Jupyter AI

Jupyter AI
jupyter-ai.readthedocs.io

Kinda strange statement. I think of Jupyter as one of the places generative AI originated!

Wondering if others are finding use for genAI in notebooks.

GPT4 with Code Interpreter is a fun, frustrating experience where you’re writing a dialog about writing some code, sort of like pair programming or a code interview. Compared to a notebook, it’s terrible. The sandbox environment resets if you take a break. There’s also a quota, and if you hit that it forces taking a break, causing a reset.

In a notebook, you could rerun all the cells and pick up where you left off. When using Code Interpreter, GPT4 will see a stack trace indicating that a symbol is undefined, interpret that as a reset, and write the code again. It’s sort of cool the first time it happens but it’s unnecessary and becomes tedious.

The resulting experience is a cross between a roguelike and a text adventure, where I try to get something fun accomplished in one sitting, before running out quota. (This is strictly recreational programming.)

It’s beta. I assume they know it has problems and will eventually fix it.

I’d like to see a recreation of this “writing a dialog together about coding” experience using a notebook-like interface that isn’t terrible. The point isn’t just to write the code (it’s doing it the hard way), it’s writing a tutorial about how to solve a problem.

Jupyter AI looks like a somewhat more practical tool. It’s designed to not use the AI API too much to keep expenses down, and doesn’t have the impractical limitation that you cannot write the code yourself. It’s not the same game, though.

It's particularly useful when I can just write a comment explaining the kind of transformation I want, and it then writes a pandas incantation which I can immediately check and iterate on.