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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a stab at changing your mind. AIs are not able to write Redis. That's not their job. AIs should not write complex high performance code that millions of users rely on. If the code does something valuable for a large number of people you can afford humans to write it. AIs should write low value code that just repeats what's been done before but with some variations. Generic parts of CRUD apps, some fraction…

I have to disagree. If there’s that much boilerplate floating around then the tooling should be improved. Pasting over inefficiency with sloppier inefficiency is just a pure waste.

It's not boilerplate, it's just uncomplicated but necessary specifications.

AI is the improved tooling.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#522
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'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 curious coming from the other end. I guess I can totally understand certain use cases where I'm generating fairly simple, self contained code in a language I'm unfamiliar with being good.

But surely you must have experienced something where you're literally fighting with the model, where it continuously repeats its mistakes, and fixing a mistake in one place, breaks something else, and you can't seem to escape this loop. You then get desperate, invoking magic phrases like "you think through your problems step by step", or "you are a senior developer", only for it to loose the entire thread of the conversation.

Then the worst part is when you finally give up, your mental state of the problem is no better than when you first started off.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#523
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 used Jetbrains' AI Assistant for a while and I made the mistake of trusting some of its code, which introduced bugs and slowed me down to double-check a lot of the boilerplate I had it write for me.

Really not worth it for me at this point.

I must add that I found Anthropic's Claude quite useful (Sonnet 3.5) when I had to work on a legacy code base using Adobe ColdFusion (*vomit). I knew nothing of Coldfusion or the awful code base, and it helped me figure out a lot of things about Coldfusion without having to spend too much energy on learning and generating code for a framework I will never again use. I still had to make some updates to the code, but it was less cognitive effort that having to read docs and spend time Googling.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You. Can. Write. Tests.

How do tests account for cases where I'm looking at a 100 line function that could have easily been written in 20 lines with just as much, if not more, clarity? It reminds me of a time (long ago) when the trend/fad was building applications visually. You would drag and drop UI elements and define logic using GUIs. Behind the scenes the IDE would generate code that linked everything together. One of the selling points…

Sure but you go fast on the simple parts it's good at and slow on the novel/critical part. It's not that hard to understand. You don't drive at top speed everywhere either. You go slower depending on the context.

The real problem with AI coding is not knowing in advance the cases where it's going to spin its wheels and go in a cycle of stupid answers. I lose 20 minutes at a time that way because it seems like it needs just one more prompt, but in the end I have to step in, either with code or telling it specifically where the bug is.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#525
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,…

> cursor and its tab completion

If this is how you use Cursor then you dont need Cursor. Autocomplete has existed even before AI, but Cursor's selling point is in multi-files editing and a sensible workflow that let users iterate through diffs in the UI.

I have never used AI to generate code, only to edit. I can see it useful in both, and we should look at all usecases of AI instead of looking at it as glorified autocomplete.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#526
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do tests account for cases where I'm looking at a 100 line function that could have easily been written in 20 lines with just as much, if not more, clarity? If the function is fast to evaluate and you have thorough coverage by tests, you couod iterate on an LLMs that aims to compress it down to a simpler / shorter version that behaves identical to the original function. Of course brevity for the sake of brevity…

Finally found a comment down here that I like. I'm also with the notion of tests and also iterating until you get to a solution you like. I also don't see anything particularly "terrifying" that many other comments suggest. At the end of the day, we're engineers that write complex symbols on a 2d canvas, for something that is (ultimately, even if the code being written is machine to machine or something) used for som…

I'm sure people who are "terrified" either haven't really tried AI or are so attached to their intellect their egos won't allow them to admit that there's little value now in a lot of the stuff they've memorised over the last few years.

I think this egoic threat is the biggest influence on this kind of thinking tbh.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#527

Interestingly GitHub (a Microsoft entity) will use Amazon Bedrock to run Claude Sonnet. > Claude 3.5 Sonnet runs on GitHub Copilot via Amazon Bedrock, leveraging Bedrock’s cross-region inference to further enhance reliability. [1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/github-copilot

They probably need enterprise level support for regional regulations like gdpr. Especially for their enterprise customers.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#528

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.

Claude is good, openai shit?

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#529
post #55
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Claude consistently impresses me. A commenter on another thread mentioned it but it’s very similar to how search felt in the early 2000s. I ask it a question and get my answer. Sometimes it’s a little (or a lot) wrong or outdated, but at least I get something to tinker with.

Conversely I feel that the experience of searching has been degraded by a lot since 2016/17. My these is that, at this time, online spam increased by an order of magnitude

Queries were rewritten with BERT starting even before then so it's still the same generative model problem.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#530
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like you’ve had success using this tech for work. Can you tell more about your personal experience, please? I’ve tried ChatGPT a few times a year ago or so, but it was extremely frustrating, and I gave up.

Here's my "How I use LLMs and ChatGPT" series: https://simonwillison.net/series/using-llms/ Also relevant is my ai-assisted-programming tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

These examples are not much different than tutorial regurgitation imo. I would not pass this off as solving the problems that programmers have in practice, imo.
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