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

Post by sanderjd » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

shanusmagnus wrote: post #87

sanderjd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Post by 6510 » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

gumballindie wrote: post #50

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…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

Post by jprete » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:22 PM UTC

croo wrote: post #83

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 entertaini…

Post by Spivak » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:28 PM UTC

throwuwu wrote: post #94

depletedgherkin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of an aside, but I wonder if the rise of LLMs will lead to new programming languages being much slower to be adopted. Like you said, you might have given up on F# without ChatGPT assistance, and the main way ChatGPT is able to help with F# is because of all of the example code it's been trained on. If developers rely more and more on LLM aid, then a new language without strong LLM support might be a dealbreaker t…

The crazy thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that all of that data generalizes to anything new you can throw at it. As long as there’s enough space in the prompt to provide documentation it can do it on the fly but you could also fine tune the model on the new info.

Post by realce » Wed, Sep 20, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

jprete wrote: post #95

croo wrote: post #83

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 entertaini…

For a bit there it didn’t sound too bad!