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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

simonwillison.net

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Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#72
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our experience coding from scratch will have about as much validity as the experience of people who coded in assembly has today. It'll be a specialized skill with its own niche but without much value in the broader tech industry.

> but without much value in the broader tech industry. Not talking about AI; but if you want to work on compilers, linux kernel, game engine optimization, GPU optimized code and many many other things than web development you need to be more than familiar with how to work with machine instructions, albeit not working with it every single day. These are significant parts of the industry which make the rest possible.

I describe it as the difference between "software development" and "software engineering". Or between "business" and "infrastructure". Both are valuable, but have different demands on understanding, rigor etc.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#73

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

I also love the fact that now I can develop on the go. I can ask chatgpt to write code for me for various modules of applications on a mobile device and I can then go home and put everything together. Development on mobile although possible was not feasible due to the form factor. Now that limitation is gone and things are only going to improve.

Agreed! This is such an amazing use case for developers. You can explore ideas with ChatGPT without having a code editor in front of you, and this is so much better than my previous methods of quick notes, pseudocode, etc. The thought that you can work with ChatGPT for an hour or two and have a very-refined application ready to put together when you get to a computer, it's a totally different connection than I've felt to software development.

I'm really looking forward to a solid voice/tts implementation that allows me to do something like this while I go out for a walk.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#75
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our experience coding from scratch will have about as much validity as the experience of people who coded in assembly has today. It'll be a specialized skill with its own niche but without much value in the broader tech industry.

> but without much value in the broader tech industry. Not talking about AI; but if you want to work on compilers, linux kernel, game engine optimization, GPU optimized code and many many other things than web development you need to be more than familiar with how to work with machine instructions, albeit not working with it every single day. These are significant parts of the industry which make the rest possible.

I agree with you. However, it’s worthwhile also noting these represent a very small proportion of all jobs in software development.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#76
post #6

@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…

so is anyone proficient in programming in machine code these days?

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#77
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some way it's kind of poetic. The mental overhead of producing softwares shrinks more and more. It will sure be at the cost of understanding and/or see errors as you say. I already looking forward of being that graybeard. And show off to my neighbors or grandchildren

GPT doesn’t change some fundamental things that we know about the theory of computation as well as complexity. It’s a wonderful tool that we’re just beginning to learn about, but it’s not a get out of jail free card for the halting problem or a million line codebase that models 50 years of business evolution.

I don't know.. I'm looking. forward to a LoRA or whatever they call it trained on my codebase that can answer questions across the whole thing

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#78
As a beginner who started learning how to code 8 months ago, GPT makes me way more confident about tackling bigger problems. It also makes me doubt my own output less.

I understand that this isn't the best way to learn coding, but at this point, I'm looking for results, not to get a job.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#79
post #6

@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax…

so is anyone proficient in programming in machine code these days?

Not many people, but the ones who work at the bottom of the stack on compilers, OS design, embedded etc won’t be going hungry any time soon.

I think using AI to build a React app from Figma is closer than building a low level piece of infrastructure. Hence, the grey beards operating at the lower levels are slightly less vulnerable.

Re: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

#80

What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So…

> How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus? I couldn't agree more. I work as a software engineer in the medical field (think MRI's, X-rays, that sort of thing). I've started using ChatGPT all the time to write the code, and then I just fix it up a bit. So far it's working great!

What holds me back the most from using these tools is the vagueness of the copyright situation. I wouldn't straight out want to use it at work. For hobby projects that I might want to use for something serious one day, I'm on the fence.

Developers who use this for serious stuff, how goes your reasoning? Is it just a calculated risk? Reward is greater than the risk?

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