Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

StableCode

stability.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: StableCode

#61

Post by vineyardmike »

Uptrenda wrote: post #52

> People of every background will soon be able to create code to solve their everyday problems and improve their lives using AI, and we’d like to help make this happen Yeah, this is not going to happen. Anyone who has ever tried to gather requirements for software knows that users don't know what they want (clients especially lmao.) The language they use won't be detailed enough to create anything meaningful. Do you…

> These tools are all annoying AF. Developers don't need half-baked hints to write basic statements and regular people don't have the skills to hobble together whatever permutations these things spit out. Which rather begs the question: who the hell is the audience for this?

On the contrary: developers are exactly the people capable of handling those complex requirements you speak of. As a developer, getting a computer to handle basic statements is great and frees you to handle the big stuff.

Being able to write “// Retrieves second value from path” and have the computer spit out some string parsing method is great. All those little helper methods that showily fill up projects are great candidates for an AI. Especially if it helps you break up code into smaller, more composable (and disposable) chunks. If an AI writes the code, and can easily do it again, maybe people would be more willing to delete stuff that isn’t needed.

Re: StableCode

#62

Post by layoric »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #48
miohtama wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model, source, etc. are available under permissive terms https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stablecode-instruct-alpha... You can “run it locally”. Very handy if you do not trust automatically sending all your code to someone in the United States.

Hmmm... so on that hugging face page there's a text box where you enter input then you click the 'compute' button. So I asked it to "Write a python function that computes the square of the input number." And it responds with: def square(x): Which seems quite underwhelming.

I believe that is more related to how the default Huggingface inference UI is prompting. Running locally with the correct prompt template it gives default completes, eg

``` def square(x): return x*x ```

Re: StableCode

#63

Post by pylua »

smoldesu wrote: post #58
pylua wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s about giving the domain experts who understand what the requirements should be a way to build something without having to have the domain knowledge of code.

I think the problem with that is the same reason why "no code" platforms struggle to succeed. Writing software without understanding control flow or libraries or APIs is practically impossible. Instead of being a liberating experience like it should be, it becomes a confining and frustrating one where you don't understand what is and isn't possible. LLMs will work really well when developers know what they want and h…

That is true. I have seen this first hand with bpmn tools such as camunda, where the analysts simply cannot wrap their head around it.

However, over time you will need to describe less and less of the code for a large majority of use cases. I expect Generative AI will be able to take more generic prompts based on a specific vendor and really generate more with less prompting given context of whatever you are targeting. Ie azure , camunda, etc

Re: StableCode

#64

Post by cutler »

smcleod wrote: post #49
cutler wrote: post #34

Yet another site whose data privacy policy amounts to nothing more than an Accept button. Refuse to use such sites.

Use uBlock Origin and then you won't have to see them ;)

But won't that just default you to agreeing to whatever.

Re: StableCode

#65

Post by smcleod »

cutler wrote: post #64
smcleod wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use uBlock Origin and then you won't have to see them ;)

But won't that just default you to agreeing to whatever.

The ublock cookie ones will decline if it’s possible I believe. IANAL but I doubt that most of the things that pop up websites, get you to agree to would really hold up in court unless they had evidence that you specifically agreed to something. From what I’ve seen most of them are like it or lump it where if you don’t agree, they exit you from the website anyway.

Re: StableCode

#66

Post by abi »

Uptrenda wrote: post #52

> People of every background will soon be able to create code to solve their everyday problems and improve their lives using AI, and we’d like to help make this happen Yeah, this is not going to happen. Anyone who has ever tried to gather requirements for software knows that users don't know what they want (clients especially lmao.) The language they use won't be detailed enough to create anything meaningful. Do you…

You're missing the point: Natural language can be much a higher layer of abstraction than the programming languages we currently have. It's much faster to say "Add a button to download the output as a PDF" than write JS directly.

You'd be surprised by what regular people can build when you give them the power to create software. Here are a bunch of apps created using my tool/GPT-4: https://showcase.picoapps.xyz Most of our users have never coded before, and are able to build small tools to make their and their customers' lives better.

Re: StableCode

#67

Post by chrisnight »

Uptrenda wrote: post #52

> People of every background will soon be able to create code to solve their everyday problems and improve their lives using AI, and we’d like to help make this happen Yeah, this is not going to happen. Anyone who has ever tried to gather requirements for software knows that users don't know what they want (clients especially lmao.) The language they use won't be detailed enough to create anything meaningful. Do you…

Additional idea for why this won't be used as much as they hope: Creating the software is just one part of the entire process of utilizing software. Small scripts actually could be possible to be written by AI, but actually using them could turn up challenging for normal users.

Anyone who has setup a coding project knows that actually creating the project structure, setting up dependencies, build scripts, making the code compile/be interpreted are all problems that can have extremely obscure, frustrating errors, and they happen before you even start coding.

Then, not to mention, deploying the software. Even if you give someone code, they won't immediately know how to run it. End users get worried at the idea of opening a terminal and running a command in it, no matter how easy it is. Not to mention setting up the software to do so. (Is the right Python version even installed?)

As such, even if an AI could write a perfect script in code from standard text to, say, lowercase all of the words in a document, it would still be hard for non-developers to use because of the surrounding knowledge barrier, outside of the code itself. Although, yeah, it would be easier.

Re: StableCode

#68

Post by pphysch »

abi wrote: post #66
Uptrenda wrote: post #52

> People of every background will soon be able to create code to solve their everyday problems and improve their lives using AI, and we’d like to help make this happen Yeah, this is not going to happen. Anyone who has ever tried to gather requirements for software knows that users don't know what they want (clients especially lmao.) The language they use won't be detailed enough to create anything meaningful. Do you…

You're missing the point: Natural language can be much a higher layer of abstraction than the programming languages we currently have. It's much faster to say "Add a button to download the output as a PDF" than write JS directly. You'd be surprised by what regular people can build when you give them the power to create software. Here are a bunch of apps created using my tool/GPT-4: https://showcase.picoapps.xyz Most…

Sure, they can "build" it, but can they maintain it? Can they only add more layers of mud? How do you refactor the statement "Add a button to download the output as a PDF"?

That's not a replacement for software engineering.

Re: StableCode

#69

Post by whimsicalism »

> ~120,000 code instruction/response pairs in Alpaca format were trained on the base model to achieve this result.

Very curious where they are getting this data from. In other open source papers, usually this comes from a GPT-4 output, but presumably Stability would not do that?

Re: StableCode

#70

Post by abi »

pphysch wrote: post #68
abi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the point: Natural language can be much a higher layer of abstraction than the programming languages we currently have. It's much faster to say "Add a button to download the output as a PDF" than write JS directly. You'd be surprised by what regular people can build when you give them the power to create software. Here are a bunch of apps created using my tool/GPT-4: https://showcase.picoapps.xyz Most…

Sure, they can "build" it, but can they maintain it? Can they only add more layers of mud? How do you refactor the statement "Add a button to download the output as a PDF"? That's not a replacement for software engineering.

What's hard about refactoring it? I sorta get the point you're trying to make, but codegen models generate code, but they also understand and explain code very well in plain language. I believe domain experts are smart enough to solve the problems that crop up and maintain their code with help from AI.
Post reply on HN