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Appreciate the effort but these demos have really quickly become so boring. If you can design an entire website with the AI tools, it appears its almost certain

Appreciate the effort but these demos have really quickly become so boring. If you can design an entire website with the AI tools, it appears its almost certainly a website you don't need to create in the first place. Either it has already essentially been made by somebody who actually understood and cared about the code, or it's such a trivial mix of stuff you're better off making a squarespace site or whatever. At least that is hardened and tested as a product. Like, we should maybe give pause to the fact that this is at least the 20th demo specifically about "making a website." If this technology is so powerful, saves so much time, democratizes the profession so much, etc why are the demos all the same? Either people are unimaginative, which they are not, or perhaps this is pretty much what we can get from this in general. Coding involve care and inspiration, and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again, even if youre getting the AI to do the reinvention for you. But beyond any principled thoughts, just not seeing the returns here that people are trying to get me to see. Lots of laymen have been making wonderful websites for 30 years. Its cool the computer knows what css people have been using for those decades, but it only makes brittle uninspired things that only incidentally work. I'd really like to know, beyond the hype, if any serious engineers have actually used this stuff for an extended amount of time. Ive tried and tried to use it and convince myself its helping me, but it just leads to so much frustration with the hallucinations and misunderstandings and schizophrenic comprehension of its own context..

ux-app 4y ago
>Coding involve care and inspiration give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls. Aligning buttons and agonizing over 18px vs 20px padding is a monumental waste of human capital. 99.999% of coding is basically an interface to a DB (fetch some data, display it, maybe do some basic arithmetic and then save the data). A machine will do all that drudgery better and quicker. We're not there yet, but the writing is on the wall. >and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again you must be new to the job.
- gwoolhurme 4y ago
  While I don't disagree with you largely. What a really nasty way to say it no? It's true a lot of what happens is boilerplate API calls and copy pasting of solved problems. AI is making that happen a lot faster, however the parent comment also has some good points. If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that. It would be nice to see something more exciting because this is the Nth version of "AI made a thing" I have seen.
  - ux-app 4y ago
    >If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that. ... which involves fetching some data, displaying it, maybe doing some basic arithmetic and then shuffling it off to a DB? drudgery. bring the machines on so we don;t have to deal with this nonsense any more.
    - apsurd 4y ago
      i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do? often in life i find myself reminding myself that everything is just something to do. serious question, what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits vs not, for lack of a better word. edit to add: i painted my family's garage in my teens, manually. and i'm thirties now and when i go to my family home i see the painted garage. it never leaves me, the value.
      - ux-app 4y ago
        >i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do? whatever it is, it ain't making websites. >what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits painting your garage is getting pretty close to it I think.
        thexumaker 4y ago
        To that extent nothing is worthy of humans to do. Nothing we do is truly unique. It only seems unique because we have a poor understanding of it. Might as well not exist or eat or poop because that’s not worthy
wraptile 4y ago
Because new-developer market is huge. There are more beginner/intermediate developers than seniors by a large margin. It gets the clicks. As an anecdote our technical blogs covering vital industry techniques and news get like 10% of the readers of our introduction blogs do. I'd imagine the best selling progamming books are the ones aimed at beginners too.
janeway 4y ago
Here is my example. In the last two weeks I have rewritten, from scratch, one of my genomics pipelines which can analyse 1000 clinical exomes in a few hours to return candidate genetic causes of rare disease. * 42 scripts/programs. * 3694 lines of code. * Several languages. * Process raw fastq data up to germline variant calling. * Using high-performance computing cluster. * Process vcf data into clinical variant interpretation. * Options for custom filtering strategies. * Statistical analysis and logs. * Replaced several mainstream tools that are difficult to manage. Final results: 1. This work was ~6-10x times faster. 2. I probably would not have rewritten this better version as it would have taken too long. 3. Instead of getting stuck at any difficult impasse I can get context-specific alternatives and testable example code.
- krashidov 4y ago
  Which specific tools have you been using? Just a general dialogue with chatGPT or a are you using CoPilot?
  - janeway 4y ago
    Only ChatGPT. I usually state bullet points and pseudocode and ask for answer, or current code with request to fix the error. With good requests I usually get a working answer but sometimes need careful checking.
    - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
      How would you estimate the work breaks down between you and chatgpt as a rough percentage? It sounds like you're still doing a lot of the coding, obviously lots of prompt work, analysing and understanding the results, etc.
mike_hock 4y ago
I love how every person on the VR website is wearing a completely different headset. It's just haphazardly throwing together vague associations of "VR." It doesn't understand anything. It's an amazing achievement of AI research, but we're not anywhere close to AI replacing humans in any kind of engineering discipline. A giant leap for AI but a step backward for man. We're gonna see code quality decline due to people thinking they can let the AI do it. Most importantly, we'll probably see an uptick in vulnerabilities.
- gwern 4y ago
  He could've made it the same headset using one of the standard tools for defining a specific object to get consistency across images (Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, hypernetworks, LoRA etc etc). I'm sure Midjourney supports something for that purpose, he just didn't use it.

ux-app 4y ago

>Coding involve care and inspiration give it a rest mate. Most coding is garbage generic gluing of boilerplate and API calls. Aligning buttons and agonizing over 18px vs 20px padding is a monumental waste of human capital. 99.999% of coding is basically an interface to a DB (fetch some data, display it, maybe do some basic arithmetic and then save the data). A machine will do all that drudgery better and quicker. We're not there yet, but the writing is on the wall. >and should not necessarily be reinventing the wheel again and again you must be new to the job.

gwoolhurme 4y ago
While I don't disagree with you largely. What a really nasty way to say it no? It's true a lot of what happens is boilerplate API calls and copy pasting of solved problems. AI is making that happen a lot faster, however the parent comment also has some good points. If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that. It would be nice to see something more exciting because this is the Nth version of "AI made a thing" I have seen.
- ux-app 4y ago
  >If you work for a large company most of your day is spent understanding domain specific problems then executing on that. ... which involves fetching some data, displaying it, maybe doing some basic arithmetic and then shuffling it off to a DB? drudgery. bring the machines on so we don;t have to deal with this nonsense any more.
  - apsurd 4y ago
    i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do? often in life i find myself reminding myself that everything is just something to do. serious question, what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits vs not, for lack of a better word. edit to add: i painted my family's garage in my teens, manually. and i'm thirties now and when i go to my family home i see the painted garage. it never leaves me, the value.
    - ux-app 4y ago
      >i'm curious what you think is worthy of humans to do? whatever it is, it ain't making websites. >what do you then distinguish as enlightened pursuits painting your garage is getting pretty close to it I think.
      - thexumaker 4y ago
        To that extent nothing is worthy of humans to do. Nothing we do is truly unique. It only seems unique because we have a poor understanding of it. Might as well not exist or eat or poop because that’s not worthy

wraptile 4y ago

Because new-developer market is huge. There are more beginner/intermediate developers than seniors by a large margin. It gets the clicks. As an anecdote our technical blogs covering vital industry techniques and news get like 10% of the readers of our introduction blogs do. I'd imagine the best selling progamming books are the ones aimed at beginners too.

janeway 4y ago

Here is my example. In the last two weeks I have rewritten, from scratch, one of my genomics pipelines which can analyse 1000 clinical exomes in a few hours to return candidate genetic causes of rare disease. * 42 scripts/programs. * 3694 lines of code. * Several languages. * Process raw fastq data up to germline variant calling. * Using high-performance computing cluster. * Process vcf data into clinical variant interpretation. * Options for custom filtering strategies. * Statistical analysis and logs. * Replaced several mainstream tools that are difficult to manage. Final results: 1. This work was ~6-10x times faster. 2. I probably would not have rewritten this better version as it would have taken too long. 3. Instead of getting stuck at any difficult impasse I can get context-specific alternatives and testable example code.

krashidov 4y ago
Which specific tools have you been using? Just a general dialogue with chatGPT or a are you using CoPilot?
- janeway 4y ago
  Only ChatGPT. I usually state bullet points and pseudocode and ask for answer, or current code with request to fix the error. With good requests I usually get a working answer but sometimes need careful checking.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    How would you estimate the work breaks down between you and chatgpt as a rough percentage? It sounds like you're still doing a lot of the coding, obviously lots of prompt work, analysing and understanding the results, etc.

mike_hock 4y ago

I love how every person on the VR website is wearing a completely different headset. It's just haphazardly throwing together vague associations of "VR." It doesn't understand anything. It's an amazing achievement of AI research, but we're not anywhere close to AI replacing humans in any kind of engineering discipline. A giant leap for AI but a step backward for man. We're gonna see code quality decline due to people thinking they can let the AI do it. Most importantly, we'll probably see an uptick in vulnerabilities.

gwern 4y ago
He could've made it the same headset using one of the standard tools for defining a specific object to get consistency across images (Textual Inversion, DreamBooth, hypernetworks, LoRA etc etc). I'm sure Midjourney supports something for that purpose, he just didn't use it.