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GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

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Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#711

Post by KingMob »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #182
ffujdefvjg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of progress, but I feel like we've been seeing diminishing returns. I can't help but feel like recent improvements are just refinements and not real advances. The interest in AI may drive investment and research in better models that are game-changers, but we aren't there yet.

You're proving GP's point about normalization of progress. It's been two years. We're still during the first iteration of applications of this new tech, advancements didn't have time yet to start compounding. This is barely getting started.

Neither of your points are proven. Is the slowdown a real effect of hitting technological/technique/data limits? Or is it just a lull in the storm?

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#712

Post by anticensor »

Wheatman wrote: post #604
th0ma5 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These examples are not much different than tutorial regurgitation imo. I would not pass this off as solving the problems that programmers have in practice, imo.

It is great for cheating at school, at least. And maybe boilerplate.

That's one of business goals of OpenAI, which is to disrupt work and school.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#713

Post by creata »

bastardoperator wrote: post #684
creata wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That literally has no bearing on the issue.

It literally does, even if you don't like it.

You're free to explain how you think it's linked to the issue if you want to, but it just isn't. Yes, Microsoft contributes some open source software. That obviously does not preclude them from being exploitative toward other creators of open source software.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#714

Post by friendzis »

hansonkd wrote: post #367
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…

> 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…

> Russian has a lot of ways you can write "compactly" with fewer words than english and have a much more precise meaning of the sentence. (I always likened russian to type-safe haskell and english to dynamic python)

The difference is in fusionality. English does not use inflection and relies heavily on auxiliaries (pre-, post-positions, particles, other modifiers) while Russian (and other Slavic, Baltic languages) rely rather heavily on inflection.

For English speakers, probably the closest is the gerund. A simple suffix transforms a verb into a noun-compatible form, denoting process. In highly fusional languages a root can be combined with multiple modifying pre-, a-, suf-fixes, and inflected on top. This does unlock some subtlety.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#715

Post by friendzis »

TheNewsIsHere wrote: post #620
DeathArrow wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 requirement…

> > [...] 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

I know this is highly unpopular take, but I believe agile, scrum and similar has led the field directly into this direction.

Look at this magnificent blog post (https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/5-worst-agile-mistakes-...) published recently right on scrum.org and especially this item, listed as one of the worst mistakes:

> 2. Letting the Definition of Done Include Customer Approval

In the olden days we used to model user workflows. Task A requires to do that and that, we do this and this and transition to workflow B. Acceptance testing was integral step of development workflow and while it did include some persuasion and deception, actual user feedback was part of the process.

As much as scrum tries to position itself as delivering value to the customer, the actual practices of modeling the customer, writing imagined user stories for them and pulling acceptance criteria out of llama's ass ensures that actual business and development team interact as little as possible. Yes, this does allow reduce the number of implemented features by quite a bunch, however by turning the tables and fitting a problem inside the solution.

Think about it, it is totally common for website layouts to shift, element focus to jump around as the website is loading or more recently two step login pages that break password managers. No sane user would sign these off, but no actual user has participated in the development process, neither at design phase, nor at testing phase.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#716

Post by DeathArrow »

munksbeer wrote: post #641
DeathArrow wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> We're writing trading systems

If you write critical systems executing trades, managing traffic lights, landing a rover on the moon, then you should take your time and write the best possible version.

Our code is both easy to read and easy to modify because that allows us to add features fast. It is not the very best possible version of what we can do, because that would cost us much more time.

The code has few bugs, which are mostly caught by the QA teams, is reasonably fast. Maybe not the most elegant, not engineered to take into account future use cases and we push to eliminate from AC some very rare use cases,that will take too much time to implement. Maybe the code it's not the most resource efficient.

But the key aspect is we focus on delivering the most features possible from what customers need in the limited amount of time we have and with the limited manpower we have.

Company is owned by some private equity group and their focus is solely growing the customer base while paying as little as possible. Last year they fired 25% of personnel because their ARR was missing a few millions.

Newertheless, most companies I worked before were in the hurry. With the exception of a very small company where I could work however I see fit.

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#717

Post by globular-toast »

CaptainFever wrote: post #667
GreenWatermelon wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Cars are horrible, they made everything worse for everyone except the few people with money to buy a car. Cars produce toxic fumes, air pollution, noise pollution with their engine noises and horns, light pollution with their headlights pointed directly into my fucking eye, consume incredible amounts of resources to function, consume a fuckton of resources for road maintainability waste millions of man-hours…

But horses were still worse. They shat everywhere.

Yeah, but it's a silly comparison anyway. Horses weren't used for personal transport around town. They were used to pull heavy loads or crossing great distances.

When it comes to personal transport the current best invention is the safety bicycle. It's truly a marvel and can never be celebrated enough. A tubular frame, ball bearings, cable actuated brakes and gears, spoke tensioned wheels and pneumatic tyres provide a stiff yet lightweight machine that needs very little maintenance and no more energy than walking.

But unfortunately the car used all of that technology in a hilariously inefficient way, and unbridled use of fossil fuels meant it was attractive to use a vehicle that needs a million joules just to make it move without anything in it. If we weren't so greedy but instead considered each gain carefully we might have never ended up with cars.

But, alas, we're no better than a dog who got access to the food cupboard and made itself sick

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#718

Post by alaaalawi »

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…

MMV But for me at least i tend to use it for brain storming, aka intial sailing through a subject/topic/task, getting intial idea. the idea is to use as an admin who is guided by you throgh chatting. for example im given a task to translate a user description/requirement to pull something from the database. like (simplistic example) what are the top grossing films by category within each rating. so igive the AI the database tables schema and give it literally the user requirement. and see what it gave back and compare it with how I'll do it. ask it more for optimizations what else can be done more.... etc.. keep chating with the AI until I'm bored ;)

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#719

Post by emptiestplace »

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.

Are you familiar with the idea of consciousness as an emergent property?

Re: GitHub cuts AI deals with Google, Anthropic

#720

Post by oglop »

Cool. Im underwater and have zero help an open source progect and AI has been crucial in saving some of the little sanity I have left. These things rule if you just speak with them and don’t use it like a moron or regular computer. Maybe one of best coworkers I ‘ve ever had.
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