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Robb Oat is a robot software engineer
- ctoth 4y agoNow add JIRA integration and sell the Enterprise version and we can all go home.
- bergenty 4y agoJob opening: Professional JIRA ticket writer wanted
- gillesjacobs 4y agoPrompt "engineering" is definitely going to be in some job descriptions soon.
- smeej 4y agoThis is a weird thought, but I think I stand a better chance of being able to learn to speak "bot" than I do of ever actually learning to write code, even though code is pretty much literally a type of "speaking 'bot.'" I've tried a handful of times and just can't get past how unbearably tedious I find writing for loops, so I give up. It's like trying to read the whole Bible and getting bogged down in Leviticus. I'm sure it gets more interesting. I just can't push through that part!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nextaccountic 4y agoMaybe try Haskell in your next attempt? For one thing, you won't be writing for loops at all. It's also much higher level than most languages
- whit537 4y agoMaybe skip Leviticus and come back to it later?
- eloisius 4y agoThis is my primary reason, after IP abuse, of disdaining Copilot. We’re still going to need engineers, and I’d rather us make our languages and tooling more expressive than turn into a prompt engineer.
- bergenty 4y agoThat’s Luddite, anti progressive thinking.
- eloisius 4y agoIt’s not. I’m not saying things are perfect the way they are now and we shouldn’t look for ways to be productive, it’s that I don’t want us to get stuck in a local maximum like our industry tends to do. If Python isn’t expressive enough, let’s evolve on languages, not pile kludgy code generators on top that must be finessed with special prompts.
- jerrysievert 4y agoSometimes I wonder how good jira would be if developers actually embraced their environment and improved it rather than deal with $100/month plugins that don’t really do much. Maybe jira would improve? Nah.
- bergenty 4y agoWhat jira plug-ins do people pay for?
- metadat 4y agoDo people really pay for jira plugins? I've never seen this occur in the wild.
- grogenaut 4y agoBig companies pay for lots of them. I think we had 4 or 5 gant chart plugins at one point.
- lmm 4y agoA group of developers did this ten years ago, unfortunately they're stil waiting for the jira admins to grant them the right permissions to install the plugins they wrote.
- kevmo314 4y agoIt would be cool if it wasn't necessary to link the relevant line. That would enable non coders to create changes.
- ctoth 4y agoI wonder if you could use a vector similarity search to find a specific implementation in code based on a feature description. I first thought you would need a language model with a large-enough context window to digest the whole codebase, but after thinking about it a bit longer it seems like the right way to do this would be similarity search. Wonder if it would work at all.
- the_mitsuhiko 4y agoWhat's going on here? I submitted this post a few days ago and I also wrote my comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33420082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33420082) at that point. I have a web archive to point it to: http://web.archive.org/web/20221101130830/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33420068 http://web.archive.org/web/20221101130830/https://news.ycomb... Yet this post is currently on the front page and the comment I wrote claims to be from an hour ago?
- imran-iq 4y agoProbably ended in the second chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
- neilv 4y agoAltering the record of dates/times that people said things seems like a really bad precedent. I'm guessing it's a kludge to implement the second chance behavior, but maybe there's a more benign kludge, or a practical more proper way to do it.
- aliqot 4y agoI hope it's not intentional. I don't see a moderation log anywhere. That's one thing that Lobste.rs and other HN-alikes got right.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- metadat 4y agoThis frequently happens with my submissions; the flammable material doesn't always catch fire with the first strike. And it's probably not worth complaining about.. hear me out. Reframing it: Are you pleased you were able to accurately predict something that ended up being of interest to a great many people? You deserve to feel good about this! In the end, the thing got shared as intended. This is success. At least, this is what I've learned to tell myself ;). HN points are probably the most worthless form of currency, except for maybe crypto.
- eddsh1994 4y agoPlease make the password field plaintext
- raydiatian 4y agoI find it just slightly comical that there’s at the same time a post on front page of HN regarding litigation against GitHub copilot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33457063 https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/ https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- taneq 4y agoHey wait this isn’t a software engineer that works on robots…
- hoten 4y agoThis is very interesting. Before I try it, I wonder if Robb can sign a CLA... :)
- 29athrowaway 4y agoIt cannot enter into a contract because it is not a legal person.
- geph2021 4y agoPersonally would have gone with something like 'Rowe Baught' but maybe that's just too obvious.
- moffkalast 4y agoThat's a trireme.
- IncRnd 4y agoThis is cute and all, but I think their software engineers are coding the wrong projects. This (and other recent projects) indicate a lack of strategic direction from GitHub, which is now Microsoft.
- NginxT 4y agoI just want to appreciate the name, it was clever (at least for my standard, which, admittedly isn't high), and the name was suggested by DALL-E, which have no context on text input
- whit537 4y agoYeah it blew me away when DALL-E spit that out on the first try. Both the name and the logo are so perfect, and DALL-E cut the time down from hours if not days or weeks to seconds to get there. At the same time I did iterate on it, I made it two words, Robb Oat, instead of one, Robboat, to make it more relatable and easier to figure out how to pronounce. :^) Runner up was Sobbart Root. :D
- joshxyz 4y agoI just tested it, it works. https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/45 https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/45
- whit537 4y agoThanks for trying it out! :^) As you can see it struggles with whitespace.
- awb 4y agoCan’t wait for the future presentation: “How Robb Oat uses Robb Oat to build Robb Oat”
- danielbln 4y agoUsing the website as a primer, GPT-3 comes up with this: > Give a TOC for a presentation titled: "How Robb Oat uses Robb Oat to build Robb Oat" 1. Introduction 2. What is Robb Oat? 3. How Robb Oat uses Robb Oat to build Robb Oat 4. Conclusion > Give 4 speaker note bullet points for each point: 1. Introduction -Robo Oat is a robot software engineer that reads GitHub issues and submits pull requests. -It is still in development and currently only fixes code snippets that are linked to in the issue. -We are going to be discussing how Robb Oat uses Robb Oat to build Robb Oat. -This will include a demonstration of how to use Robb Oat to fix a code snippet. 2. What is Robb Oat? -Robb Oat is a robot software engineer that reads GitHub issues and submits pull requests. -It is still in development and currently only fixes code snippets that are linked to in the issue. 3. How Robb Oat uses Robb Oat to build Robb Oat -Robb Oat uses Robb Oat to build Robb Oat by trying to fix every GitHub Issue it understands. -It does this by creating a pull request with an attempted fix. 4. Conclusion -Robb Oat is still in development and is only able to fix code snippets that are linked to in the issue. -However, it is a useful tool for those who want to quickly fix small code snippets. -It is also a good
- whit537 4y agoReady for the CFP! :^)
- tkk23 4y agoKind of like >If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea ... and turn it on! https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/i/149246 https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/i/149246
- yewenjie 4y agoIt is amazing how software engineers and AI researchers are automating themselves out of their jobs. Sure, it is all good if the revenue generated from automation is used for the good of all people, and if the AIs are aligned/ friendly. But looking at current indications, none of that is going to happen.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoThe way I see it the only jobs you are realistically automating (without full on AGI) are the CRUD and pipework jobs which are unambiguously explainable without a lot of context. The difficulty/complexity in delivering software is mostly on having accurate domain knowledge on the problem you are trying to solve and how users or other machines in that environment interact with said software. So again, unless we hit a landmark of a very outperforming AGI I think that much of the domain knowledge in many software 'niches' will be out of reach of automation. That is not to say that many sub-tasks/boilerplate cannot be automated.
- lbriner 4y agoBut you are missing the point that even a robot could code 90% of the boilerplate and leave it to someone with domain knowledge to check it through and possibly tweak a few bits.
- antigirl 4y agoGreat, i can review it then. I don't want to write boilerplate or tooling. It's a waste of my time.
- girvo 4y agoIs that not a good thing? That’s the worst part of software development frankly, writing that grunt work piping code.
- k3liutZu 4y agoGitHub Copilot is starting to do this for me for specific items.
- pjmlp 4y agoSo now there is a university with Software Engineering degree certified by the country's Engineering organisation, and the respective professional titles exams for robots? That's progress.
- hooby 4y agoThe examples mainly show Robb creating PRs with code changes that are less work to write, than the corresponding issue... ^_^'
- whit537 4y agoThat's definitely how it has played out, yes. The big one for me was: https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/7 https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/7 I coded it up myself and then was like "wait I should be dogfooding this" so I did and Robb Oat spit out basically what I had just written. That was the aha moment for me. Also I've been reading Innovator's Dilemma and basically all disruptive technology sucks at first so I haven't been too discouraged about it.
- baking 4y agoEverything sucks at first. That doesn't make it disruptive or good or gives you any information as to how it will work in the future.
- whit537 4y agoTrue! It is not disruptive just because it sucks. In fact, it is not disruptive at all yet—what has it disrupted? Nothing. :^) What I said, though, is that I'm not _discouraged_ at its limited utility at this point in the game. It's to be expected. Everything, as you say, sucks at first. In terms of Innovators Dilemma: Robb Oat is not useful to existing "customers" of software engineers (product managers, engineering managers, lead engineers). But because of its drastically lower cost and higher speed, it _may_ open up new markets that barely exist right now. If successful in these new, smaller markets, it may eventually move upmarket and displace existing "technology" (i.e., us) once it can compete on productivity. That's the point at which it will have proven itself to be disruptive. The next step for Robb Oat, if it's to go anywhere, is to find the smaller, newer market where it can be useful. TBD
- differentview97 4y agoIt's still a win if the person writing them costs less than the person who'd be coding, and/or if it expands the pool of people capable of making changes to the code base.
- tinglymintyfrsh 4y agoAI self-programming systems are the bottleneck gateway to the technological singularity. The main issues are communicating with humans to get feedback and solving the right problems. Once this becomes more easily doable, it will likely displace most generic, low-skilled software engineers within a few years. Then there will be other markets such as AI-assisted coding, which is all the rage right now, the trick is making them actually useful.
- the_mitsuhiko 4y agoIt's built by Chad Whitacre and I find it highly amusing. It basically listens on GitHub issues in a repo and tries it's best to address them. Here an example issue: https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/7 https://github.com/robb-oat/server/issues/7
- aliqot 4y agoChad's a super cool guy. I met him at a python conference in Nashville and he was using this big cutter to punch little heart shaped holes in pennies to promote his service gittip (later Gratipay). I had mine for years until it was stolen :/ Glad he's still out there doing good stuff! Chad if you read this you really inspired me that day the way you were so cool with random strangers and genuinely an attentive listener.
- whit537 4y agoYou're making me blush, aliqot. Thanks for the kind words! Hit me up chad@zetaweb.com and let's get you a new heart coin. I still have the punch. :D