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What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

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Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#81

Post by shanusmagnus »

tyingq wrote: post #76
wokwokwok wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one uses it to generate code. Really. Talk to people who actually use it and listen to what they say… they use it to help them write code. If you try to generate code, you’ll find it underwhelming, and frankly, quite rubbish. However, if you want an example of what I’ve seen multiple people do: 1) open your code in window a 2) open chatgpt in window b (side by side) 3) you write code. 4) when you get stuck, have a…

That matches my experience. It's a sort of shortcut to the old process of googling for examples and sifting through the results. And those results, I didn't typically cut and paste from them, or if I did, it was mostly as a sort of a scaffold to build from, including deleting a fair amount of what was there. Many times it works really well, and it surfaces the kind of example I need. Sometimes it works badly. Usually…

Me too. As someone who used to be a dev but hasn't written code professionally in twelve years or so, it was such an amazing accelerant. My iteration loop was to contextualize it (in English and in code), ask how to do a thing, look at its response, tweak it, execute, see what happened, alter it some more.

The fact that it usually had errors didn't bother me at all -- it got much of the way there, and it did so by doing the stuff that is slowest and most boring for me: finding the right libraries / functions / API set up, structuring the code within the broader sweep.

Interesting side note: un-popular languages, but ones that have been around for a long time and have a lot of high-quality and well-documented code / discussion / projects around, are surprisingly fecund. Like, it was surprisingly good at elisp, given how fringe that is.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#83

Post by croo »

I'll tell you my vision which is kinda long term - like 20-30 year from now on. I think the future is that everyone will have their own personalized AI assistant on their phone. Internet as it is will be mostly useless because only robots will be able to wade through the generated shit ocean and the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaining anymore.

There will be a paradigm shift where our-customers-are-ai apps appear and most stuff will need to have an API which makes AI able to connect and use those services effortlessly and without error because who don't want to tell his assistant to "send 5$ to Jill for the pizza"? There will be money in base AI models you can choose(subscribe to) and what it can and cannot do for you. It will still be riddled with ads and now it's your personal assistant who can push any agenda to you.

Operation systems will become a layer under the assistant ai.

You will still talk on/to your phone.

I guess free software will be more important than ever.

Free ai assistants will be available and computing power will be there to run it on your phone but all the shit we've seen with open Vs closed source, Linux Vs Windows, walled gardens whatnot will go another round this time with free open public training data assistants Vs closed-but-oh-so-less-clumsy ones.

Security problem will be plenty like how to hide your AI assistant custom fingerprint? Authentication and authorization system for AI? How much someone else personal assistant worth? How to steal or defend it?

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#84

Post by christkv »

j-a-a-p wrote: post #40

My prediction: knowledge will start to be reformatted into an LLM directly and knowledge providers will stop publishing it otherwise. Thus the chat interface will both improve and protect knowledge access once the traditional formats are not published anymore. This will come together with the downfall of search, a prime driver why so much knowledge was published on the web. Search will start to drown in an explosion…

Back to human curated web directories we go.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#85

Post by sanderjd »

n4r9 wrote: post #55
_8j50 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like such a jerk for not wanting to use chatgpt for all that. It's not just mild paranoia about feeding it input I prefer be kept private but I just don't enjoy having someone else do half the thinking for me I guess. I mean, I don't like intellisense either (but simple autocomplete is fine). Perhaps it is because I only code to help with my job, I don't get paid to have a lot of good quality code output.

Don't beat yourself up. As a mathematically-oriented software engineer I also have little to no interest in using LLMs to help with coding. It feels like the people that do are the builders, i.e. interested in quickly knocking up something that works most of the time. Which is great from a business perspective. I can't help but see my programming output as an artistic expression of my thought, and therefore find it d…

I think the division is along a different axis than this one (or probably it's along multiple axes).

I've always been more of a fastidious crafter than a "just get it built" person, but I also struggle with a blank page. I thrive on editing more than writing. Since forever, I like to get out something that works or mostly works, and then start carving on it until I like it.

LLMs have been helping me get some ink on the page, but very little of what they suggest ends up in the final product.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#86

Post by sanderjd »

waynesonfire wrote: post #63
ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

I had similar success when trying to solve problems with Makefiles.

Yeah, for me it has been docker and kubernetes. I have found it to be something of a killer app for spinning up on anything with a bunch of annoying little details, that I'm not already super familiar with.

Make, docker, kubernetes, all fit this pattern. Heck, maybe I won't be so down on autotools if I run into it again now that I can attack it with LLM support.

Or html / css; I haven't written any of that in the LLM era, but maybe I'd enjoy it more now.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#87

Post by shanusmagnus »

sanderjd wrote: post #78
_8j50 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like such a jerk for not wanting to use chatgpt for all that. It's not just mild paranoia about feeding it input I prefer be kept private but I just don't enjoy having someone else do half the thinking for me I guess. I mean, I don't like intellisense either (but simple autocomplete is fine). Perhaps it is because I only code to help with my job, I don't get paid to have a lot of good quality code output.

I think I would have felt this way when I was younger. But after writing code for over twenty years, I'm very happy to let computers do the boring half of the thinking, so that I can think about more interesting things. It is not intellectually stimulating for me to think about what the syntax for a dict comprehension is, or what exactly I'm supposed to do to map over the values of an array in javascript without scre…

That's what's been so striking for me -- the stuff that is fun and playful for me I get to do; and a bunch of stuff that I hated I can now offload, with the net result that I get to work at the level of abstraction that is most interesting and most human, vs acting like a human robot trying to unearth documentation, API examples, etc.

There's no question about this being the right way to use it for me, but I wonder if this could introduce something bad for someone just starting out, who hadn't first got all the reps with the drudgery over decades? Still mulling on that.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#88

Post by breckenedge »

sanderjd wrote: post #78
_8j50 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like such a jerk for not wanting to use chatgpt for all that. It's not just mild paranoia about feeding it input I prefer be kept private but I just don't enjoy having someone else do half the thinking for me I guess. I mean, I don't like intellisense either (but simple autocomplete is fine). Perhaps it is because I only code to help with my job, I don't get paid to have a lot of good quality code output.

I think I would have felt this way when I was younger. But after writing code for over twenty years, I'm very happy to let computers do the boring half of the thinking, so that I can think about more interesting things. It is not intellectually stimulating for me to think about what the syntax for a dict comprehension is, or what exactly I'm supposed to do to map over the values of an array in javascript without scre…

It takes programming back to the pseudocode experience, but now the computer can fill in all the code bits really well about 75% of the time

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#89

Post by sanderjd »

CaptRon wrote: post #72
alluro2 wrote: post #42

I was hoping for some clever ideas about direction of software / UIs, and new use-cases for LLMs / AI, since for now I'm still struggling and have a lack of vision, it seems. For example, I work on developing a logistics management and route optimization platform. If I try to envision new features that could be unlocked through AI or just LLMs, I basically get nothing back from my feeble brain, that I would fit into…

Try asking chatgpt for some ideas.

Unironically, I've done this sort of thing.

Not too impressed with the results though.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#90

Post by Closi »

waynesonfire wrote: post #67
Closi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also wondered this - including if we might see a breed of 'higher level' languages (i.e. much higher level than Python) which can then be 'AI compiled' into highly efficient low level code. i.e. the advantages of an even-higher-level python that's almost like pseudo-code with assembly-level speed and rust-level safety, where some complexity can be abstracted out to the LLM.

I disagree. Chatgpt is helpful here because f# is a paradigm shift for this otherwise experienced programmer. The programmer probably knows juuussstt enough f# to guide the llm.

I mean why is f# the goal, and could we write a better f# with the use of AI.

As an example, why not write in f# and let an 'AI-compiler' optimise the code...

The AI-compiler could then make sure all the code is type safe, add in manual memory management to avoid the pitfalls of garbage collection, add memory safety etc - all the hard bits.

And then if we gave the AI-compiler those sort of responsibilities, then we can think about how this would impact language design in the longer term.

None of this is with current generation LLM's, but might be where we end up.

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