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Artificial intelligence is losing hype

economist.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#531

Post by kaoD »

lz400 wrote: post #290

AI is a very strange thing where 2 seemingly smart coders use it and one comes out thinking it's obviously revolutionary and the other one thinking it's a waste of time and where 2 seemingly smart journalists use it and one thinks AGI and the end of the world is nigh and the other one thinks the market will crash when the hype dies over. I think part of it is due to the politically and internet-induced death of nuanc…

> AI is a very strange thing where 2 seemingly smart coders use it and one comes out thinking it's obviously revolutionary and the other one thinking it's a waste of time

My take on this is that those 2 developers are often working on very different tasks.

If you're a very smart coder working in a large codebase with tons of domain knowledge you'll find it's useless.

If you're a very smart coder working in a consultancy and your end result looks like a few thousand lines of glue code, then you're probably going to get a lot out of LLMs.

It's a bit like "software engineering" vs "coding". Current iterations of LLMs is good for "coding" but crap at "software engineering".

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#532

Post by torginus »

mns wrote: post #512
Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Sometime I think there's something wrong with me. I've used copilot, I'm paying for ChatGPT and we're also having the Jetbrains AI, and there's just something so off about all of this. Some basic things are fine, but once you get into specialised things, everything gets just terribly wrong and weird. I can't even put it into words, I see people saying how they are 10x more productive (I'd like to see actual numbers a…

Absolutely the same for me. Whenever I encounter a problem I'm pretty sure nobody else has encountered before (or has not written about it at least), ChatGPT writes complete nonsense.

On stuff that's a bit obscure, but not really (like your Vulkan example), ChatGPT tends to write 60-95% correct code, that's flawed in the exact ways a noob wouldn't be able to fix.

In this case, nicking code from Github seems to fix the issue, even if I need to adapt it a bit.

Then comes the licensing issue. Often, when searching for an obscure topic, the code ChatGPT generates is very close to what's found on Github, but said code often comes with a non-permissive license, unlike what the AI generates.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#534

Post by rcarmo »

anonzzzies wrote: post #448
Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

> but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I work in 9 different projects now and I would say that around 80% of functional code comes from Sonnet (like GP) for these projects. These are not (all) trivial either; there is a very niche (for banking) key/value store written in Go for instance which has a lot of edge cases etc, all the plumbing…

I'd like to see that 3D editor. It's a highly non-trivial thing to do properly.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#535

Post by zaptrem »

arcticbull wrote: post #486
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #469

If anything, i'm getting more hyped up over time. Here are the things i've used LLMs for, with success in all areas as a solo technical founder. Business Advice including marketing, reaching out to investors, understanding SAFE notes (follow up questions after watching the Y Combinator videos), customer interview design. All of which, as an engineer, I had never done before. Create SQL queries for all kinds of busine…

> Helping with challenging code problems that would otherwise need hours of searching google or reading the docs. I'm glad this has been working for you -- generally any time I actually have a really difficult problem, ChatGPT just makes up the API I wish existed. Then when I bring it up to ChatGPT, it just apologizes and invents new API.

I assume it knows the big stuff like the PyTorch API/major JS and React libs then just paste the docs or even impl code for any libs it needs to know beyond that.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#536

Post by torginus »

magicalhippo wrote: post #446
Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

I was skeptical like you, but recently decided to try it out. I wasn't expecting much, and as such I was slightly surprised. For example, just now my NAS stopped working because the boot device went offline. So I got to thinking about writing a simple syslog server. I've never looked at the syslog protocol before, and I've never done any low-level TCP/UDP work in C# yet. So I asked ChatGPT to generate some code[1], a…

This is what the AI is great at - the topics might be obscure to you but they are not that obscure in general, so the AI has had a lot of training data.

I've also assembled a Kubernetes cluster overnight, despite not knowing much about Kubernetes before, and I ran the kubectl files ChatGPT made for me past some devops folks, and it passed the smell test.

I consider much of coding to be a magic spellcasting tutorial - we do conceptually simple things, and the difficult lies in figuring out how to use novel libraries and get them to do what you want.

Edit: After checking out the Arduino sketch, I'd take issue with all the floating point calculations in there - most microcontrollers don't have FPUs, and the performance is awful on 8-bit AVRs. It's not great on Cortex M3s either as all this stuff is done in software, and each FP operation is like a hundred cycles.

I'd definitely try to rephrase the issue with integer math. It might work, but no self-respecting embedded dev would write like this.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#537

Post by pif »

Calavar wrote: post #359
_acco wrote: post #207

AI (specifically Claude Sonnet via Cursor) has completely transformed my workflow. It's changed my job description as a programmer. (And I've been doing this for 13y – no greenhorn!) This wasn't the case with GPT-4/o. This capability is very new. When I spoke to a colleague at Microsoft about these changes, they were floored. Microsoft has made themselves synonymous with AI, yet their company is barely even leveragin…

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

> The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants

If you define "productive" as writing a simple CRUD web application that your 13-year-old cousin could write between two gaming sessions, then you'll consider LLMs as sacred monsters.

Snake oil vendors always had great appeal over people who didn't know better.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#538

Post by usrnm »

darkerside wrote: post #396
Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

I'm guessing AI won't be great with anything nontrivial related to pointers for a while since they require actual thinking

At least, we can hope that AI will master pointers one day. For people it's completely hopeless

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#539

Post by zaptrem »

Jensson wrote: post #507
chromanoid wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you provide code examples? In my experience the more specific you get with your problem the more specific are the provided solutions (probably a "natural" occurence in LLMs). Hallucianted APIs are sometimes a problem for me, but then I just specify which API to use.

Why do you need an LLM if you know what you want it to do? Just write the code rather than wrangling with the LLM, it isn't like writing code take much time when you know what it should do.

Not op but my response: Because I am lazy and would like to save the 1-5 minutes it would take me to actually write it. When there are dozens of these small things a day the saved time really adds.

Re: Artificial intelligence is losing hype

#540

Post by cess11 »

mns wrote: post #512
Calavar wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I'm living in a different universe sometimes. The consensus on HN seems to be that you can be pretty productive with LLMs as coding assistants, but every time I try I find it borderline impossible to get functional code even for pretty straightforward prompts. I decided to fire up GPT-4o again today to see if maybe things have gotten better over the past few months. I asked GPT to write code to render a t…

Sometime I think there's something wrong with me. I've used copilot, I'm paying for ChatGPT and we're also having the Jetbrains AI, and there's just something so off about all of this. Some basic things are fine, but once you get into specialised things, everything gets just terribly wrong and weird. I can't even put it into words, I see people saying how they are 10x more productive (I'd like to see actual numbers a…

Having spent a couple of hours with some llama models and others I've given up on them for code. Code generation from XML or grinding it out ad hoc with stuff like sed on top of a data or config file is faster and more convenient for me.

The Jetbrains thing is rather rudely incompetent, it consistently insists on suggestions that use variables and fragments that are supposed to be replaced by what I'm writing and also much more complex than what I actually need. I suffered through at least a hundred mistaken tabbed out shitty suggestions before I disconnected it.

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