driving themselves. Give it 10 years.

humans greatly over estimate trends short-term, and greatly under estimate it long-term .

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#520

Post by patrickk »

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.

English and German are EU languages. Russian is not.

The EU maintains a large translation service to translate most EU official texts into all EU languages. So Google Translate is using that to train on. Google gets a free gift from a multinational bureaucracy and gets to look like a smart company in the process.

This is also why English-Mandarin is often poorly translated, in my opinion.

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