5 ms·

One of the reasons I'm not blown away is that everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers. A lot of them outright didn't work. When

by devjab 4y ago

One of the reasons I'm not blown away is that everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers. A lot of them outright didn't work. When they did, the way GPT created our solutions were often in a way that wouldn't work well over time. Unfortunately you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you really know your tools. In many ways, this isn't too different from people performing brute-force programming through their favorite search engine, but at least most people know that "Google programming" is sort of bad. I think we're going to be cleaning up the GPT messes for decades to come because it's very confidently incorrect and much more accessible as you point out. I think we're going to see a lot of programmers who are going to trust GPT a little too much, and I think that's sort of scary. For the most part that is going to work out just fine. Often the quality of your programming isn't actually going to matter that much, because as long as it solves the business needs okish, then it's frankly great. That's not always the case, however, imagine someone using GPT to get your healthcare software wrong. I'm still impressed with it in other areas. I think it'll do wonders in the world of office automation because it seems to have the ability to succeed at this much better than any previous "no-code" attempt where the logic would almost always end up requiring people who are basically programmers for it to work. I think GPT will help here, requiring less "superusers" for a department to move their data flows into automation. Especially in areas, where efficiency and stability aren't necessarily that important if the automation-tools mean you don't need three full time employees moving data from one system to another.

dwaltrip 4y ago
Have you tried gpt-4? It's not perfect but it is a clear improvement for code.
sharemywin 4y ago
Are people actually allowing it to perform actual software development? State your assumptions. Read and summarize the pervious documents generate a data flow diagram. generate a data model. Get it to inquire about use cases and requirements generate tests for these uses cases and requirements.
- Cyphase 4y ago
  I've played with getting it to ask me about my requirements. I think that was on ChatGPT3.5? It wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible.
tablespoon 4y ago
> ...but at least most people know that "Google programming" is sort of bad. I think we're going to be cleaning up the GPT messes for decades to come because it's very confidently incorrect and much more accessible as you point out. Speaking of which: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po... > Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking and looking for correct answers. > The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure. If we're lucky ChatGPT will poison itself by pissing in its well, but it will take a lot of good things with it.
idopmstuff 4y ago
> I think it'll do wonders in the world of office automation because it seems to have the ability to succeed at this much better than any previous "no-code" attempt where the logic would almost always end up requiring people who are basically programmers for it to work. I think GPT will help here, requiring less "superusers" for a department to move their data flows into automation. Especially in areas, where efficiency and stability aren't necessarily that important if the automation-tools mean you don't need three full time employees moving data from one system to another. Yeah, at this point I think this is a valid use case for GPT-4 in its current form. I would be comfortable using it to build internal process tools or standalone things like a simple browser extension. Nobody in engineering at my company would be dumb enough to let me start monkey around with our actual codebase though.
vehementi 4y ago
> everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers Maybe this is the chatGPT equivalent of "learning to google search properly". You got bad answers, but maybe someone more competent at chatGPT prompts and workflow would have gotten to a better solution more quickly, and we need to figure out what that means
- 8organicbits 4y ago
  Is there a primer on how to engineer prompts? I didn't like my results, tried engineering my prompts a bit, but it kept introducing different error. I had the domain knowledge to see them, but it felt like whack-a-mole.
  - tmaly 4y ago
    There are a lot of posts of different prompts on some subreddits. I have seen people selling a live course on prompts to make titles for social media or blogs. There is also some research to show giving examples and answers sets up ChatGPT to give better results in the style of examples. But overall, I have not seen anything that covers a process that would work most of the time.
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  I've never seen so many people grinding to make an autocomplete engine produce "better solutions" to randomized output.
foobarian 4y ago
I think your parent is on to something: it won't be the programmers trusting GPT a little too much, it will be the PMs, and there won't be a programmer :-)
- AverageDude 4y ago
  I see an Idiocracy inspired future for programming. People claim that AI can write code so they start firing programmers. Universities stop software engineering programs as there is no one taking the courses. People stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No new innovation or new line of code written by human. Meanwhile, software quality get worse by each passing day and there’s no one to fix. AI poisons it’s own well by generating shitty code and now even simple tasks are taking 30 seconds. People say, “In the good old days, we used to get response in under 1 second”. Just like how they talk about cars and their durability in the good’ol days.
  - Cyphase 4y ago
    It seems like you're assuming that the only way for it to get better is more human-written code. Also, why would software quality get worse over time, as opposed to stagnating at worst? Attempting to use it for more complex applications? There is already so far beyond enough data available online for an AI to be a super-human senior software engineer/architect/whatever. Because there's enough for the humans, and an AI can do it better in theory. It just needs to be a good enough model. Barring the most extreme edge cases, it's never going to be worse than it is right now.
    - saurik 4y ago
      Yeah, but we don't have that kind of tech yet. When someone figures out how to build something that learns like a human does--where, even though all the books I ever read sucked, I am still a better programmer than any of those authors ever were and notably better than I was yesterday despite not reading anything new--then the world is going to change in a fundamental and potentially devastating way... but while that day might come literally tomorrow, it also isn't obvious it will ever come, and just because GPT exists doesn't imply it is going to happen. GPT is not that, though, and no matter how much data you throw at it it isn't going to become that without a fundamentally different architecture.
omaranto 4y ago
> I'm still impressed with it in other areas. You mean in areas you are less expert in? :) Maybe it's bad at everything, but each person can only tell when it comes to their own area of expertise.

by devjab 4y ago

dwaltrip 4y ago

Have you tried gpt-4? It's not perfect but it is a clear improvement for code.

sharemywin 4y ago

Are people actually allowing it to perform actual software development? State your assumptions. Read and summarize the pervious documents generate a data flow diagram. generate a data model. Get it to inquire about use cases and requirements generate tests for these uses cases and requirements.

Cyphase 4y ago
I've played with getting it to ask me about my requirements. I think that was on ChatGPT3.5? It wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible.

tablespoon 4y ago

> ...but at least most people know that "Google programming" is sort of bad. I think we're going to be cleaning up the GPT messes for decades to come because it's very confidently incorrect and much more accessible as you point out. Speaking of which: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-policy-chatgpt-is-banned https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po... > Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking and looking for correct answers. > The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure. If we're lucky ChatGPT will poison itself by pissing in its well, but it will take a lot of good things with it.

idopmstuff 4y ago

> I think it'll do wonders in the world of office automation because it seems to have the ability to succeed at this much better than any previous "no-code" attempt where the logic would almost always end up requiring people who are basically programmers for it to work. I think GPT will help here, requiring less "superusers" for a department to move their data flows into automation. Especially in areas, where efficiency and stability aren't necessarily that important if the automation-tools mean you don't need three full time employees moving data from one system to another. Yeah, at this point I think this is a valid use case for GPT-4 in its current form. I would be comfortable using it to build internal process tools or standalone things like a simple browser extension. Nobody in engineering at my company would be dumb enough to let me start monkey around with our actual codebase though.

vehementi 4y ago

> everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers Maybe this is the chatGPT equivalent of "learning to google search properly". You got bad answers, but maybe someone more competent at chatGPT prompts and workflow would have gotten to a better solution more quickly, and we need to figure out what that means

8organicbits 4y ago
Is there a primer on how to engineer prompts? I didn't like my results, tried engineering my prompts a bit, but it kept introducing different error. I had the domain knowledge to see them, but it felt like whack-a-mole.
- tmaly 4y ago
  There are a lot of posts of different prompts on some subreddits. I have seen people selling a live course on prompts to make titles for social media or blogs. There is also some research to show giving examples and answers sets up ChatGPT to give better results in the style of examples. But overall, I have not seen anything that covers a process that would work most of the time.
krainboltgreene 4y ago
I've never seen so many people grinding to make an autocomplete engine produce "better solutions" to randomized output.

foobarian 4y ago

I think your parent is on to something: it won't be the programmers trusting GPT a little too much, it will be the PMs, and there won't be a programmer :-)

AverageDude 4y ago
I see an Idiocracy inspired future for programming. People claim that AI can write code so they start firing programmers. Universities stop software engineering programs as there is no one taking the courses. People stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No new innovation or new line of code written by human. Meanwhile, software quality get worse by each passing day and there’s no one to fix. AI poisons it’s own well by generating shitty code and now even simple tasks are taking 30 seconds. People say, “In the good old days, we used to get response in under 1 second”. Just like how they talk about cars and their durability in the good’ol days.
- Cyphase 4y ago
  It seems like you're assuming that the only way for it to get better is more human-written code. Also, why would software quality get worse over time, as opposed to stagnating at worst? Attempting to use it for more complex applications? There is already so far beyond enough data available online for an AI to be a super-human senior software engineer/architect/whatever. Because there's enough for the humans, and an AI can do it better in theory. It just needs to be a good enough model. Barring the most extreme edge cases, it's never going to be worse than it is right now.
  - saurik 4y ago
    Yeah, but we don't have that kind of tech yet. When someone figures out how to build something that learns like a human does--where, even though all the books I ever read sucked, I am still a better programmer than any of those authors ever were and notably better than I was yesterday despite not reading anything new--then the world is going to change in a fundamental and potentially devastating way... but while that day might come literally tomorrow, it also isn't obvious it will ever come, and just because GPT exists doesn't imply it is going to happen. GPT is not that, though, and no matter how much data you throw at it it isn't going to become that without a fundamentally different architecture.

omaranto 4y ago

> I'm still impressed with it in other areas. You mean in areas you are less expert in? :) Maybe it's bad at everything, but each person can only tell when it comes to their own area of expertise.