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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#641

Post by munksbeer »

DeathArrow wrote: post #537
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…

> 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 interacting with the code. Is it clear and concise? Is it too clever? Is it too easy to write a subtle bug when making changes? Have I made it totally clear that X is relying on Y dangerous behavior by adding a comment or intentionally makin…

> Over 20 years of experience, too, but I quit doing that for work. Nobody really really cares, all they care is about time to market and having features they've sold yesterday to customers being done today.

I don't recognise this.

Or at least, I recognise that it can be that way but not always. In places I've worked, I tend to have worked with teams that care deeply about this. But we're not writing CRUD apps or web systems, or inventory management, or whatever. We're writing trading systems. I absolutely want to be working with code that we can understand in a hurry (and I mean, a real hurry) when things go wrong, and that we can change and/or fix in a hurry.

So some of us really do care.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#642

Post by shinycode »

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 have a colleague that did it also, moving parts of code and « writing » code quickly with copilot. Because it’s easier to overlook LLM updates he riddled the code with bugs. Subtle things that we undercover later, now that he’s gone. When you write everything yourself you are more keen to think deeply about changes. I read today that Google has 25% of their code written by AI. They have an history of trashing huge projects and the quality of their services is getting worse over time. Maybe the industry is going to move to « let’s trash the codebase and ask cGPT 8 to write everything with this new framework »… OP said he’s talking to AI like guiding an other dev. Isn’t he afraid that he will loose the ability to think about solutions for himself ? That’s a trained part of the brain that we can « loose » no ?

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#643

Post by losvedir »

fumeux_fume wrote: post #475
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…

Reading this comment is like listening to Tesla in 2014 tell me about how their cars will be driving themselves. Give it 10 years.

Tesla gave out free trials of their self driving upgrade this month. I didn't buy it initially because of the grandiose claims that never seemed to materialize, but I've actually been pretty impressed with the trial. I still don't think it's worth it, but my Model Y has driven itself (with my close supervision of course) to a number of destinations I've keyed into the navigation, without me having to intervene.

There's also lots of times I have had to intervene, but we're closer than we are far, at this point, I think.

So I think your take here is a bit outdated. It was good a couple years ago, though.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#644

Post by CoastalCoder »

remedan wrote: post #635
sotix wrote: post #633

This sort of makes me sick as a software engineer with licensed code on GitHub. Am I understanding correctly that they have trained data on my code despite my license? Do I receive monetary payment from the deal? Or have I misunderstood this?

I'm pretty sure that to upload your code to GitHub, you have to agree to their terms of service, which potentially give them all sorts of rights to your code. This creates a special relationship between you and GitHub that is separate from the license you assign to your project.

I'm curious:

Suppose I upload some code to GitHub, but I didn't have the authority to share it with anyone at all. And then it was used to train DL models.

How would various jurisdictions handle that? Would any of them force the deletion of all resulting model weights?

And how might the remedies differ based on the kind of data? E.g., copyright vs. trade secret vs. protected medical info vs. military secrets?

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#645

Post by vvillena »

ianeigorndua wrote: post #86
guerrilla wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the point. They are laundering IP. It's the long way around the GPL, allowing then to steal.

How many OSS repositories do I personally have to read through for my own code to be considered stolen property? That line of thought would get thrown out of court faster than an AI would generate it.

If the product is the result of compiling all the open source code out in the wild into a LLM, it can be argued that the derived product, the LLM itself, must follow the licensing requirements of the used source code.

The AI companies don't care much about this. When the time comes, they will open their models or stop using sources that don't meet the appropriate licensing. Their current concern is learning how to build the best models, and win the race to become the dominant AI provider - who cares if they need to use polluted sources to reach their goal. They will fix it later.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#646

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

frankdenbow wrote: post #613
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…

"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.

Maybe in the future when we have AGI, but not at the moment.

Did you read yesterday's "How I code using Cursor" thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41979203

The "Changes to my workflow" part is most relevant, and would be more accurately titled "How Cursor writes code differently to me [a senior developer]".

For example:

1) Cursor/AI more likely to reinvent the wheel and write code from scratch rather than use support libraries. Good to avoid dependencies I suppose, but widely used specialized libraries are likely to be debugged, and mature - able to handle corner cases gracefully, etc. AI "writes code" by regenerating stuff from it's training data - akin to cut and pasting from Stack Overflow, etc. If you're using this for a throwaway prototype or personal project then maybe you don't care as long as it works most of the time, but for corporate production use this is a liability.

2) AI more likely to generate repetitive code rather than write reusable functions (which he spins as avoiding abstractions) means code that is harder to read, debug and maintain. It's like avoiding global symbolic constants and defining them multiple times throughout your code instead. This wouldn't pass typical human code review. When future you, or a co-worker, maybe using a different editor/IDE, fixes a bug, they may not realize that the same bug has been repeated multiple times throughout the code, rather than fixing it once in a function.

We don't have human level AGI yet, far from it, and the code that today's AI generates reflects that. This isn't code that an experienced developer would write - this is LLM generated code, which means it's either regurgitated as-as from some unknown internet source, or worse yet (and probably more typical?) is a mashup of multiple sources, where the LLM may well have introduced it's own bugs in addition to those present in the original sources.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#647

Post by duxup »

So in my experience GitHub Copilot was pretty good to start, got better ... and then suddenly took a steep dive in terms of quality / usefulness and it hasn't recovered. Anyone else?

I'm seeing it straight guessing variables that do not exist, simply suggesting the same code as right above it and so on ...

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#648

Post by randomdata »

Kiro wrote: post #539
javaunsafe2019 wrote: post #387

I don’t know how people can claim such huge success using copilot and such. I also own a subscription and tried to use it for coding but all task from spring boot authentication configuration to aws policies and lambdas it failed horribly. Writing the code myself using proper documentation was the only option. I wonder if false information is written here in the comments section for certain reasons …

It's a completely new skill that you need to learn. My productivity gains are substantial but it comes from experience building multiple applications using LLMs. I feel I learn something new every day and the tooling just gets better and better. > I wonder if false information is written here in the comments section for certain reasons … I find it perplexing that you resort to this instead of other plausible explanat…

I see a decent productivity boost in my personal projects which extend common technologies to solve more "boring" problems, but struggle to find much gain at work where we're deep in esoteric technologies that LLMs have little to no knowledge of.

Are you also finding gains in the latter cases?

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#649

Post by tim333 »

thagb wrote: post #619
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.

It's not that different from a manager who can't code much hiring some programmers.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#650

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

torginus wrote: post #615
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…

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.

I like to believe (it may not be true though), that the AI has learned what code actually exists in the wild, and is doing what all of us end up doing when trying to refactor a system we don't understand, writing new, similarish code as writing code is more fun than reading it.
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