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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#621

Post by thagb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #219
atomic128 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Thank you for saying it. We're watching Microsoft et al. defeat open source. Large language models are used to aggregate and interpolate intellectual property. This is performed with no acknowledgement of authorship or lineage, with no attribution or citation. In effect, the intellectual property used to train such models becomes anonymous common property. The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often mo…

> The social rewards (e.g., credit, respect) that often motivate open source work are undermined. You mean people making contributions to solve problems and scratch each others' itches got displaced by people seeking social status and/or a do-at-your-own-pace accreditation outside of formal structures, to show to prospective employees? And now that LLMs start letting people solve their own coding problems, sidesteppi…

A photocopier provides "vastly greater value" than the people who wrote the books?

> they can't extract rent now that their past work became valuable for reasons they had no part in.

That is not the case at all. If I donate food to Africa, I'm happy if it goes to humans. I'm not happy if a Mafia organization steals the food in transit, repackages it and sells it.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#622

Post by etherealG »

DeathArrow wrote: post #543
hansonkd wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Coding isn't the hard part. The hard part is translating the business needs in code. You can tell a junior programmer "Make a DB with tables book, author, has Written, customer, stock, hasBought, with the following rules between them. Write a repository, for that DB. Use repository in BooksService and BasketService. Use those services in Books controller and Basket controller." and he will do a fine job. Ask the juni…

Ask a modern LLM to write an API for a book store... pretty sure it'll be close to, if not better, than the quoted part of your comment.

It's hard to argue with the drastic jump in LLM capabilities.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#623

Post by gcanyon »

FrequentLurker wrote: post #490
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…

Except the automobile in this case only reaches the destination correctly sometimes. They are less likely to reach the destination as the path becomes longer or more complex.

Ho, boy, you should read about the 1919 Motor Transport convoy -- the military sent a team across the United States by truck and car. It took them almost two months, and over 10% of the vehicles and many of the men didn't complete the journey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_Motor_Transport_Corps_con...

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#624

Post by IgorPartola »

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 used AI to move multi thousand line codebases between languages.

And are you certain you’ve reviewed all use cases to make sure no errors were introduced?

I recently tried using Google’s AI assistant for some basic things like creating a function that could parse storage size in the format of 12KB, or 34TB into an actual number of bytes. It confidently gave me amount, units = s.split() which just is not correct. Even added a comment explaining what that line is meant to do.

This was an obvious case that just didn’t work. But imagine it did work but flew into an infinite loop on an input like “12KB7” or some such.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#625

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

> Change my mind.

Imagine the LLM is another developer and you're responsible for reviewing their code. Would you think of them the same thing?

While I don't like AI either, I feel a lot of the fear around it is just that - fear and distrust that there will be bugs, some more subtle than others. But that's true for code written by anyone, isn't it?

It's just that you're responsible for the code written by something or someone else, and that can be scary.

But remember that no code should make it to production without human and automated review. Trust the system.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#626

Post by fragmede »

ElFitz wrote: post #601
dools wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible I heard a similar thing from a dude when I said I use it for bash scripts instead of copying and pasting things off StackOverflow. He was a bit "get off my lawny" about the idea of running any code you didn't write, especially bash scripts in a terminal. It is obviously the case that I didn't write most of the code in t…

> He was a bit "get off my lawny" about the idea of running any code you didn't write, especially bash scripts in a terminal. I hacked together a CLI tool that provides an LLM a CRUD interface to my local file system for, letting it read, write, and execute, code and tests, and feeds it back the commands outputs. And it was bootstrapped with me playing the role of CLI tool. Mostly useless, a bit irresponsible, but fu…

If that idea engages you, might take a look at the openinterpreter GitHub.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#627

Post by Cthulhu_ »

scubbo wrote: post #479
dools wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the idea of letting an LLM write/move large swaths of code seems so incredibly irresponsible I heard a similar thing from a dude when I said I use it for bash scripts instead of copying and pasting things off StackOverflow. He was a bit "get off my lawny" about the idea of running any code you didn't write, especially bash scripts in a terminal. It is obviously the case that I didn't write most of the code in t…

> Me reviewing AI code is no different from me reviewing anyone else's code. I take your point, and on the whole I agree with your post, but this point is fundamentally _not_ correct, in that if I have a question about someone else's code I can ask them about their intention, state-of-mind, and understanding at the time they wrote it, and (subjectively, sure; but I think this is a reasonable claim) can _usually_ dete…

> Asking AI for explanations tends to lead to extremely convincing and confident false justifications rather than an admission of error or doubt.

Not always true, AI can realise their own mistakes and they can learn. It's a feedback loop system, and / but as it stands this feedback of what is good and bad is provided by end-users and fed back into e.g. Copilot.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#628

Post by fragmede »

kmacdough wrote: post #599
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…

Don't worry, unless you're Grace Hopper, they said the same about your first programming language too.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#629

Post by Cthulhu_ »

otikik wrote: post #588
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…

Agree that it is a mess. If I know that someone is using an llm to produce code, I think it is only fair that I use an LLM to review the code too. If you want me to put the work as a reviewer, you'd better put the work as a writer.

I don't know if you jest but this is likely the next stage, to be released within the next months, that is, AIs doing the first rounds of code reviews. It'll likely be from github / microsoft as they have one of the biggest code review datasets around.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#630

Post by vultour »

Yodel0914 wrote: post #364
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 find chatgpt incredibly useful for writing scripts against well-known APIs, or for a "better stackoverflow". Things like "how do I use a cursor in sql" or "in a devops yaml pipeline, I want to trigger another pipeline. How do I do that?". But working on our actual codebase with copilot in the IDE (Rider, in my case) is a net negative. It usually does OK when it's suggesting the completion of a single line, but when…

The problem with this is that you lose the entire context around the answer you're given. There might be notes about limitations or edge cases in the documentation or on StackOverflow. I already see this with my coworkers who use LLMs, they often have no idea how or why things work and then they're absolutely perplexed when something goes wrong.
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