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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#591

Post by DeathArrow »

hi_hi wrote: post #496

Every single one of these discussion, at some point, devolves to some version of - is by far the best. In my extensive usage it is consistently outperforms by at least 2x. The difference is night and day. Then the immediate child reply: - What!? You must be holding it wrong. The complete inverse is true for me. I don't know what to make of this contradiction. We're all using the same 2 things right? How can opinions…

There are tests for LLMs coding capabilities.

However, unless one is severely worse, I don't think LLM choice matters much, but how well the tool that uses LLM is thought.

So it's not Claude vs Chat GPT vs Llama vs Qwen vs Deepseek but Copilot vs Clide vs Cursor vs Aider.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#592

Post by hi_hi »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #579
hi_hi wrote: post #496

Every single one of these discussion, at some point, devolves to some version of - is by far the best. In my extensive usage it is consistently outperforms by at least 2x. The difference is night and day. Then the immediate child reply: - What!? You must be holding it wrong. The complete inverse is true for me. I don't know what to make of this contradiction. We're all using the same 2 things right? How can opinions…

Most of the LLM quality discussions have a shelf life measured in weeks. The companies involved are leap frogging each other with model updates and tweaks every few weeks. Try it yourself. I'm getting a lot of value out of just using chat gpt for coding. It's not without flaws. But I can get it to do a lot of routine stuff quite quickly. What I like about the desktop client is that a prompt is just one alt+space away…

Personally I've been getting great results from Claude. I was initially using chatGPT, but now I'm finding Cursor + Claude to be a good fit.

And no, I'm not taking the alternative view to you just to prove my point haha.

I feel like AI is ripe for a tabs vs spaces moment. If only Silicon Valley (the show) was still around. The material would practically...write itself...

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#594

Post by lugu »

It feels like the Samsung tactic which consist of flawding their competitor with order requests to prevent them from developing their product only to stop commands afterward and put them in financial difficulties. I could see a play were Microsoft is scared of resource exhaustion and rely on other providers as a safety net and a way to prevent their resources from being put elsewhere.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#595

Post by lljk_kennedy »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #329
ianbutler wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

It's like worrying about moving bits on a hard drive, or writing nice machine code. Eventually you just won't care. AI / LLMs interacting with code bases in future won't care about structure, clearness, conciseness etc. They'll tokenize it all the same.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#596

Post by Tainnor »

ianbutler wrote: post #311
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'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've created new apps from scratch with it.

I don't think that "creating new apps from scratch" should be the benchmark. Unless you're doing something very novel, creating a new app/service is rather formulaic. Many frameworks even have templates / generators for that sort of thing. LLMs are maybe just better generators - which is not useless, but it's not where the real complexity of software development lies.

The success stories I am looking for are things like "I migrated a Java 6 codebase with a legacy app server to Java 21", "I ripped out this unsupported library across the project and replaced it with a better one" or "I refactored the codebase so that the database access is in its own layer". If LLMs can do those tasks reliably, then I'll have another look.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#598

Post by nowahe »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #579
hi_hi wrote: post #496

Every single one of these discussion, at some point, devolves to some version of - is by far the best. In my extensive usage it is consistently outperforms by at least 2x. The difference is night and day. Then the immediate child reply: - What!? You must be holding it wrong. The complete inverse is true for me. I don't know what to make of this contradiction. We're all using the same 2 things right? How can opinions…

Most of the LLM quality discussions have a shelf life measured in weeks. The companies involved are leap frogging each other with model updates and tweaks every few weeks. Try it yourself. I'm getting a lot of value out of just using chat gpt for coding. It's not without flaws. But I can get it to do a lot of routine stuff quite quickly. What I like about the desktop client is that a prompt is just one alt+space away…

I also found that passing all the codebase in a single file in the context works really well. I've tried Cursor et al, but I found that it not having the full context of the codebase (and having to do some back and forth for it to requests files) was slower and didn't really yield any better results. Granted I work on projects where the codebase fit in 100-200kb text files, but I'm still only at 20% of the context limit in Claude.

Also I found the UX of Claude to be better for this, especially their Projects feature. I can just put the codebase in the Project's context, and start a new conversation to ask different questions/solve different problems.

The only pain point I have is that it seems to be pretty optimized to only show changes in existing files, not rewriting them in full, which is a bit of a pain to copy-paste into my IDE. I'll see if I can write out a system prompt to force it to generate diff or a similar format that could more easily be applied automatically to my code.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#599

Post by kmacdough »

mergisi wrote: post #593

[dead]

I'm torn. The rise of python did massively increase the accessibility of programming, but it simultaneously tied much of the industry to one of the most poorly designed languages still in use. Simultaneously, the low barrier has created an ecosystem of poorly designed, yet de-facto packages. I'm not convinced it sped up long term progress, even if there's a lot more "code" out there.

I worry AI will do the same. Even less thoughtful programmers will beat the community to this or that package, quickly get taken up, leaving ever more tenacious code tumors.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#600

Post by Tainnor »

hansonkd wrote: post #367
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer of over 20 years - this is terrifying. I'm willing to accept that I just have "get off my lawn" syndrome or something. But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible. Whenever I sit down to write some code, be it a large implementation or a small function, I think about what other people (or future versions of myself) will struggle with when interactin…

> 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…

You don't even have to go back in time or use a comparatively rare language pair such as English/Russian.

Google Reviews insists on auto translating reviews to your native language (thankfully, the original review can be recovered by clicking a link). Even for English->German (probably one of the most common language pairs), the translations are usually so poor that you can't always tell what the review is trying to say. To be fair, I think that state of the art machine translation is better than whatever the hell Google is using here (google translate probably), but apparently product people at Google don't care enough to make translations better (or better, allow you to turn off this feature).

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