Live data from Hacker News

What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

vishnumenon.com

61–70 of 219 posts

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#61
post #55
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like such a jerk for not wanting to use chatgpt for all that. It's not just mild paranoia about feeding it input I prefer be kept private but I just don't enjoy having someone else do half the thinking for me I guess. I mean, I don't like intellisense either (but simple autocomplete is fine). Perhaps it is because I only code to help with my job, I don't get paid to have a lot of good quality code output.

Don't beat yourself up. As a mathematically-oriented software engineer I also have little to no interest in using LLMs to help with coding. It feels like the people that do are the builders, i.e. interested in quickly knocking up something that works most of the time. Which is great from a business perspective. I can't help but see my programming output as an artistic expression of my thought, and therefore find it d…

Mathematically oriented software engineers have the most to benefit off of software assistance due to algebraic designs.

As one myself LLMs don't feel like giving up control it feels like collaboration. You probably don't like collaboration.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#62
post #10

9/10 requests for a simple sql query get a working query. This isn't enough to enable a useful interface. It takes a lot of scaffolding to get an llm powered interface to actually work.

You might be interested in another way to use LLMs inside a SQL query. For example, LLMs can be used to power a "soft join" between SQL tables for when a correspondence is only implied (e.g. different address formats, etc.).

More details here: https://medium.com/evadb-blog/augmenting-postgresql-with-ai-...

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#63

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

I had similar success when trying to solve problems with Makefiles.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#64
Nice writeup! Here is another example of using LLMs is to augmenting existing software that we are exploring -- specifically SQL database systems. We are using LLMs inside a SQL query to power a "soft join" between SQL tables for when a correspondence is only implied (e.g. different address formats, etc.).

   --- Create a reference table that maps neighborhoods to zipcodes using ChatGPT
   CREATE TABLE reference_table AS
   SELECT parkname, parktype, 
          ChatGPT(
          "Return the San Francisco neighborhood name when provided with a zipcode. The 
   possible neighborhoods are: {neighbourhoods_str}. The response should an item from the 
   provided list. Do not add any more words.",
       zipcode) 
   FROM postgres_db.recreational_park_dataset;


   --- Map Airbnb listings to park
   SELECT airbnb_listing.neighbourhood
   FROM postgres_db.airbnb_listing
     JOIN reference_table ON airbnb_listing.neighbourhood = reference_table.response;
More details on LLM-powered joins and EvaDB: https://medium.com/evadb-blog/augmenting-postgresql-with-ai-..., https://github.com/georgia-tech-db/evadb

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#65
The modern internet and modern app experience has become so shitty. For example opening up Robinhood, transferring money from a bank account, and buying a stock is hidden behind a multitude of product driven dark patterns that turns what should be a low cognitive load task into a high cognitive load task. This is true for everything now days.

I predict llm based agents will be used as a 3rd party layer on top of the modern web to work in users favor against enshitification.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#66

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

No one uses it to generate code. Really. Talk to people who actually use it and listen to what they say… they use it to help them write code.

If you try to generate code, you’ll find it underwhelming, and frankly, quite rubbish.

However, if you want an example of what I’ve seen multiple people do:

1) open your code in window a

2) open chatgpt in window b (side by side)

3) you write code.

4) when you get stuck, have a question, need advice, need to resolve an error, ask chatgpt instead of searching and finding a stack overflow answer (or whatever).

You’ll find that it’s better at answering easy questions, translating from x to y, giving high level advice (eg. Code structure, high level steps) and suggesting solutions to errors. It can generally make trivial code snippets like “how do I map x to y” or “how do I find this as a regex in xxx”.

If this looks a lot like the sort of question someone learning a new language might ask, you’d be right. That’s where a lot of people are finding a lot of value in it.

I used this approach to learn kotlin and write an IntelliJ plugin.

…but, until there’s another breakthrough (eg. Latent diffusion for text models?) you’re probably going to get limited value from chatgpt unless you’re asking easy questions, or working in a higher level framework. Copy pasting into the text box will give you results that are exactly as you’ve experienced.

(High level framework, for example, chain of thought, code validation, n-shot code generation and tests / metrics to pick the best generated code. It’s not that you cant generate complex code, but naively pasting into chat.openai.com will not, ever, do it)

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#67
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of an aside, but I wonder if the rise of LLMs will lead to new programming languages being much slower to be adopted. Like you said, you might have given up on F# without ChatGPT assistance, and the main way ChatGPT is able to help with F# is because of all of the example code it's been trained on. If developers rely more and more on LLM aid, then a new language without strong LLM support might be a dealbreaker t…

I've also wondered this - including if we might see a breed of 'higher level' languages (i.e. much higher level than Python) which can then be 'AI compiled' into highly efficient low level code. i.e. the advantages of an even-higher-level python that's almost like pseudo-code with assembly-level speed and rust-level safety, where some complexity can be abstracted out to the LLM.

I disagree. Chatgpt is helpful here because f# is a paradigm shift for this otherwise experienced programmer. The programmer probably knows juuussstt enough f# to guide the llm.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#68

> Even if an LLM could provide me with a recipe that perfectly suits what I’m looking for, I wouldn’t want to give up the experience of using a recipe search engine and browsing through a large collection of recipes. Even if an LLM could provide me with restaurant recommendations based on my preferences, I’d still seek out a map-based UX for exploring the variety present in my vicinity. The desire to replace all UX w…

We wrote about Jane using Particlesy Retrieval-Augmented-Generation platform to create and share Recipe chatbots with her friends - https://www.particlesy.com/2023/07/25/rag-in-the-kitchen-jan...

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#69
post #42

I was hoping for some clever ideas about direction of software / UIs, and new use-cases for LLMs / AI, since for now I'm still struggling and have a lack of vision, it seems. For example, I work on developing a logistics management and route optimization platform. If I try to envision new features that could be unlocked through AI or just LLMs, I basically get nothing back from my feeble brain, that I would fit into…

Can LLMs help in cleaning up the logistics database -- like handling different variants of an address? Here is an example: https://medium.com/evadb-blog/augmenting-postgresql-with-ai-....

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really good stuff, but some minor things: your url doesn't work; went to your twitter profile, and it seems you meant https://chatcraft.org ? Also, you are un-dm-able on twitter. (I am @eating_entropy if you want to talk more)

that's the right link :) would be great to chat on discord https://discord.gg/JsVe9ZuZCn (updated discord link)

The discord link seems to be not working. Just a heads up.

The YOLO example on your Github page is super interesting. We are finding it easier to get LLMs to write functions with a more constrained function interface in EvaDB. Here is an example of an YOLO function in EvaDB: https://github.com/georgia-tech-db/evadb/blob/staging/evadb/....

Once the function is loaded, it can be used in queries in this way:

  SELECT id, Yolo(data)
     FROM ObjectDetectionVideos
     WHERE id 
Would love to hear your thoughts on ChatCraft and a more constrained function interface.
Post reply on HN