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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#611

Post by onion2k »

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…

The whole thing just sounds like a gargantuan mess.

Most apps are a gargantuan mess. It's just a mess that mostly works. In a typical large scale web app written in something like Node or PHP, I wouldn't be at all surprised if 95% of the code is brought in from libraries that the dev team don't review. They have no idea about the quality of the code they're running. I don't see why adding AI to the mix makes much of a difference.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#613

Post by frankdenbow »

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…

"cobbled together by an AI"

It will be as cobbled together as the thoughtfulness of the person in charge of the code. Same as if they wrote it themselves.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#614

Post by xk_id »

eyegor wrote: post #499
xk_id wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm actually very curious why AI use is such a bi-modal experience. My conspiracy theory is that the positive experiences are exaggerated and come from investors in the Nvidia stock.

Have you tried using chatgpt/etc as a starting point when you're unfamiliar with something? That's where it really excels for me, I can go crazy fast from 0 to ~30 (if we call 60 mvp). For example, the other day I was trying to stream some pcm audio using webaudio and it spit out a mostly functional prototype for me in a few minutes of trying. For me to read through msdn and get to that point would've taken an hour o…

I don’t really care about broken clocks even if to someone they are useful twice a day.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#615

Post by torginus »

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 tried using AI(Claude) to do refactors/move code between languages, and in my experience, it has the tendency to go off the rails and just start making up code that does something similar, essentially doing a rewrite that never works.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#616

Post by jappgar »

Every thread about AI coding turns into a therapy session for those devs among us who apparently derive a lot of their self worth from being able to write code.

Every time I mention using AI at work the same people put on their nitpicking glasses and start squinting.

It's getting to be embarrassing. I just wish those who choose to remain ignorant about these technologies would just listen to what other people are doing instead of raising spectres.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#617

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

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…

I’m with you on this, at least in spirit.

I’ve tried AI coding assistance tools multiple times. Notably with Ansible and then with some AWS stuff using Amazon Q. I decided I wanted to be curious and see how it went.

With Ansible, it was an unusable mess. Ansible is a bit of an odd bird of a DSL though. You really need to be on top of versions and modules. It’s not well suited for AI because it requires a lot of nuanced understanding. There’s no one resource that will work (effectively) forever, like C or something.

With AWS’s Amazon Q, I started out simple by having it write an IAM policy that I was having a hard time wrapping my head around. It wasn’t very helpful because the policies it provided used conditional keys that weren’t supported in the service that was addressed by the policy.

I’ve found I can typically work with higher quality and less fixing by just writing it myself. I could babysit and teach an AI, but at that point what’s the point?

I’m also unconvinced it’s worth the environmental impact, especially if I need to tutor it or mark up its output anyway.

In any event, it’s easy enough to outsmart/out-clever oneself it a colleague (and vice versa). Adding AI to that just seems like adding a chaotic junior developer to that equation.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#618

Post by jappgar »

ENGNR wrote: post #470
AIorNot wrote: post #427

Reviewing these conversations is like listening to horse and buggy manufacturers pooh-poohing automobiles: 1. they will scare the horses. a good team of horses is no match for funky 'automobile' 2. how will they be able to deal with our muddy, messy roads 3. their engines are unreliable and prone to breaking down stranding you in the middle and having to do it yourself.. 4. their drivers cant handle the speed, too ma…

I think a lot of the criticism is constructive. Many of the limitations won’t just magically go away - we’ll have to build tooling and processes and adjust our way of thinking to get there. Most devs will jump across to anything useful the second it’s ready, I would think

I do see a lot of constructive criticism from people who actually use these tools regularly, but there is also a heap of uninformed complaints from the luddites among us.

It's true that the limitations won't magically go away. Some may _never_ go away. I have a suspicion that neuroticism and hallucination are intrinsic qualities of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.

Many of the criticisms leveled could readily be applied to a fellow human. It seems what the naysayers really don't like are _other people_, especially imperfect ones.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#619

Post by thagb »

AIorNot wrote: post #427

Reviewing these conversations is like listening to horse and buggy manufacturers pooh-poohing automobiles: 1. they will scare the horses. a good team of horses is no match for funky 'automobile' 2. how will they be able to deal with our muddy, messy roads 3. their engines are unreliable and prone to breaking down stranding you in the middle and having to do it yourself.. 4. their drivers cant handle the speed, too ma…

This is completely different: With an automobile (back then) you still needed ad driver.

This replaces the most human occupation of all: thinking. So young people go ahead and steal the whole open source corpus that they did not write. And are smug about it.

If your projections of progress are true, at least 90% of the people here who praise the code laundering machines will be made redundant.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#620

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

DeathArrow wrote: post #544
abadpoli wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This presumes that it will be real humans that have to “take care” of the code later. A lot of the people that are hawking AI, especially in management, are chasing a future where there are no humans, because AI writes the code and maintains the code, no pesky expensive humans needed. And AI won’t object to things like bad code style or low quality code.

>AI writes the code AI will never write proper code unless guided by someone who knows how to properly code and how to properly translate business needs into code.

> [...] business needs into code.

I think this is where we lose a lot of developers. My experience has been this is a skill set that isn’t as common as you’d hope for, and requires some experience outside developing software as its own act. In other words, this doesn’t seem to be a skill that is natural to developers who haven’t had (or availed themselves of) the opportunity to do the business analyst and requirements gathering style work that goes into translating business needs to software outcomes. Many developers are isolated (or isolate themselves) from the business side of the business. That makes it very difficult to be able to translate those needs themselves. They may be unaware of and not understand, for example, why you’d want to design an accounting feature in a SaaS application in a certain way to meet a financial accounting need.

On the flip side, non-technical management tends to underestimate and undervalue technical expertise either by ego or by naïveté. One of my grandmothers used to wonder how I could “make any money by playing on the computer all day,” when what she saw as play was actually work. Not video games, mind you. She saw computers as a means to an end, in her case entertainment or socializing. Highly skilled clients of mine, like physicians, while curious, are often bewildered that there are sometimes technical or policy limitations that don’t match their expectations and make their request untenable.

When we talk about something like an LLM, it simply doesn’t possess the ability to reason, which is precisely what is needed for that kind of work.

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