8 ms·

Somehow these GitHub-trained ML code assistants sadden me. My idea of enjoyable high-quality programming isn’t to dip a spoon into an ocean of soup made of oth

by pavlov 4y ago

Somehow these GitHub-trained ML code assistants sadden me. My idea of enjoyable high-quality programming isn’t to dip a spoon into an ocean of soup made of other people’s random design decisions and bugs accumulated over fifteen years, hoping to get a spoonful without hidden crunchy insect bits. I know the soup is nutritious and healthy 98% of the time, and eating it saves so much time compared to preparing a filet mignon myself. But it’s still brown sludge.

indeyets 4y ago
Well, these are not tools for the art-level programming. But it helps to improve productivity of commercial programming a lot. Different genre
carlbarrdahl 4y ago
What if you could inspire the assistant with code you like and it would generate in that style? For example choose a few repos with code-bases you want to mimic, give it a set of instructions (and perhaps structure), and it generates code for it. Maybe something like GPT, style transfer, and OpenAPI combined.
neximo64 4y ago
And yet it is so useful. It is just an assistant. It's quite unlike soup, since you can easily alter it.
- indeyets 4y ago
  I think it might be compared of "cook it yourself" kits of ingredients. Good base but you can alter to your liking
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fijiaarone 4y ago
    Like hamburger helper and box macaroni and cheese.
boredemployee 4y ago
Since everyone has different goals and opinions on this, etc, many people will see it in a different way. I love to solve _problems_ and to help people with it, but sometimes I just hate to write code to solve them. I wish my computer could have a clear picture of the solution that is in my mind so I didnt have to write a single line of code, so I could focus on the creative part of the problem solving
- sanderjd 4y ago
  Unfortunately, I'm skeptical that this is going to end up looking much like "my computer has a clear picture of the solution in my mind so that I don't have to write a single line of code". I fear it's a siren song that's going to drag many of us into the shoals. But I totally agree with you that it would be a positive outcome if we spent less time writing lines of code and more time using better tools to direct computers in solving problems and (I think just as critically) understanding the dynamics of those solutions. A major facet of my skepticism is that I think progress on that second part seems to be lagging way behind... I foresee a lot of "we had a team, who have all now left, that used AI to write this system and it's mostly working right except in all these ways, and you need to fix it, good luck!" in all of our futures.
  - rakejake 4y ago
    Exactly. Isn't it already a big pain when the guys who wrote the code left long back, and you're left with some truly puzzling stuff that is not well-commented or documented? I'm not sure "asking the AI" will be of much help here. It is going to be incredibly easy for people to be the 100x programmer who always delivers on time and promptly leaves for a higher paying job, leaving the debris in the hands of some poor sod who knows nothing about the code or the decisions that led to it. What AI will do in this scenario is make the "creative" part much easier and jolly and the maintenance part much more painful and frustrating.
    - boredemployee 4y ago
      Sounds a lot of drama for a problem that already happens without AI? So I'm not sure what exactly AI would worse here?
williamcotton 4y ago
How much of your identity is made up of “programmer”? Are you proud or hesitant to tell people you’re a programmer? Do you identify as a “painter” or anything else? How often do you compare yourself to other programmers and feel bad?
- thuuuomas 4y ago
  Do you truly believe yr StableDiffusion Americana is “not like what anyone else is making”? You’ve got some knots to untangle :)
  - williamcotton 4y ago
    Oh yeah, what are those knots? What I meant by that is that there are no source images that have previously existed, and especially not in these animated latent space forms. And no, I’m not the only person to be using the tools like this and I never claimed to be. https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-making-of-distant-desert-highway-with-chatgpt-and-stable-diffusion https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-making-of-distant-des... What I think I’m doing with this is revisiting some live audio visual stuff I was working with over a decade ago, but instead of having to hand draw as I did in this video: https://vimeo.com/6110370 https://vimeo.com/6110370 Around 2:20 has some landscape animations. There’s some really low quality temp imagery in that video as well because it take a lot of time to draw stuff! I basically stopped doing this kind of stuff because it was already too much work to do on top of writing and performing music let alone all the nonsense related to getting shows and managing a band… I don’t have time to make these base visuals, animate them, program, etc. Also, I want to try to map audio inputs like amplitude to vectors in the latent space… snare hit increases (lightning:1.0) vector, kick the (ocean:1.0) vector, etc. Or maybe I don’t do anything other than explore and get inspired.
    - thuuuomas 4y ago
      A dark, desert highway, huh? Cool wind in yr hair? :)))
      - 4y ago
rileymat2 4y ago
I agree with you, however, the work I see is not that. What I see is a person who copy and pastes crap around until it works and calls it a day. I think code assistants can and will compete with them.
Zetobal 4y ago
Eh... I don't have the desire to do all the plumbing in my house and neither in my code.
- mstade 4y ago
  I'm afraid you may have chosen the wrong profession, to be honest. Programmers – myself included – are essentially glorified plumbers, piping data from one end to another. As much as we'd all like to think we're all architects, let's just be honest. That's not to say plumbing doesn't take skill, it certainly does, but the point of it is that nobody except the next plumber cares how the pipes are laid out, so long as it works and works well. It's when one blows and you have to fix it, or install a second bathroom, that shit really tends to come out. If I'm the one that has to do the work, I can only hope the previous plumber had some idea of what they were doing, and didn't just leave it entirely to automation. But if they did I'd hope they trust, but verify.
  - Zetobal 4y ago
    You might just be in a different part of CS because in my part plumbing is a boring necessity and not the main focus of development work. Ofc you must do QS but that's also part of the job if you outsource the work. The profession is way broader than your narrow-minded and condescending comment might suggest.
  - jstimpfle 4y ago
    In some areas, you need to control precisely what goes where, and when. You need to achieve high throughput and/or low latency. You can't just install N x M connections but need a suitable architecture to minimize the amount of pipes as well as keep a flexible connectivity. A lot of thought goes into the architecture at a global scale, it isn't just the local "here's two ends, let's glue them together". In fact if there's a lot of that something is wrong.
  - ren_engineer 4y ago
    >Programmers – myself included – are essentially glorified plumbers, piping data from one end to another. As much as we'd all like to think we're all architects, let's just be honest. depends what you are working on, I suppose the average web developer could probably be considered this. But there are people working on problems that require major CS knowledge, domain expertise, etc. Those types would definitely be closer to engineers building the tools that the plumber uses
Pandabob 4y ago
OpenAI Is reportedly hiring dev contractors to teach the new version of their Codex model[0]. [0]: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-an-army-of-contractors-to-make-basic-coding-obsolete https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-...
- echelon 4y ago
  There goes the software career. The six figure salaries won't last another decade. For some of us, maybe, but certainly not most of us. Learn AI now. Good luck, everyone.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    It’s not about learning AI so much as learning how to manage, delegate, and ask for exactly what you want. The last skill is basically what you already do as a programmer, but you need to be able to precisely ask for bigger things.
    - echelon 4y ago
      For now. This is year one. This is all moving too fast to predict.
      - gfodor 4y ago
        Well I think eventually humans won’t have any role, but it does seem like a pretty robust prediction that until then, the role of the human programmer will slowly morph into what looks like a manager of 1000x engineers with perfect communication skills. What other paths could there be? (Genuine q)
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Yup. The folks here who think this is not coming for them are delusional. It really doesn't take that much time to teach the CS fundamentals needed to help you figure out where to put the generated code. Or even to know how to prompt it. Our careers as high earners are collectively doomed. I really didn't expect LLMs to get this good until 2025 minimum. Pretty sad that "learn to code" is gonna be dead. It was the only place where the American dream was still alive.
pjc50 4y ago
Given all the discussion about "supply chain security", heading in this direction is surprising. I guess it means we automate away the creative part and leave the humans to the duller work of validation. Everyone's going to become a software tester.
- krono 4y ago
  > Futurists in 1950: Automation will free mankind from meaningless tedium to focus on creative pursuits only humans can master. > Techbros in 2023: We coded AI to write all your books, music, and TV so you can focus on the meaningless tedium of your cubicle farm. From this popular tweet by @stealthygeek https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1618997354199400449 https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1618997354199400449
  - ren_engineer 4y ago
    turns out math and blue collar labor is much harder to automate than "creative" tasks. Watching people who thump their chest about being progressive and supporting science turn into luddites due to having to face the harsh reality that their skills aren't that special is funny honestly. Are they going to follow the luddites and call for people to storm data centers and smash the GPUs?
    - popinman322 4y ago
      Properly creative work still isn't automated. The current generation of systems can only generate content within the codomain (semantic space) they were trained on; they're interpolating and need more work to extrapolate. Most creative work companies need can likely be substantially automated either now or soon. Most creative work individuals want will take much longer to automate. Things like movies, where even humans can't robustly figure out which ideas will work, will take more human discretion.
      - ren_engineer 4y ago
        who know how it will progress, but I can see the ability to churn out "MVP movies" where AI actors and voice actors are used and scenes are generated. There is already stuff to create sequences of images that create videos based on prompts Hollywood studios are already using game engines like Unreal to create virtual sets in real-time. I could see some sort of hobbyist pipeline being created that will get a decent starting point made. Workflow would be like this: >use GPT to generate scenes and ideas >GPT then used to create multiple different scripts, human chooses the best for each scene >AI voice synthesizer used to do the dialogue >Stable diffusion or equivalent used to create multiple 3D models for characters, finishing touches by human >models then used by game engine to act out the scene, not sure how much of this can be done via AI >live action stuff can use deep fake technology with any random person being deep faked to look like the AI generated unique character I can see some crazy animated/CGI movies being produced much cheaper than traditional Hollywood style used now. We could see indie projects with the look of much bigger budget projects thanks to automation. It will level the playing field somewhat and allow people with better ideas to flourish, rather than just people with connections to get funding from studios.
credit_guy 4y ago
Take a look at the average faces of women across different countries [1]. They are all strikingly beautiful. By averaging, a lot of imperfections get diluted away. Like in Anna Karenina "happy families are all alike, unhappy ones are each in its own way". The defects are idiosyncratic, the commonalities are good. [1] https://fstoppers.com/portraits/average-faces-women-around-world-2944 https://fstoppers.com/portraits/average-faces-women-around-w...
- gavinray 4y ago
  I like this analogy, and I'd never seen this before, thanks for sharing. (My experience with Copilot and ML-assisted programming has been extremely positive, I would not choose to go without it at this point)
  - djmips 4y ago
    Do you think it would work for food. Or maybe that's what McDonalds is.
- amelius 4y ago
  "You look average" will be my new pickup line :)
- RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
  Failure is an extremely common and accepted thing in biological systems - your offspring may just die if you have incompatible genes. Software on the other hand is a logical environment with clear, logical requirements. It ought to work, not just fall apart randomly. There is no guarantee that sticking the average of one software into a completely different one will satisfy the logical requirements by any means whatsoever.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Just wait until we build systems that don't adhere to rigid logic and that can tolerate fuzziness and a degree of imperfection. I can see us switching from programing languages to some new type of logical construct that AI excels at.
GuB-42 4y ago
I am not much into ML code assistants either, though it may change in the future as technology becomes better and more reliable. But I don't buy the "joy of writing code" argument. Coding is all about making a computer work for you, and I think that taming AIs to be more efficient without letting it introduce random crap will become both important and enjoyable. I think the techniques we have now are too crude for that, but it will improve. Keep in mind that even if you are writing C, you are already at high level, using libraries and compilers other people wrote, bugs included. Now there is a certain charm being close to "hands on" programming, but if that's the case, go get an Amiga and make a few demos. It won't pay the bills, but it can be fun.
- discreteevent 4y ago
  >But I don't buy the "joy of writing code" argument. Coding is all about making a computer work for you That is an absolutely valid point of view. But it doesn't apply to everyone. Programming is something that can take me into the zone like nothing else. And it has the added side effect of making me think more precisely about higher level problems as well. It's one of those excercises that help me stop fooling myself (in the Feynman sense).
  - popinman322 4y ago
    This reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend while playing Factorio together. Traditionally you'd put a list of recipe ratios into a spreadsheet and then calculate what you need. But there's a mod called Helm that can handle all those calculations for you, so you just need to specify what logistics components you'll be using. His immediate comment was "that takes all the fun out of it", to which I responded "it just moves the fun elsewhere." In this case, the programmer still provides intent and strategy for the bot. We know roughly how efficient the final algorithm should be, and roughly what the data model might be-- being able to get 90% of the code written in 30s-1min should free up more time to think about the system as a whole, I think. (Though this point has been beaten nearly to death, now that I ruminate on it.) At least in my own experience with Copilot it's been very convenient not having to worry about the finer details. More "should I model the problem this way?" and less "and now I bring in the inner for loop, then I overwrite the first part of the buffer up to index j...".
netr0ute 4y ago
I don't know about this. I would actually expect the opposite, where the soup is just fine 98% of the time and sweet the last 2% because that's the "good stuff" that you can get creative on because the AI doesn't know how to help you.
gfodor 4y ago
These tools don’t introduce design decisions or other things that really constitute most of the “art” of programming. They just help you with the lowest grain bits of moving data around. This is probably a temporary condition but your concern here seems misplaced given where the tools are at today.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  You didn't write your prompt well enough. I can ask it to design the software component and code it.
fortyseven 4y ago
So don't use it?
derefr 4y ago
> an ocean of soup made of other people’s random design decisions and bugs accumulated over fifteen years As a human programmer, is this not what your own brain looks like? What are you doing to the information you take in that allows you to avoid regurgitating the "crunchy insect bits" of your own training corpus?
SergeAx 4y ago
It's okay, you don't have to use AI assistants to program.
nbardy 4y ago
This isn't how large language models work. Deep Features are much more rich than this. It's not random the models have their own sense of taste, and you can easily control it with comments specifying what you care about in the code you are going to write.
nikau 4y ago
Is a bold assumption to assume most code these days isn't just a series of copy paste fragments from stack overflow anyway.

by pavlov 4y ago

indeyets 4y ago

Well, these are not tools for the art-level programming. But it helps to improve productivity of commercial programming a lot. Different genre

carlbarrdahl 4y ago

What if you could inspire the assistant with code you like and it would generate in that style? For example choose a few repos with code-bases you want to mimic, give it a set of instructions (and perhaps structure), and it generates code for it. Maybe something like GPT, style transfer, and OpenAPI combined.

neximo64 4y ago

And yet it is so useful. It is just an assistant. It's quite unlike soup, since you can easily alter it.

indeyets 4y ago
I think it might be compared of "cook it yourself" kits of ingredients. Good base but you can alter to your liking
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fijiaarone 4y ago
  Like hamburger helper and box macaroni and cheese.

boredemployee 4y ago

Since everyone has different goals and opinions on this, etc, many people will see it in a different way. I love to solve _problems_ and to help people with it, but sometimes I just hate to write code to solve them. I wish my computer could have a clear picture of the solution that is in my mind so I didnt have to write a single line of code, so I could focus on the creative part of the problem solving

sanderjd 4y ago
Unfortunately, I'm skeptical that this is going to end up looking much like "my computer has a clear picture of the solution in my mind so that I don't have to write a single line of code". I fear it's a siren song that's going to drag many of us into the shoals. But I totally agree with you that it would be a positive outcome if we spent less time writing lines of code and more time using better tools to direct computers in solving problems and (I think just as critically) understanding the dynamics of those solutions. A major facet of my skepticism is that I think progress on that second part seems to be lagging way behind... I foresee a lot of "we had a team, who have all now left, that used AI to write this system and it's mostly working right except in all these ways, and you need to fix it, good luck!" in all of our futures.
- rakejake 4y ago
  Exactly. Isn't it already a big pain when the guys who wrote the code left long back, and you're left with some truly puzzling stuff that is not well-commented or documented? I'm not sure "asking the AI" will be of much help here. It is going to be incredibly easy for people to be the 100x programmer who always delivers on time and promptly leaves for a higher paying job, leaving the debris in the hands of some poor sod who knows nothing about the code or the decisions that led to it. What AI will do in this scenario is make the "creative" part much easier and jolly and the maintenance part much more painful and frustrating.
  - boredemployee 4y ago
    Sounds a lot of drama for a problem that already happens without AI? So I'm not sure what exactly AI would worse here?

williamcotton 4y ago

How much of your identity is made up of “programmer”? Are you proud or hesitant to tell people you’re a programmer? Do you identify as a “painter” or anything else? How often do you compare yourself to other programmers and feel bad?

thuuuomas 4y ago
Do you truly believe yr StableDiffusion Americana is “not like what anyone else is making”? You’ve got some knots to untangle :)
- williamcotton 4y ago
  Oh yeah, what are those knots? What I meant by that is that there are no source images that have previously existed, and especially not in these animated latent space forms. And no, I’m not the only person to be using the tools like this and I never claimed to be. https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-making-of-distant-desert-highway-with-chatgpt-and-stable-diffusion https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-making-of-distant-des... What I think I’m doing with this is revisiting some live audio visual stuff I was working with over a decade ago, but instead of having to hand draw as I did in this video: https://vimeo.com/6110370 https://vimeo.com/6110370 Around 2:20 has some landscape animations. There’s some really low quality temp imagery in that video as well because it take a lot of time to draw stuff! I basically stopped doing this kind of stuff because it was already too much work to do on top of writing and performing music let alone all the nonsense related to getting shows and managing a band… I don’t have time to make these base visuals, animate them, program, etc. Also, I want to try to map audio inputs like amplitude to vectors in the latent space… snare hit increases (lightning:1.0) vector, kick the (ocean:1.0) vector, etc. Or maybe I don’t do anything other than explore and get inspired.
  - thuuuomas 4y ago
    A dark, desert highway, huh? Cool wind in yr hair? :)))
    - 4y ago

rileymat2 4y ago

I agree with you, however, the work I see is not that. What I see is a person who copy and pastes crap around until it works and calls it a day. I think code assistants can and will compete with them.

Zetobal 4y ago

Eh... I don't have the desire to do all the plumbing in my house and neither in my code.

mstade 4y ago
I'm afraid you may have chosen the wrong profession, to be honest. Programmers – myself included – are essentially glorified plumbers, piping data from one end to another. As much as we'd all like to think we're all architects, let's just be honest. That's not to say plumbing doesn't take skill, it certainly does, but the point of it is that nobody except the next plumber cares how the pipes are laid out, so long as it works and works well. It's when one blows and you have to fix it, or install a second bathroom, that shit really tends to come out. If I'm the one that has to do the work, I can only hope the previous plumber had some idea of what they were doing, and didn't just leave it entirely to automation. But if they did I'd hope they trust, but verify.
- Zetobal 4y ago
  You might just be in a different part of CS because in my part plumbing is a boring necessity and not the main focus of development work. Ofc you must do QS but that's also part of the job if you outsource the work. The profession is way broader than your narrow-minded and condescending comment might suggest.
- jstimpfle 4y ago
  In some areas, you need to control precisely what goes where, and when. You need to achieve high throughput and/or low latency. You can't just install N x M connections but need a suitable architecture to minimize the amount of pipes as well as keep a flexible connectivity. A lot of thought goes into the architecture at a global scale, it isn't just the local "here's two ends, let's glue them together". In fact if there's a lot of that something is wrong.
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  >Programmers – myself included – are essentially glorified plumbers, piping data from one end to another. As much as we'd all like to think we're all architects, let's just be honest. depends what you are working on, I suppose the average web developer could probably be considered this. But there are people working on problems that require major CS knowledge, domain expertise, etc. Those types would definitely be closer to engineers building the tools that the plumber uses

Pandabob 4y ago

OpenAI Is reportedly hiring dev contractors to teach the new version of their Codex model[0]. [0]: https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-an-army-of-contractors-to-make-basic-coding-obsolete https://www.semafor.com/article/01/27/2023/openai-has-hired-...

echelon 4y ago
There goes the software career. The six figure salaries won't last another decade. For some of us, maybe, but certainly not most of us. Learn AI now. Good luck, everyone.
- gfodor 4y ago
  It’s not about learning AI so much as learning how to manage, delegate, and ask for exactly what you want. The last skill is basically what you already do as a programmer, but you need to be able to precisely ask for bigger things.
  - echelon 4y ago
    For now. This is year one. This is all moving too fast to predict.
    - gfodor 4y ago
      Well I think eventually humans won’t have any role, but it does seem like a pretty robust prediction that until then, the role of the human programmer will slowly morph into what looks like a manager of 1000x engineers with perfect communication skills. What other paths could there be? (Genuine q)
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Yup. The folks here who think this is not coming for them are delusional. It really doesn't take that much time to teach the CS fundamentals needed to help you figure out where to put the generated code. Or even to know how to prompt it. Our careers as high earners are collectively doomed. I really didn't expect LLMs to get this good until 2025 minimum. Pretty sad that "learn to code" is gonna be dead. It was the only place where the American dream was still alive.

pjc50 4y ago

Given all the discussion about "supply chain security", heading in this direction is surprising. I guess it means we automate away the creative part and leave the humans to the duller work of validation. Everyone's going to become a software tester.

krono 4y ago
> Futurists in 1950: Automation will free mankind from meaningless tedium to focus on creative pursuits only humans can master. > Techbros in 2023: We coded AI to write all your books, music, and TV so you can focus on the meaningless tedium of your cubicle farm. From this popular tweet by @stealthygeek https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1618997354199400449 https://twitter.com/stealthygeek/status/1618997354199400449
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  turns out math and blue collar labor is much harder to automate than "creative" tasks. Watching people who thump their chest about being progressive and supporting science turn into luddites due to having to face the harsh reality that their skills aren't that special is funny honestly. Are they going to follow the luddites and call for people to storm data centers and smash the GPUs?
  - popinman322 4y ago
    Properly creative work still isn't automated. The current generation of systems can only generate content within the codomain (semantic space) they were trained on; they're interpolating and need more work to extrapolate. Most creative work companies need can likely be substantially automated either now or soon. Most creative work individuals want will take much longer to automate. Things like movies, where even humans can't robustly figure out which ideas will work, will take more human discretion.
    - ren_engineer 4y ago
      who know how it will progress, but I can see the ability to churn out "MVP movies" where AI actors and voice actors are used and scenes are generated. There is already stuff to create sequences of images that create videos based on prompts Hollywood studios are already using game engines like Unreal to create virtual sets in real-time. I could see some sort of hobbyist pipeline being created that will get a decent starting point made. Workflow would be like this: >use GPT to generate scenes and ideas >GPT then used to create multiple different scripts, human chooses the best for each scene >AI voice synthesizer used to do the dialogue >Stable diffusion or equivalent used to create multiple 3D models for characters, finishing touches by human >models then used by game engine to act out the scene, not sure how much of this can be done via AI >live action stuff can use deep fake technology with any random person being deep faked to look like the AI generated unique character I can see some crazy animated/CGI movies being produced much cheaper than traditional Hollywood style used now. We could see indie projects with the look of much bigger budget projects thanks to automation. It will level the playing field somewhat and allow people with better ideas to flourish, rather than just people with connections to get funding from studios.

credit_guy 4y ago

Take a look at the average faces of women across different countries [1]. They are all strikingly beautiful. By averaging, a lot of imperfections get diluted away. Like in Anna Karenina "happy families are all alike, unhappy ones are each in its own way". The defects are idiosyncratic, the commonalities are good. [1] https://fstoppers.com/portraits/average-faces-women-around-world-2944 https://fstoppers.com/portraits/average-faces-women-around-w...

gavinray 4y ago
I like this analogy, and I'd never seen this before, thanks for sharing. (My experience with Copilot and ML-assisted programming has been extremely positive, I would not choose to go without it at this point)
- djmips 4y ago
  Do you think it would work for food. Or maybe that's what McDonalds is.
amelius 4y ago
"You look average" will be my new pickup line :)
RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm 4y ago
Failure is an extremely common and accepted thing in biological systems - your offspring may just die if you have incompatible genes. Software on the other hand is a logical environment with clear, logical requirements. It ought to work, not just fall apart randomly. There is no guarantee that sticking the average of one software into a completely different one will satisfy the logical requirements by any means whatsoever.
- echelon 4y ago
  Just wait until we build systems that don't adhere to rigid logic and that can tolerate fuzziness and a degree of imperfection. I can see us switching from programing languages to some new type of logical construct that AI excels at.

GuB-42 4y ago

I am not much into ML code assistants either, though it may change in the future as technology becomes better and more reliable. But I don't buy the "joy of writing code" argument. Coding is all about making a computer work for you, and I think that taming AIs to be more efficient without letting it introduce random crap will become both important and enjoyable. I think the techniques we have now are too crude for that, but it will improve. Keep in mind that even if you are writing C, you are already at high level, using libraries and compilers other people wrote, bugs included. Now there is a certain charm being close to "hands on" programming, but if that's the case, go get an Amiga and make a few demos. It won't pay the bills, but it can be fun.

discreteevent 4y ago
>But I don't buy the "joy of writing code" argument. Coding is all about making a computer work for you That is an absolutely valid point of view. But it doesn't apply to everyone. Programming is something that can take me into the zone like nothing else. And it has the added side effect of making me think more precisely about higher level problems as well. It's one of those excercises that help me stop fooling myself (in the Feynman sense).
- popinman322 4y ago
  This reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend while playing Factorio together. Traditionally you'd put a list of recipe ratios into a spreadsheet and then calculate what you need. But there's a mod called Helm that can handle all those calculations for you, so you just need to specify what logistics components you'll be using. His immediate comment was "that takes all the fun out of it", to which I responded "it just moves the fun elsewhere." In this case, the programmer still provides intent and strategy for the bot. We know roughly how efficient the final algorithm should be, and roughly what the data model might be-- being able to get 90% of the code written in 30s-1min should free up more time to think about the system as a whole, I think. (Though this point has been beaten nearly to death, now that I ruminate on it.) At least in my own experience with Copilot it's been very convenient not having to worry about the finer details. More "should I model the problem this way?" and less "and now I bring in the inner for loop, then I overwrite the first part of the buffer up to index j...".

netr0ute 4y ago

I don't know about this. I would actually expect the opposite, where the soup is just fine 98% of the time and sweet the last 2% because that's the "good stuff" that you can get creative on because the AI doesn't know how to help you.

gfodor 4y ago

These tools don’t introduce design decisions or other things that really constitute most of the “art” of programming. They just help you with the lowest grain bits of moving data around. This is probably a temporary condition but your concern here seems misplaced given where the tools are at today.

Der_Einzige 4y ago
You didn't write your prompt well enough. I can ask it to design the software component and code it.

fortyseven 4y ago

So don't use it?

derefr 4y ago

> an ocean of soup made of other people’s random design decisions and bugs accumulated over fifteen years As a human programmer, is this not what your own brain looks like? What are you doing to the information you take in that allows you to avoid regurgitating the "crunchy insect bits" of your own training corpus?

SergeAx 4y ago

It's okay, you don't have to use AI assistants to program.

nbardy 4y ago

This isn't how large language models work. Deep Features are much more rich than this. It's not random the models have their own sense of taste, and you can easily control it with comments specifying what you care about in the code you are going to write.

nikau 4y ago

Is a bold assumption to assume most code these days isn't just a series of copy paste fragments from stack overflow anyway.