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I often find it faster to write something from scratch rather than to work with someone else’s code to fix it. In the latter case I need to understand the inten

I often find it faster to write something from scratch rather than to work with someone else’s code to fix it. In the latter case I need to understand the intent, the whys behind the choices. Well guess what, LLM-generated code is someone else’s code: an amalgamation derived from many peoples’ code. Except those people are ‘helpfully’ “abstracted away” from you by the middleman, so you can’t know their original intents and choices. What’s worse, it’s someone else’s code that will be treated as your code—unlike working with a legacy system that everyone knows was written by some guy, in this case any bugs will be squarely on you.

cyanydeez 4y ago
Like autopilot in planes that fall back to experienced pilots, we're embarking on the most dangerous "uncanny valley" maneuver where these systems will be adopted by experienced pilots who know the limits but who will inevitably be followed by either no one or students whose conception is entirely synthetic. At that point the plane AI better be 100% TRUSTWORTHY cause there's no safe fallback.
AdieuToLogic 4y ago
This offering, and the other half-dozen like it this past week or so, is like giving a kid a flamethrower. It's all fun and games until they burn down your house. > ... I need to understand the intent, the whys behind the choices. As do I. And that is something ChatGPT-X (for any given X) cannot provide, regardless of whether or not what is produced is correct. Perhaps with some form of backward chaining[0] a ChatGPT-X someday can explain how it arrived at what was produced works. But "the why" is the domain of people. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining
- circuit10 4y ago
  You can ask it to explain why. It might not be a true representation of why those decisions were made but at least it’s a plausible explanation of why something could work like that which is better than nothing. I’m not sure why you think it can’t do that already?
- column 4y ago
  or you know, you can ask it to insert helpful comments
  - anileated 4y ago
    Which you can’t rely on anyway.
- safety1st 4y ago
  It's weird to see a forum for hackers, with hacker in the name, and with a line about encouraging curiosity in the charter, be so hostile to someone who hacked something together. Sign of the times perhaps. Though I guess it's not much different from the thread trashing Dropbox however many years back.
  - distcs 4y ago
    > It's weird to see a forum for hackers, with hacker in the name, and with a line about encouraging curiosity in the charter, be so hostile to someone who hacked something together. I guess people are getting tired of too many topics in one narrow space. I come to HN for variety. It does get tiring when every single day I see yet another LLM-based solution attempting to solve a problem I don't think I even have. Overdose of a certain topic is not good for a general tech forum like this. Everything should be in moderation and all that.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    This forum is also against decentralization and Web3, and often shills for large centralized corporations. The ethos of hackers was always ANTI that stuff.
  - AdieuToLogic 4y ago
    > It's weird to see a forum for hackers, with hacker in the name, and with a line about encouraging curiosity in the charter, be so hostile to someone who hacked something together. My comment was in direct response to an overarching concern raised by the implications of incorporating "LLM-generated code." This is relevant here due to the "Show HN" description above, which reads thusly: Regex.ai is an AI-powered tool that generates regular expressions. It can accurately generate regular expressions that match specific patterns in text with precision. If you interpreted my characterization of "... like giving a kid a flamethrower" as being hostile, then I extend my apologies to the OP as I was using this phrase as a literary tool detailed subsequently. I thought the subject expansion of "the other half-dozen like it this past week or so" was sufficient. As to "encouraging curiosity", I point you to feedback I provided to the OP in a reply peer to this one.
  - 4y ago
- blowski 4y ago
  So if I look at most codebases, someone would be able to explain what all the code does and why it does that way? I'm extremely sceptical of that, even if I myself wrote the code 3 weeks ago.
  - manfre 4y ago
    A person should be able to explain the code they're adding to a repo at the time they are adding it. Whether or not they can explain it at some arbitrary point in the future is a different question/issue.
cuuupid 4y ago
It's even worse. When working with someone else's code e.g. StackOverflow there's a reputation system gating people from the platform and incentivizing them to provide correct answers. You can reasonably expect that someone else's code has at least been thought through to some extent to solve the problem at hand, and very likely tested. With LLM-generated code, especially ChatGPT-style decoder models, none of that is true. All of the posts and comments I see about it here seem to be anecdotes "it can do all of my job for me" yet asking it to write the simplest code creates several issues on my end. Personally I think a model geared towards code generation isn't an unsolvable task; the Spider dataset was released some time ago (text to SQL task) and the winning approach there was no fanciness on the model side, but rather to just test all the output queries to ensure it's at least valid SQL. That got a 20%+ boost in accuracy.
- Kiro 4y ago
  Your experience is no less anecdotal than the millions of people who successfully use Copilot and ChatGPT to write code on a daily basis. I am one of those and can't imagine coding without Copilot or an equivalent ever again.
  - soiler 4y ago
    I'm (genuinely) curious what kind of code you write. I haven't tried Copilot and I haven't used ChatGPT very much, but I feel I would be pretty surprised if either of them made significant improvements to my workflow. Copilot I could see, since I already use Intellisense, autocomplete, and snippets to great effect. I'd be annoyed if I had to work without them. But in general, knowing what I want the code to do is >90% of the work of writing new code. I feel there are a few possibilities for why I'm confused: 1. I'm not a very good software engineer, at least in certain respects. Maybe I should have a better understanding of architecture patterns or something I might have learned in a CS degree. Maybe I am hacking everything together and maybe I am already a slow coder. 2. I'm not [being] creative enough as a prompt engineer. I typically can't think of any way that ChatGPT could help me without ingesting my entire repo and figuring out the correct patterns. It could be, however, that there are ways to get the answers I need with better questions. 3. We do completely different kinds of work, and some kinds of coding are better suited for AI assistance than others.

cyanydeez 4y ago

Like autopilot in planes that fall back to experienced pilots, we're embarking on the most dangerous "uncanny valley" maneuver where these systems will be adopted by experienced pilots who know the limits but who will inevitably be followed by either no one or students whose conception is entirely synthetic. At that point the plane AI better be 100% TRUSTWORTHY cause there's no safe fallback.

AdieuToLogic 4y ago

This offering, and the other half-dozen like it this past week or so, is like giving a kid a flamethrower. It's all fun and games until they burn down your house. > ... I need to understand the intent, the whys behind the choices. As do I. And that is something ChatGPT-X (for any given X) cannot provide, regardless of whether or not what is produced is correct. Perhaps with some form of backward chaining[0] a ChatGPT-X someday can explain how it arrived at what was produced works. But "the why" is the domain of people. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_chaining

circuit10 4y ago
You can ask it to explain why. It might not be a true representation of why those decisions were made but at least it’s a plausible explanation of why something could work like that which is better than nothing. I’m not sure why you think it can’t do that already?
column 4y ago
or you know, you can ask it to insert helpful comments
- anileated 4y ago
  Which you can’t rely on anyway.
safety1st 4y ago
It's weird to see a forum for hackers, with hacker in the name, and with a line about encouraging curiosity in the charter, be so hostile to someone who hacked something together. Sign of the times perhaps. Though I guess it's not much different from the thread trashing Dropbox however many years back.
- distcs 4y ago
  > It's weird to see a forum for hackers, with hacker in the name, and with a line about encouraging curiosity in the charter, be so hostile to someone who hacked something together. I guess people are getting tired of too many topics in one narrow space. I come to HN for variety. It does get tiring when every single day I see yet another LLM-based solution attempting to solve a problem I don't think I even have. Overdose of a certain topic is not good for a general tech forum like this. Everything should be in moderation and all that.
- EGreg 4y ago
  This forum is also against decentralization and Web3, and often shills for large centralized corporations. The ethos of hackers was always ANTI that stuff.
- AdieuToLogic 4y ago
  > It's weird to see a forum for hackers, with hacker in the name, and with a line about encouraging curiosity in the charter, be so hostile to someone who hacked something together. My comment was in direct response to an overarching concern raised by the implications of incorporating "LLM-generated code." This is relevant here due to the "Show HN" description above, which reads thusly: Regex.ai is an AI-powered tool that generates regular expressions. It can accurately generate regular expressions that match specific patterns in text with precision. If you interpreted my characterization of "... like giving a kid a flamethrower" as being hostile, then I extend my apologies to the OP as I was using this phrase as a literary tool detailed subsequently. I thought the subject expansion of "the other half-dozen like it this past week or so" was sufficient. As to "encouraging curiosity", I point you to feedback I provided to the OP in a reply peer to this one.
- 4y ago
blowski 4y ago
So if I look at most codebases, someone would be able to explain what all the code does and why it does that way? I'm extremely sceptical of that, even if I myself wrote the code 3 weeks ago.
- manfre 4y ago
  A person should be able to explain the code they're adding to a repo at the time they are adding it. Whether or not they can explain it at some arbitrary point in the future is a different question/issue.

cuuupid 4y ago

It's even worse. When working with someone else's code e.g. StackOverflow there's a reputation system gating people from the platform and incentivizing them to provide correct answers. You can reasonably expect that someone else's code has at least been thought through to some extent to solve the problem at hand, and very likely tested. With LLM-generated code, especially ChatGPT-style decoder models, none of that is true. All of the posts and comments I see about it here seem to be anecdotes "it can do all of my job for me" yet asking it to write the simplest code creates several issues on my end. Personally I think a model geared towards code generation isn't an unsolvable task; the Spider dataset was released some time ago (text to SQL task) and the winning approach there was no fanciness on the model side, but rather to just test all the output queries to ensure it's at least valid SQL. That got a 20%+ boost in accuracy.

Kiro 4y ago
Your experience is no less anecdotal than the millions of people who successfully use Copilot and ChatGPT to write code on a daily basis. I am one of those and can't imagine coding without Copilot or an equivalent ever again.
- soiler 4y ago
  I'm (genuinely) curious what kind of code you write. I haven't tried Copilot and I haven't used ChatGPT very much, but I feel I would be pretty surprised if either of them made significant improvements to my workflow. Copilot I could see, since I already use Intellisense, autocomplete, and snippets to great effect. I'd be annoyed if I had to work without them. But in general, knowing what I want the code to do is >90% of the work of writing new code. I feel there are a few possibilities for why I'm confused: 1. I'm not a very good software engineer, at least in certain respects. Maybe I should have a better understanding of architecture patterns or something I might have learned in a CS degree. Maybe I am hacking everything together and maybe I am already a slow coder. 2. I'm not [being] creative enough as a prompt engineer. I typically can't think of any way that ChatGPT could help me without ingesting my entire repo and figuring out the correct patterns. It could be, however, that there are ways to get the answers I need with better questions. 3. We do completely different kinds of work, and some kinds of coding are better suited for AI assistance than others.