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Command line functions around OpenAI

antonjs 4y ago
This is a pretty cool idea, at least to experiment with. If you use ZSH, I made a ZSH plugin version based on the article: https://github.com/antonjs/zsh-gpt https://github.com/antonjs/zsh-gpt
solomatov 4y ago
What the articles like this miss is that we understand pretty well how ChatGPT writes code. But what about maintenance, and particularly debugging? How would it make these tasks. And we know that these things take much much more time than writing code.
- realusername 4y ago
  Especially that code generators are pretty old, ChatGPT is very late to the game. I see all this people spending time to create a landing page with ChatGPT whereas in reality you can just install Wordpress and it even looks nicer.
  - manojlds 4y ago
    As though creating landing pages is where it's tricky. So many cookie cutter examples to just create one. One of the examples from GPT wasn't even responsive and didn't work on mobile. But...some folks are creating iOS games without any Swift experience, so that's cool.
- krsdcbl 4y ago
  Plain and simple: Feed the code it produced back into it and ask it to modify the sections needing maintenance or changes, or just tell it the issues you're having and ask it to explain/debug them.
  - solomatov 4y ago
    IMO, the problem is that it doesn't work. It could introduce other bugs, make incorrect changes, or mess up the code. If a good developer does this, it converges, with GPT I am not so sure. We need to find a way for the system to iterate, debug, write unit tests, and repeat the loop. In theory it's doable, but we are yet to see the system which does this.
  - globalise83 4y ago
    Be careful! I have been experimenting with just this approach and ChatGPT 4 often forgets important parts of the code when generating the new files. If you ask ChatGPT to break down every change into step-by-step changes with code examples, it does a really great job and you can check every change yourself before implementing it.
    - throwthrowuknow 4y ago
      A good prompt is key. If pasting code make sure to run it through the tokenizer first to make sure it’s not too long. Be very descriptive about what you want it to do. If it goes off the rails just hit the stop button and then edit your prompt with the little edit button at the top right and try again, this saves on context length and it saves the previous prompt and response so you can switch between them and compare.
- manojlds 4y ago
  Which is why I still believe proper developers will still have jobs :) GPT is just Spreadsheets in a way. Lot of companies had business users and SMEs create contraptions based on Excel and then when it's a hairy mess or a rube goldberg machine, there are "digital transformation" projects that are done to make them proper apps.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    That might be the exact right analogy. People who see Excel for the first time seem to think they have superpowers. In actual fact the superpower is knowing how to use it effectively and knowing when you are on the edge of its abilities.
- blagie 4y ago
  I find ChatGPT is pretty helpful for debugging. A big chunk of debugging is missing stupid things, and for debugging, it's like having a second set of eyes. It's almost useless for high-level design and architecture. Those tasks do take more time than writing code, but they're super-charged by rapid prototyping, which ChatGPT excels at. For example, right now, if I'm picking between three libraries, I can have working versions of my code implemented in all three in a few minutes, and built out a bigger mockup in a few hours. I can make a more educated decision from there. In the olden days, that'd be a few hours and many days, respectively. It also does really nicely for code reviews, which results in better code. That also speeds up maintenance and, later, debugging. That's especially true in domains I'm less familiar with. Some maintenance, it excels at. I'm the author of a major piece of open source infrastructure, which is widely used, well-architected, but every technology used is obsolete (JQuery, older Python web frameworks, legacy database, etc.). I feel like I could rewrite the whole thing in React+Node+etc. in a few weeks. There is close to zero architecture work -- it's mostly having GPT write -- or sometimes just translate -- code piece-by-piece. I don't feel like GPT-4 obsoletes software engineers as it's used yet, but it does really raise the bar on what's possible to build.
  - nolawi89 4y ago
    Not yet; I spend 60% my day reviewing PRs. I don't have to if chat GPT gets integrated as a PR reviewer..
    - grumple 4y ago
      I review PRs primarily for correctness and to look for nonobvious problems. I rarely find buggy code. Sometimes I'll find performance issues. In order to do what I do when reviewing, ChatGPT would need clear specs (yeah right) and a deep understanding of our system, domain, and even our customers. Of course I'll try it and see how it does. But it struggled and failed to produce what I would consider trivial code when I tried to create a single usable page to spec in react native, so I'm not terribly optimistic.
    - Lewton 4y ago
      ChatGPT will turn your day into spending 90% of your time reviewing code...
- elif 4y ago
  GPT is a much better debugger than coder in my experience. It is a drop in replacement for googling random linux errors too. "I'm getting this error <error> with the following code. Please add log statements that will test for all the things that could be going wrong <code>" Saved me about 15 minutes yesterday. Not only does chatGPT generate the probably causes of the error, it knows how to test the code for those errors. The human doesn't even have to read the error message anymore.
malborodog 4y ago
Anyone know best way to punch up his function a little so it tees >> out both the q and a to a file? Like history but for chat gpt.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  I don't, but you may be interested in something that improves upon that with the history optionally in outline format: https://github.com/rksm/org-ai https://github.com/rksm/org-ai
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  https://github.com/npiv/chatblade https://github.com/npiv/chatblade this has built in history and lots of other features that a serious user needs, like checking token limits and estimating costs, etc.
eschneider 4y ago
My money is on "die trying."
esperent 4y ago
> First off, you’ll need an OpenAI API key. You can get this by going here and signing up. Note that you'll also need to be from a Western country, or at least have access to both a phone number from one and a VPN. And if you want a plus subscription, you'll also need a US credit card - not stated anywhere but I've been totally unable to sign up for plus with either Irish or Belgium cards, it just immediately flashes "card declined" every time with no further info. There's about a 0.1s delay between clicking the pay button and getting that message so it's not querying my bank.
- aero-glide2 4y ago
  Sign up for the api, they only start charging end of month.
- irrational 4y ago
  Why are you trying to pay for it? Let procurement at your company figure it out. You wouldn’t pay for your IDE or any other tools, would you? The business should be paying for any tools they want me to use.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    Plenty of people work as contractors/consultants where payroll pays them as a separate company. In fact you are probably much more likely to have something closer to a FAANG income working as contractor rather than as an employee.
  - celestialcheese 4y ago
    Yes, I would - these tools are massive time savers, and if I suspect it'll soon become a situation where if you don't use these tools, you're going to get left behind. If my org wouldn't pay for them, I would start looking for other jobs (unless your in an industry that can't use them like national security, etc), but I'm not going to let $30/mo stop me from using a tool that significantly improves my work just because of a middle manager. Also, many programmers I know bring their own keyboards.. Chefs often bring their own knives, or mechanics with their own tool chests. Ownership of your own tools is powerful.
roenxi 4y ago
Being efficient at writing code can barely make someone a 5x engineer. A team of people who write code effectively is easy to do. Hyperproductivity in software is all about deciding what problems to tackle. Richard Hipp isn't worried about chipotle restaurant orders in golang, he's worried about how to store data reliably. That isn't a coding puzzle that ChatGTP is likely to help with. Either ChatGTP can do the whole thing itself (not yet the case) or it is a minor productivity boost because the hard part is articulating the problem. Writing code quickly really isn't a challenge that high performing software engineers need to tackle. ChatGTP is a cool tool, we're all going to be using things like it in a few years, it'll change everything. But it won't make any old engineer a rival to the big names in software engineering.
- dmix 4y ago
  I think the headline was being tongue in cheek. It probably generated more clicks than “5 clever examples of using ChatGPT via CLI for programming and data science”. Still a good post and reply.
- Zach_the_Lizard 4y ago
  Writing code quickly may not help the mythical 10x engineer, but it might help a 1x engineer become a 5x engineer. In relative terms, the unaided 10x engineer is now only a 2x engineer as his peers are now vastly more productive. That's huge.
  - classified 4y ago
    ... if churning out boilerplate is your definition of "productive".
    - lubujackson 4y ago
      If churning out boilerplate is what your employers sees as product, does it really matter? Coding udeals are valuable in a vacuum but most companies want those PRs merged, technical debt be damned.
synergy20 4y ago
does not work for me: { "error": { "message": "The model: `gpt-4` does not exist", "type": "invalid_request_error", "param": null, "code": "model_not_found" } }
- krsdcbl 4y ago
  gpt-4 is in closed preview right now, you'd have to register on the waitlist to use that specific model (3.5 is publicly available)
- synergy20 4y ago
  change gpt-4 to gpt-3.5-turbo worked, gpt-4 api is only for beta testers and you need be on the waiting list to get approved. I tested the scripts and they work really well, esp like the image generation script. However unlike the web-browser the scripts does not keep the context, which is not great. is there a way for shell script to maintain context session somehow?
  - shagie 4y ago
    > is there a way for shell script to maintain context session somehow? Feed the output of the previous prompt back into itself. If you look at https://platform.openai.com/playground/p/default-chat?model=text-davinci-003 https://platform.openai.com/playground/p/default-chat?model=... you will see that the prompt for the next line is all of the previous generation conversation. This can consume tokens at an accelerating rate.
    - synergy20 4y ago
      "Human: you seem to remember the context of the chat, how many context you keep, the most recent previous output, or a few conversations AI: I generally remember the last few conversations and I'm also capable of keeping context in longer conversations." I don't think there is a way to feed context back to the script efficiently, maybe need a local database or a queue of certain length to sustain the subject. To mimic the web-browser experience at terminal. the real magic for chatgpt vs old chatbots is that it maintains context, how to keep that via API calls is something I do not fully understand yet. Need read the API reference I guess
asb 4y ago
I've been enjoying using aichat for command-line chatgpt access https://github.com/sigoden/aichat https://github.com/sigoden/aichat (it supports both an interactive repl mode and you can invoke it with your query directly from the command line like the helper used in this article).
artursapek 4y ago
I've found ChatGPT very useful as a "desk buddy" who I can turn to and ask about obscure things. It's quickly replacing my Google/StackOverflow in my workflow. I was working on a .pkg MacOS installer and could not figure out how to get my background image @2x.png to render on a retina display. Turns out I needed to create a directory with the .imageset extension. My attempts at searching for a solution online never led me to this, but ChatGPT immediately knew what to do when I described my problem. It's also tremendously useful as an interactive manpage. I've found it's much faster to ask ChatGPT how a complicated CLI tool works than trying to read the dense --help output to find what I need. It can even have a conversation about A* pathfinding, and how best to implement it with different nuances. It's crazy. I wonder how employers will handle this trend, which is happening so quickly. Is it OK for an employee to get advice on their work from ChatGPT? Is it OK to commit AI-generated code? Is it OK to show internal source code to an AI to help them find a bug or refactor it? There are security implications here, and ethical questions. I think most sophisticated companies will only adopt this kind of tech when they can self-host it, or at least have some kind of guarantee that their employees are using a dedicated, isolated model. With that said, I'm sure many people are already making heavy use of this for their work (as are students). It's already an out-of-control phenomenon.
Madmallard 4y ago
High level engineers solve the right problems quickly and put everything together in a resilient fashion. GPT4 may help them do that more quickly but they probably already will use copilot and templates and past project material and various generators for anything tedious. 10x engineering comes from someone who is trying to "be a better developer" actively for many years. Most people who just use the tools to create the product won't ever become that much better. They will just become more knowledgeable. It is the same as any natural skill. You can play piano for years and never really get better. Or you can try specifically to do hard work of improving your technique, theory, and performance ability directly. It will be way more emotionally taxing to do so, but the end result after years of doing this is that you're vastly better than most. Not everyone can even do this. You definitely have to be in a growth mindset and not particularly stressed emotionally at the outset and during the process. My coworker at Amazon was just making macros nonstop for all these things he wanted to automate within his workflow. He would focus specifically on the hardest problems that we haven't solved first and everything else around it would just spring up together rapidly (I don't even know how he did this). He ended up being heavily involved with AWS and later went to Netflix.
- AdityaSanthosh 4y ago
  I'm interested about the macros automation. Could you point me to any resource?
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    These were things like keybinds and shortcuts within his editor (which 10 years ago this was Eclipse at Amazon). There were other scripts he had but I do not really recall at this point what they were doing. If you google macros for software engineers you can probably find some useful stuff.
Lapsa 4y ago
this is getting lowkey annoying
surrTurr 4y ago
(shameless self plug) wrote a little shell script to efficiently use gpt in the terminal. maybe someone else can make use of it: https://github.com/AlexW00/cli-gpt https://github.com/AlexW00/cli-gpt
bluGill 4y ago
Will I get anything more out of this? As a 10x engineer I can expect to make at most double what a normal 2x engineer (1x engineers mostly get out of engineering in my experience) makes when I get to the tail end of my career. I like to improve my engineering skills. However I also like to take nice vacations, do wood carving, play mandolin, go for long walks in the park, see my kids grow up, and all the billions of other things people do in life. There isn't time to do it all: time spend becoming better at one is time stolen from the others.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Wouldn't a "2x" engineer then be a 1x engineer, and a "1x" engineer <1x?
- intelVISA 4y ago
  No point putting in more than 1x for somebody else's yacht, you have to build your own vision and sell it.
spyremeown 4y ago
Spoilers: the future is actually kinda just ok-ish. GPT is used in almost all professions but akin to Google. Nothing really changes, we come back to these threads and articles every couple years to look back and realize how plain stupid and hopeful humanity really is sometimes.
- tester457 4y ago
  What you describe is a huge change.
- dmix 4y ago
  Adding a major new tool that is “used in almost all professions” is a pretty big deal even if it’s only used as productivity software, which IMO is still far too short sighted of its potential (a simple chat interface is just the baby steps before we figure out all the API driven usecases). What was the last time we could look back at old HN threads and say that? Bitcoin?
ar9av 4y ago
TL;DR: another ChatGPT article
juujian 4y ago
Don't get me wrong, this is neat. But the only reason why this works is because there is one million tutorial out there who use this data for teaching new students. The bigger issue is edge cases, stuff where there is no precedence. This output is a starting point for something, but it does not even get you 3% of the way there unless you work for a teenager who is into basketball anecdotes.
- throwthrowuknow 4y ago
  It’s also trained on code and books. The knowledge is in there, it just needs more RLHF to improve its abilities. There’s a good chance it can handle those edge cases by combining the information it has in different ways.
  - juujian 4y ago
    If the books have the specific code that is. If the books have some code and discuss edge cases, that is not something a language model could handle. It could give you the abstract concept that applies but it would fail when you prompt it to create new, valid code based on abstract concepts that are in the data.
    - throwthrowuknow 4y ago
      Why do you think it can only copy existing code? I’ve used it for some really obscure cases and it’s still able to produce useful output both code and language. Try using it to create your own programming language with completely different keywords and oddball syntax and control structures and then ask it to write programs in it, it actually works!
intelVISA 4y ago
10x is a mindset, identifying real problems and solving them in a simple* way with novel solutions. *most people can solve problems effectively but, imo, it takes true crafts(wo)man to solve it -simply- It's not a skill you can grind per se, although many try that fruitless path.
uncletaco 4y ago
At what point did we stop making fun of that 10x engineer thread and started taking it seriously? Who forgot that 10x was a silly little thing that made zero sense in the real world?
- jrvarela56 4y ago
  There are obvious examples of 10x performers in every creative endeavor. Why would it be any different in software engineering? There are people who find bugs 10x faster than others, design stuff that's 100x easier to maintain, increase morale of a team vs being an energy drain, make changes faster without breaking stuff, etc. There are a lot of ways one can become 10x more effective than another at building software.
  - toastedwedge 4y ago
    There are examples, yes, but I took it as the implication that a 10x engineer shouldn't be the bare minimum for the entire workforce's ability to reason about a problem or dedication to its craft (and thus lead to the meme that one isn't worth spent effort unless they are in the >=10x group).
  - seventytwo 4y ago
    That’s the nature of any long-tailed distribution. The lie is that anyone can become a 10x [insert thing here] just by trying harder. Self-improvement is a real thing, but everyone can’t be 10x or 6-sigma or world class. Strive, reach, sure… but ultimately, just make sure you live your life. You only get one, and the clock’s ticking.
- deleted 4y ago
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- cryptonym 4y ago
  Unfortunately people thinking they are overall worth 10 to 1000 times their co-workers exists.
  - 4y ago
xnx 4y ago
I didn't believe in 10x developers until I met a 0.1x developer.
- Clubber 4y ago
  I would argue there are -1x developers because regular developers have to go back and fix/refactor/rewrite the code later, thus create a net negative. I've always been curious what people feel the baseline of a 10x is (i.e. 1x). Is it a fresh developer out of college or what?
  - xnx 4y ago
    Great point. Maybe it's relative if everyone thinks they are a 1x developer.
recursivedoubts 4y ago
if you want a vision of the future, winston, imagine a half-wit shipping generated code they are incapable of understanding, modifiying or debugging into production, forever
- zabzonk 4y ago
  while stamping on your face
  - recursivedoubts 4y ago
    while the business people exclaim "how come nothing works anymore? man, we saved a ton of money getting rid of those senior developers tho, amirite?"
superb-owl 4y ago
There seems to be a lot of dissenting opinion on how these tools will affect software engineering jobs. Those of us that have deep architectural skills, are able to deal with ambiguous requirements, balance UX with technical limitations, etc, will be safe for a good while. Those of us that were trained in bootcamps to crank out MEAN/MERN/etc apps might be in a bit of trouble. I say this not to disparage the latter group--many are great engineers who do great, reliable work. But it's ultimately rote work, something LLMs excel at. There is a huge tranche of SWEs who are going to become redundant soon. Lots of them gave up careers as teachers etc for a more lucrative career in tech. It's unfortunate.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Question is whether you have to go through the bootcamp stage to become an architect? Like many skills, you often start with the simple stuff.
  - superb-owl 4y ago
    Yeah I'm wondering the same thing. How do we train up the next generation of SWEs given the new world we live in? Interesting times.
    - hyperhopper 4y ago
      I'm hoping the AI scare and layoffs stop people from flocking to software engineering. Less supply of us means more demand, higher wages, better working conditions. Especially with how things are going, the last thing we want is a new generation of swes to compete with the dwindling amount of jobs.
    - mrbombastic 4y ago
      I would think whatever we consider today as mid-level would become the expectation for entry-level. It would be nice if we had a culture of apprenticeship in our industry though.
  - analognoise 4y ago
meindnoch 4y ago
That's not even a 1.5x, sorry.
giantg2 4y ago
"Become a 1000x engineer or die tryin" Easy, source out your ideas and work to a team of 1000 people (aka become a subdivision manager).
ChrisBland 4y ago
Writing code is the basic 101 of our industry. Anyone can write a loop or an if statement. With todays computing power, for most applications even poorly written code will run and will execute quite fast. What makes someone a 10x (and i hate that term) is the ability to take requirements, or better yet, a vague idea given to them by the business and turn that into software that benefits the end user and makes the company money. The 10x engineer gets to the 'why' that you are building something, not the 'how'.
- zuzuleinen 4y ago
  "The 10x engineer gets to the 'why' that you are building something, not the 'how'." It's a pity that our interviews are all biased towards the "how"
  - colonwqbang 4y ago
    I mean, you do need to know the "how" too. It isn't unimportant, it's just a more common skill. You need to be a 1x engineer before you can be a 10x engineer (if you believe in them).
- deleted 4y ago
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- daveslash 4y ago
  RE>> Anyone can write a loop or an if statement. <-- Respectfully disagree. I had an intern a few years ago -- recent college grad in CompSci. I tried my best to lightly mentor him. One day I was talking about the diff between a compiled language and scripting, mentioned REPL. To demonstrate REPL, I opened up both the windows CMD prompt and the Chrome Developer tools. I mentioned that with a REPL like the Chrome Tools, it's trivial to do FizzBuzz in JavaScript. I explained the problem to him and asked him to take a stab at writing it. This wasn't an interview question, just a discussion and a mentoring opportunity. He couldn't. What he said next blew me away, coming from a CompSci graduate "Oh, loops, yeah, I never quite understood those. Like, for loops and while loops - I never really got that". I asked if he meant recursion, cause that can be tricky. No - he really could not write a for loop in any language. I wasn't going to shame him and I walked him through it, but I was disappoint. ಠ_ಠ [Edit: Spelling] Edit 2...Before I start claiming that CompSci programs are letting students down, I have to consider that the claim that he had a BS in CompSci may have not been accurate. I did not check or verify his transcript. The more I reflect on it, I think he may have had a degree is Web Design and we got pressured to add him to our Software Eng. team because the hiring manager (and his actual mentor outside of work) passed him off as a "Web Developer". Now that I think about it... that seems more likely....Edit 3: It was driving me crazy so I dug up the resume in my inbox ... it was def CompSci, listing C++, C#, Java, and SQL as technologies and data structures and algorithms as courses taken... I'm not sure what to think...
vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
[flagged]
- joenot443 4y ago
  If you want people to look at your project, make a Show HN post. Promoting your stuff on unrelated posts isn't really encouraged.
barrysteve 4y ago
50c had a mil' in the bank and was still on the grind. Increased productivity doesn't mean freedom from more work. This article is beautiful and effective. Thank you for the information! The culture around GPT at the moment is verging on fanaticism. When car companies close down and people lose jobs, it's sad for the die-hard followers, but most people don't care so much. This closure of trivium-level programmery is being met with a ramp up in fanaticism and repetitive doubling-down on preset views. So odd...
Aperocky 4y ago
10x engineer obviously do not do 10x work, because 10x work usually means 10x bugs. 10x engineer cut the implementation complexity from 10x -> 1x, and then proceed to do that, while still satisfying business/product intention. Generating 1000x code is more like being a -1000x engineer.
deleted 4y ago
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jollyllama 4y ago
Suddenly, the wisdom of the whiteboard interview dawns on me.
yosito 4y ago
A lot of people seem to be hung up on the title and totally missing how useful this tool is. People are right that the tasks that you're having this tool do aren't tasks that a 10x (or 1000x) developer would do. But what they're missing is that this is exactly why you can use this tool to multiply your productivity. If you don't have to spend your time writing silly scripts anymore or converting JSON to yaml or whatever other yak you're shaving, your time is free to spend on other stuff, making big decisions, solving truly hard problems. And that's how you become a 10x developer. Thanks for this article, I found it very inspiring.
- californical 4y ago
  It possibly enables you to build the wrong thing, 10x faster. Do you think the company will let you just have fun learning for the other 90% of the time that you can free up? They’ll just expect more output. Being able to write code 10x faster will likely not free your time enough to become a 10x problem solver.
  - yosito 4y ago
    No, it frees you up to spend your energy on thinking about what the right thing to build is. If your head is buried in code all the time, that's when you can't stop and look at the bigger picture and ask if you're building the wrong thing or not.
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Arubis 4y ago
The 10x engineers I've met don't write 10x more or better or more well-targeted code. They enable ten other engineers to double their output. "10x engineers" are a leadership position, not a development position.
tomas789 4y ago
My experience with code assistant is strikingly similar to my current experience with Vim. Sometimes, it makes me slightly faster. Other times the experience breaks down spectacularly on previously simple things. And last but not least, it is difficult to get rid of it.
Dave3of5 4y ago
Ha we'll I'm becoming a 10,000x engineer ! ... .. . 10,000x shitter !
m3kw9 4y ago
Using Gpt is more like trying to get to point a to point b, it allows you to move faster, but you still need to decide what paths and modes of transports to take. So overall it could 1.5x you
ugiox 4y ago
One can also decide to just be a https://1x.engineer https://1x.engineer
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  Or a grug brained engineer https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/
- conor- 4y ago
  10x being real or not aside, if there's a 1x-type they certainly don't do many of the things in this list in my experience and certainly not: >Writes code that others can read. >Reads the Docs. >Updates the Docs. In my experience, half of the differentiation between above average and solidly "1x" or middling devs is reading documentation and obtaining a deeper understanding of the tools, language, platform they're developing on top of.
elif 4y ago
Not mentioned in post this but occured to me by reading: I think I will start changing my functional prompts to require a JSON format in responses so that various aspects of the response don't need to be manually parsed, and requests can be more reliably piped to subsequent requests.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  > Not mentioned in post this but occured to me by reading: > I think I will start changing my functional prompts to require a JSON format in responses so that various aspects of the response don't need to be manually parsed, and requests can be more reliably piped to subsequent requests. that adds more characters though so maybe hits token limits faster, I was thinking about how to have better contexts then found out about langchain and creating a sort of long term memory using vector databases. still trying to figure this out, but once I do, I think it'll be amazing what I can do with it.
  - fzliu 4y ago
    Beyond artificially increasing prompt length, vector DBs also allow you to inject domain knowledge into autoregressive LMs.
    - gremlinsinc 4y ago
      yeah, it's basically like updating the 'cutoff date' on chatGPT but only w/ specific data pertinent to a specific topic, right?
- beigebrucewayne 4y ago
  I had other examples where I request the output in Markdown and it acts accordingly—definitely a nice feature.
simonw 4y ago
AI-assisted programming tools have already increased my personal coding productivity to the point that they've made me more ambitious: I'm building whole projects that previously I wouldn't have committed to, because they would have taken too long (just past my "worth-it" threshold) otherwise. Wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...
- beigebrucewayne 4y ago
  Enjoy your posts - agreed!
electrondood 4y ago
The 10x trope needs to die. It's unhealthy.
penguin_booze 4y ago
Our dearly beloved tech leaders have called for pausing AI for 6 months [0]. Can HN ban AI/ChatGPT-themed posts as well? [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65110030 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65110030
usrbinbash 4y ago
Okay, let's talk about a theoretical figure, called the "1000x novelist", a very productive author who uses advanced AI to write novels really fast. Clearly super productive, because novels get written so very fast. Now, here is a question: George R.R. Martin has been writing on the 6th book of "Game of Thrones", titled "The Winds of Winter" (TWoW) for over 10 years. It still isn't finished. What do you think, which will sell more copies: TWoW, or all novels of the 1000x novelist combined?
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  The latter, of course. That’d be like pitting an army of Stephen Kings against him. Their net worths show it: $65M for Martin vs $450M for King.
Zetice 4y ago
Ok, dumb question, but does the API skip over the whole, "Thanks for asking that question, here's what I found:" stuff I keep seeing in ChatGPT when I ask it to generate non-text responses? Even when I ask it the "generate a 10 row csv containing sample chipotle restaurant order data with headers" prompt, I get "Sure, here's an example CSV file with 10 rows of sample Chipotle restaurant order data, including headers:" at the top...
- throwthrowuknow 4y ago
  Add: I only want the CSV, don’t describe what you are doing.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Heh nope, I still get the whole "Sure, here's an example of a CSV file with 10 rows of sample Chipotle restaurant order data:" I wonder if the web UI has some additional "explain everything you do" prompt injection stuff going on.
    - claar 4y ago
      My favorite trick is to ask for JSON, and tack this onto my prompt: "Return JSON, beginning with {"
    - throwthrowuknow 4y ago
      Hmm works with GPT-4 but I see what you mean with turbo. Edit: got it to work with Output an example of a CSV document with 10 rows containing sample chipotle restaurant order data. Do not start with any other text.
- macromaniac 4y ago
  Are you using the API endpoint or browser chatgpt? I tried it 5 times via API and it works and then 2 times via the browser and it doesn't work. They are different models. If you are using the API try lowering the temperature mb?
- 4y ago
notjoemama 4y ago
I tried chatpt and asked a few questions about doing something specific in a Rails project. It was so specific that I had already found the sources online that were avaiable. It summarized the sources into directly actionable steps. At first I thought that was odd and unhelpful, but perhaps I expected too much. So then I tried giving it a prompt about setting up the devise ruby gem in a new rails project. That's one of those tasks that it helps to be familiar woth once and you can promptly forget; you'll rarely return to authentication in the lifetime of an app after its done and secure. It again presented me with the exact actionable steps for setup. I reviewed the gem's GitHub readme and found the response to be correct. As far as I can tell, chatgpt performs the action of finding and simplifying the information needed to take the next step forward, with caveats for a lack of understanding unless asked and the potential to be inaccurate or wrong. But that's all it does at the moment. No better than asking the "devise expert" on my team how to setup devise from memory. Kinda cool experience, but I doubt it's a titanic shift because it doesn't have the depth of sematic meaning you and I do.
- Denzel 4y ago
  > As far as I can tell, chatgpt performs the action of finding and simplifying the information needed to take the next step forward [...] But that's all it does at the moment. ChatGPT's output is certainly limited by its input. If you ask questions that can be answered by finding and simplifying information, then that's the answer you'll get. However, if you treat ChatGPT like a functioning software engineer, describe the problem space, explain the requirements, and define the boundaries, then ChatGPT will do much more. From that point on, you can ask it to explain why it chose a certain data structure, or to adjust an implementation approach, among other things. With 15 prompts in 2 hours, I was able to pair program a novel 200-line program in Go that used AST parsing, command execution, pattern matching, file parsing, and custom data structures for specific data processing. All to solve a problem one of my teams experienced in the industry. ChatGPT wrote 99% of the code; I tweaked 2 or 3 lines because it had problems correcting an error in a regex (most likely due to the fact that ChatGPT sees tokens not characters). The code compiled, ran, and produced the exact result I wanted. Researching, prototyping, and writing this code by hand would have taken me a few days probably. That's why the project sat on my TODO list for months
noncoml 4y ago
Am I the only one that doesn’t get it? I tried GPT and it’s unable to write anything but the most simple code from simple requirements. As a tiny bit of complexity and it’s lost. Are people at work dealing with tiny code bases with well defined requirements?
- fastball 4y ago
  I don't know what kinda code-bases you work on, but I think there are many more potential factors which determine how useful GPT might be besides "tiny and well-defined". I won't try to enumerate them here, but as an example if you are working in a much more / entirely functional way, you can think of your entire code-base as tiny and well-defined, even if it is composed of 1000s of functions. Can think similarly if the arch is microservices.
  - noncoml 4y ago
    In which case the main problem an engineer is solving is how all these interact together. And not the X minutes that it takes to write each individual well defined tiny function. So, I still don’t get it.
    - blibble 4y ago
      you don't get it because it's all hype it's a slightly better version of google
    - fastball 4y ago
      Yes, GPT can model/design how all these interact together as well.
ArenaSource 4y ago
One subtle bug in your code is all it takes to go from 1000x to 0.01x
senko 4y ago
Wow. 210+ comments and maaybe 10 of those actually talk about the article! (yes, I've read them all because I can't believe almost everyone missed the point) The point of the article is actually neat: a small shell (Fish) script to send query to ChatGPT or DALL-E and get response back in the terminal. As a terminal user myself, this is really nice! (I rewrote it for myself in bash which I use, but used the curl command virtually as is) The post itself is hilariously over the top (1000x c'mon), quoting 50 Cent and including statements like: > Unfortunately, due to inflation — real and imagined, 10X just won’t cut it anymore. We need bigger gains, bigger wins, more code, more PRs, more lines, less linting, etc... Either people really need to be pointed out the sarcasm these days, or everyone's just philosophising about the title (I'm willing to bet it's the latter).
- gazelle21 4y ago
  [dead]
- asciii 4y ago
  > everyone's just philosophising about the title It's so easy to bait with a #x in a title, and especially when defining in terms of engineer (also an elusive term at times).
- quasarj 4y ago
  I couldn't figure out how to replicate the gpt_data one, how did you replicate the "string join" part? I'm not exactly sure what it was supposed to be putting in the json. I mean, obviously the full data in the second parameter, but I'm unsure how to encode that..
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - senko 4y ago
    What I did instead is just join all the args with spaces (so I don't need to use quotes around the prompt), with no care about the newlines, and it seems to work okay for me with multiline input: prompt="$*" Here's the complete script: https://gist.github.com/senko/68026864d502473eacd56b2e16e40108 https://gist.github.com/senko/68026864d502473eacd56b2e16e401... Since I can use this with multiline input I didn't create a separate data-gpt one. (Note I also used gpt-3.5-turbo model and not gpt-4 because the former is faster and cheaper and for quick one-offs from cmdline it's usually enough for me).
maerF0x0 4y ago
+1 to all the comments about deciding what problems to tackle. My nuanced 2c on it is that every line of code you write is a liability. Part of what revolutionized pricing mechanisms was FOSS and SaaS, which are 2 strategies of amortizing the cost of development across many many people. Every line you write for your company is a line with amortization across exactly 1. So first consider the value/cost tradeoff of FOSS and SaaS to see if you can compete. 1000x might be simply glueing together a few free/cheap systems which would have cost your company quarters. Putting in nice interfaces/adapters means you can easily cut them out if they become a regrettable decision.
fwungy 4y ago
It's often that little edge piece of script that kills productivity. Something you need but off your beaten track that takes a few hours or days to figure out. That's ai coding will shine.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
Note to self to try this technique plus merge it with "Call ChatGPT from any text box (thank you ibus!)" > https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9rh8/call_chatgpt_from_any_text_box_thank_you_ibus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9rh8/call_chatgpt....
gbro3n 4y ago
This is a really inspiring article and the best demonstration of ChatGPT's capabilities I've seen so far. I've repeated the "experiment" here having converted the queries to bash: https://journals.appsoftware.com/public/76/227/4223/blog/software-development/demonstrating-chatgpt-data-mining-and-querying-capabilities-via-the-openai-api-using-bash https://journals.appsoftware.com/public/76/227/4223/blog/sof...
allen-munsch 4y ago
Great post. I felt inspired and wired it up to whisper. - https://github.com/allen-munsch/hey_gpt_hey_whisper/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/allen-munsch/hey_gpt_hey_whisper/blob/mai...
42throwaway5832 4y ago
this + fish...if someone installs them via installer rather than building from source, is that a security risk? Meaning, is fish so powerful that a compromised version of fish could scrape / intercept GPT comms and either prime GPT networks or disturb them?
jakkos 4y ago
bookmark

This is a pretty cool idea, at least to experiment with. If you use ZSH, I made a ZSH plugin version based on the article: https://github.com/antonjs/zsh-gpt https://github.com/antonjs/zsh-gpt

solomatov 4y ago

What the articles like this miss is that we understand pretty well how ChatGPT writes code. But what about maintenance, and particularly debugging? How would it make these tasks. And we know that these things take much much more time than writing code.

realusername 4y ago
Especially that code generators are pretty old, ChatGPT is very late to the game. I see all this people spending time to create a landing page with ChatGPT whereas in reality you can just install Wordpress and it even looks nicer.
- manojlds 4y ago
  As though creating landing pages is where it's tricky. So many cookie cutter examples to just create one. One of the examples from GPT wasn't even responsive and didn't work on mobile. But...some folks are creating iOS games without any Swift experience, so that's cool.
krsdcbl 4y ago
Plain and simple: Feed the code it produced back into it and ask it to modify the sections needing maintenance or changes, or just tell it the issues you're having and ask it to explain/debug them.
- solomatov 4y ago
  IMO, the problem is that it doesn't work. It could introduce other bugs, make incorrect changes, or mess up the code. If a good developer does this, it converges, with GPT I am not so sure. We need to find a way for the system to iterate, debug, write unit tests, and repeat the loop. In theory it's doable, but we are yet to see the system which does this.
- globalise83 4y ago
  Be careful! I have been experimenting with just this approach and ChatGPT 4 often forgets important parts of the code when generating the new files. If you ask ChatGPT to break down every change into step-by-step changes with code examples, it does a really great job and you can check every change yourself before implementing it.
  - throwthrowuknow 4y ago
    A good prompt is key. If pasting code make sure to run it through the tokenizer first to make sure it’s not too long. Be very descriptive about what you want it to do. If it goes off the rails just hit the stop button and then edit your prompt with the little edit button at the top right and try again, this saves on context length and it saves the previous prompt and response so you can switch between them and compare.
manojlds 4y ago
Which is why I still believe proper developers will still have jobs :) GPT is just Spreadsheets in a way. Lot of companies had business users and SMEs create contraptions based on Excel and then when it's a hairy mess or a rube goldberg machine, there are "digital transformation" projects that are done to make them proper apps.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  That might be the exact right analogy. People who see Excel for the first time seem to think they have superpowers. In actual fact the superpower is knowing how to use it effectively and knowing when you are on the edge of its abilities.
blagie 4y ago
I find ChatGPT is pretty helpful for debugging. A big chunk of debugging is missing stupid things, and for debugging, it's like having a second set of eyes. It's almost useless for high-level design and architecture. Those tasks do take more time than writing code, but they're super-charged by rapid prototyping, which ChatGPT excels at. For example, right now, if I'm picking between three libraries, I can have working versions of my code implemented in all three in a few minutes, and built out a bigger mockup in a few hours. I can make a more educated decision from there. In the olden days, that'd be a few hours and many days, respectively. It also does really nicely for code reviews, which results in better code. That also speeds up maintenance and, later, debugging. That's especially true in domains I'm less familiar with. Some maintenance, it excels at. I'm the author of a major piece of open source infrastructure, which is widely used, well-architected, but every technology used is obsolete (JQuery, older Python web frameworks, legacy database, etc.). I feel like I could rewrite the whole thing in React+Node+etc. in a few weeks. There is close to zero architecture work -- it's mostly having GPT write -- or sometimes just translate -- code piece-by-piece. I don't feel like GPT-4 obsoletes software engineers as it's used yet, but it does really raise the bar on what's possible to build.
- nolawi89 4y ago
  Not yet; I spend 60% my day reviewing PRs. I don't have to if chat GPT gets integrated as a PR reviewer..
  - grumple 4y ago
    I review PRs primarily for correctness and to look for nonobvious problems. I rarely find buggy code. Sometimes I'll find performance issues. In order to do what I do when reviewing, ChatGPT would need clear specs (yeah right) and a deep understanding of our system, domain, and even our customers. Of course I'll try it and see how it does. But it struggled and failed to produce what I would consider trivial code when I tried to create a single usable page to spec in react native, so I'm not terribly optimistic.
  - Lewton 4y ago
    ChatGPT will turn your day into spending 90% of your time reviewing code...
elif 4y ago
GPT is a much better debugger than coder in my experience. It is a drop in replacement for googling random linux errors too. "I'm getting this error <error> with the following code. Please add log statements that will test for all the things that could be going wrong <code>" Saved me about 15 minutes yesterday. Not only does chatGPT generate the probably causes of the error, it knows how to test the code for those errors. The human doesn't even have to read the error message anymore.

malborodog 4y ago

Anyone know best way to punch up his function a little so it tees >> out both the q and a to a file? Like history but for chat gpt.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
I don't, but you may be interested in something that improves upon that with the history optionally in outline format: https://github.com/rksm/org-ai https://github.com/rksm/org-ai
alchemist1e9 4y ago
https://github.com/npiv/chatblade https://github.com/npiv/chatblade this has built in history and lots of other features that a serious user needs, like checking token limits and estimating costs, etc.

eschneider 4y ago

My money is on "die trying."

esperent 4y ago

> First off, you’ll need an OpenAI API key. You can get this by going here and signing up. Note that you'll also need to be from a Western country, or at least have access to both a phone number from one and a VPN. And if you want a plus subscription, you'll also need a US credit card - not stated anywhere but I've been totally unable to sign up for plus with either Irish or Belgium cards, it just immediately flashes "card declined" every time with no further info. There's about a 0.1s delay between clicking the pay button and getting that message so it's not querying my bank.

aero-glide2 4y ago
Sign up for the api, they only start charging end of month.
irrational 4y ago
Why are you trying to pay for it? Let procurement at your company figure it out. You wouldn’t pay for your IDE or any other tools, would you? The business should be paying for any tools they want me to use.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  Plenty of people work as contractors/consultants where payroll pays them as a separate company. In fact you are probably much more likely to have something closer to a FAANG income working as contractor rather than as an employee.
- celestialcheese 4y ago
  Yes, I would - these tools are massive time savers, and if I suspect it'll soon become a situation where if you don't use these tools, you're going to get left behind. If my org wouldn't pay for them, I would start looking for other jobs (unless your in an industry that can't use them like national security, etc), but I'm not going to let $30/mo stop me from using a tool that significantly improves my work just because of a middle manager. Also, many programmers I know bring their own keyboards.. Chefs often bring their own knives, or mechanics with their own tool chests. Ownership of your own tools is powerful.

roenxi 4y ago

Being efficient at writing code can barely make someone a 5x engineer. A team of people who write code effectively is easy to do. Hyperproductivity in software is all about deciding what problems to tackle. Richard Hipp isn't worried about chipotle restaurant orders in golang, he's worried about how to store data reliably. That isn't a coding puzzle that ChatGTP is likely to help with. Either ChatGTP can do the whole thing itself (not yet the case) or it is a minor productivity boost because the hard part is articulating the problem. Writing code quickly really isn't a challenge that high performing software engineers need to tackle. ChatGTP is a cool tool, we're all going to be using things like it in a few years, it'll change everything. But it won't make any old engineer a rival to the big names in software engineering.

dmix 4y ago
I think the headline was being tongue in cheek. It probably generated more clicks than “5 clever examples of using ChatGPT via CLI for programming and data science”. Still a good post and reply.
Zach_the_Lizard 4y ago
Writing code quickly may not help the mythical 10x engineer, but it might help a 1x engineer become a 5x engineer. In relative terms, the unaided 10x engineer is now only a 2x engineer as his peers are now vastly more productive. That's huge.
- classified 4y ago
  ... if churning out boilerplate is your definition of "productive".
  - lubujackson 4y ago
    If churning out boilerplate is what your employers sees as product, does it really matter? Coding udeals are valuable in a vacuum but most companies want those PRs merged, technical debt be damned.

synergy20 4y ago

does not work for me: { "error": { "message": "The model: `gpt-4` does not exist", "type": "invalid_request_error", "param": null, "code": "model_not_found" } }

krsdcbl 4y ago
gpt-4 is in closed preview right now, you'd have to register on the waitlist to use that specific model (3.5 is publicly available)
synergy20 4y ago
change gpt-4 to gpt-3.5-turbo worked, gpt-4 api is only for beta testers and you need be on the waiting list to get approved. I tested the scripts and they work really well, esp like the image generation script. However unlike the web-browser the scripts does not keep the context, which is not great. is there a way for shell script to maintain context session somehow?
- shagie 4y ago
  > is there a way for shell script to maintain context session somehow? Feed the output of the previous prompt back into itself. If you look at https://platform.openai.com/playground/p/default-chat?model=text-davinci-003 https://platform.openai.com/playground/p/default-chat?model=... you will see that the prompt for the next line is all of the previous generation conversation. This can consume tokens at an accelerating rate.
  - synergy20 4y ago
    "Human: you seem to remember the context of the chat, how many context you keep, the most recent previous output, or a few conversations AI: I generally remember the last few conversations and I'm also capable of keeping context in longer conversations." I don't think there is a way to feed context back to the script efficiently, maybe need a local database or a queue of certain length to sustain the subject. To mimic the web-browser experience at terminal. the real magic for chatgpt vs old chatbots is that it maintains context, how to keep that via API calls is something I do not fully understand yet. Need read the API reference I guess

asb 4y ago

I've been enjoying using aichat for command-line chatgpt access https://github.com/sigoden/aichat https://github.com/sigoden/aichat (it supports both an interactive repl mode and you can invoke it with your query directly from the command line like the helper used in this article).

artursapek 4y ago

I've found ChatGPT very useful as a "desk buddy" who I can turn to and ask about obscure things. It's quickly replacing my Google/StackOverflow in my workflow. I was working on a .pkg MacOS installer and could not figure out how to get my background image @2x.png to render on a retina display. Turns out I needed to create a directory with the .imageset extension. My attempts at searching for a solution online never led me to this, but ChatGPT immediately knew what to do when I described my problem. It's also tremendously useful as an interactive manpage. I've found it's much faster to ask ChatGPT how a complicated CLI tool works than trying to read the dense --help output to find what I need. It can even have a conversation about A* pathfinding, and how best to implement it with different nuances. It's crazy. I wonder how employers will handle this trend, which is happening so quickly. Is it OK for an employee to get advice on their work from ChatGPT? Is it OK to commit AI-generated code? Is it OK to show internal source code to an AI to help them find a bug or refactor it? There are security implications here, and ethical questions. I think most sophisticated companies will only adopt this kind of tech when they can self-host it, or at least have some kind of guarantee that their employees are using a dedicated, isolated model. With that said, I'm sure many people are already making heavy use of this for their work (as are students). It's already an out-of-control phenomenon.

Madmallard 4y ago

High level engineers solve the right problems quickly and put everything together in a resilient fashion. GPT4 may help them do that more quickly but they probably already will use copilot and templates and past project material and various generators for anything tedious. 10x engineering comes from someone who is trying to "be a better developer" actively for many years. Most people who just use the tools to create the product won't ever become that much better. They will just become more knowledgeable. It is the same as any natural skill. You can play piano for years and never really get better. Or you can try specifically to do hard work of improving your technique, theory, and performance ability directly. It will be way more emotionally taxing to do so, but the end result after years of doing this is that you're vastly better than most. Not everyone can even do this. You definitely have to be in a growth mindset and not particularly stressed emotionally at the outset and during the process. My coworker at Amazon was just making macros nonstop for all these things he wanted to automate within his workflow. He would focus specifically on the hardest problems that we haven't solved first and everything else around it would just spring up together rapidly (I don't even know how he did this). He ended up being heavily involved with AWS and later went to Netflix.

AdityaSanthosh 4y ago
I'm interested about the macros automation. Could you point me to any resource?
- Madmallard 4y ago
  These were things like keybinds and shortcuts within his editor (which 10 years ago this was Eclipse at Amazon). There were other scripts he had but I do not really recall at this point what they were doing. If you google macros for software engineers you can probably find some useful stuff.

Lapsa 4y ago

this is getting lowkey annoying

surrTurr 4y ago

(shameless self plug) wrote a little shell script to efficiently use gpt in the terminal. maybe someone else can make use of it: https://github.com/AlexW00/cli-gpt https://github.com/AlexW00/cli-gpt

bluGill 4y ago

Will I get anything more out of this? As a 10x engineer I can expect to make at most double what a normal 2x engineer (1x engineers mostly get out of engineering in my experience) makes when I get to the tail end of my career. I like to improve my engineering skills. However I also like to take nice vacations, do wood carving, play mandolin, go for long walks in the park, see my kids grow up, and all the billions of other things people do in life. There isn't time to do it all: time spend becoming better at one is time stolen from the others.

nerdponx 4y ago
Wouldn't a "2x" engineer then be a 1x engineer, and a "1x" engineer <1x?
intelVISA 4y ago
No point putting in more than 1x for somebody else's yacht, you have to build your own vision and sell it.

spyremeown 4y ago

Spoilers: the future is actually kinda just ok-ish. GPT is used in almost all professions but akin to Google. Nothing really changes, we come back to these threads and articles every couple years to look back and realize how plain stupid and hopeful humanity really is sometimes.

tester457 4y ago
What you describe is a huge change.
dmix 4y ago
Adding a major new tool that is “used in almost all professions” is a pretty big deal even if it’s only used as productivity software, which IMO is still far too short sighted of its potential (a simple chat interface is just the baby steps before we figure out all the API driven usecases). What was the last time we could look back at old HN threads and say that? Bitcoin?

ar9av 4y ago

TL;DR: another ChatGPT article

juujian 4y ago

Don't get me wrong, this is neat. But the only reason why this works is because there is one million tutorial out there who use this data for teaching new students. The bigger issue is edge cases, stuff where there is no precedence. This output is a starting point for something, but it does not even get you 3% of the way there unless you work for a teenager who is into basketball anecdotes.

throwthrowuknow 4y ago
It’s also trained on code and books. The knowledge is in there, it just needs more RLHF to improve its abilities. There’s a good chance it can handle those edge cases by combining the information it has in different ways.
- juujian 4y ago
  If the books have the specific code that is. If the books have some code and discuss edge cases, that is not something a language model could handle. It could give you the abstract concept that applies but it would fail when you prompt it to create new, valid code based on abstract concepts that are in the data.
  - throwthrowuknow 4y ago
    Why do you think it can only copy existing code? I’ve used it for some really obscure cases and it’s still able to produce useful output both code and language. Try using it to create your own programming language with completely different keywords and oddball syntax and control structures and then ask it to write programs in it, it actually works!

intelVISA 4y ago

10x is a mindset, identifying real problems and solving them in a simple* way with novel solutions. *most people can solve problems effectively but, imo, it takes true crafts(wo)man to solve it -simply- It's not a skill you can grind per se, although many try that fruitless path.

uncletaco 4y ago

At what point did we stop making fun of that 10x engineer thread and started taking it seriously? Who forgot that 10x was a silly little thing that made zero sense in the real world?

jrvarela56 4y ago
There are obvious examples of 10x performers in every creative endeavor. Why would it be any different in software engineering? There are people who find bugs 10x faster than others, design stuff that's 100x easier to maintain, increase morale of a team vs being an energy drain, make changes faster without breaking stuff, etc. There are a lot of ways one can become 10x more effective than another at building software.
- toastedwedge 4y ago
  There are examples, yes, but I took it as the implication that a 10x engineer shouldn't be the bare minimum for the entire workforce's ability to reason about a problem or dedication to its craft (and thus lead to the meme that one isn't worth spent effort unless they are in the >=10x group).
- seventytwo 4y ago
  That’s the nature of any long-tailed distribution. The lie is that anyone can become a 10x [insert thing here] just by trying harder. Self-improvement is a real thing, but everyone can’t be 10x or 6-sigma or world class. Strive, reach, sure… but ultimately, just make sure you live your life. You only get one, and the clock’s ticking.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cryptonym 4y ago
Unfortunately people thinking they are overall worth 10 to 1000 times their co-workers exists.
- 4y ago

xnx 4y ago

I didn't believe in 10x developers until I met a 0.1x developer.

Clubber 4y ago
I would argue there are -1x developers because regular developers have to go back and fix/refactor/rewrite the code later, thus create a net negative. I've always been curious what people feel the baseline of a 10x is (i.e. 1x). Is it a fresh developer out of college or what?
- xnx 4y ago
  Great point. Maybe it's relative if everyone thinks they are a 1x developer.

recursivedoubts 4y ago

if you want a vision of the future, winston, imagine a half-wit shipping generated code they are incapable of understanding, modifiying or debugging into production, forever

zabzonk 4y ago
while stamping on your face
- recursivedoubts 4y ago
  while the business people exclaim "how come nothing works anymore? man, we saved a ton of money getting rid of those senior developers tho, amirite?"

superb-owl 4y ago

There seems to be a lot of dissenting opinion on how these tools will affect software engineering jobs. Those of us that have deep architectural skills, are able to deal with ambiguous requirements, balance UX with technical limitations, etc, will be safe for a good while. Those of us that were trained in bootcamps to crank out MEAN/MERN/etc apps might be in a bit of trouble. I say this not to disparage the latter group--many are great engineers who do great, reliable work. But it's ultimately rote work, something LLMs excel at. There is a huge tranche of SWEs who are going to become redundant soon. Lots of them gave up careers as teachers etc for a more lucrative career in tech. It's unfortunate.

lordnacho 4y ago
Question is whether you have to go through the bootcamp stage to become an architect? Like many skills, you often start with the simple stuff.
- superb-owl 4y ago
  Yeah I'm wondering the same thing. How do we train up the next generation of SWEs given the new world we live in? Interesting times.
  - hyperhopper 4y ago
    I'm hoping the AI scare and layoffs stop people from flocking to software engineering. Less supply of us means more demand, higher wages, better working conditions. Especially with how things are going, the last thing we want is a new generation of swes to compete with the dwindling amount of jobs.
  - mrbombastic 4y ago
    I would think whatever we consider today as mid-level would become the expectation for entry-level. It would be nice if we had a culture of apprenticeship in our industry though.
- analognoise 4y ago

meindnoch 4y ago

That's not even a 1.5x, sorry.

giantg2 4y ago

"Become a 1000x engineer or die tryin" Easy, source out your ideas and work to a team of 1000 people (aka become a subdivision manager).

ChrisBland 4y ago

Writing code is the basic 101 of our industry. Anyone can write a loop or an if statement. With todays computing power, for most applications even poorly written code will run and will execute quite fast. What makes someone a 10x (and i hate that term) is the ability to take requirements, or better yet, a vague idea given to them by the business and turn that into software that benefits the end user and makes the company money. The 10x engineer gets to the 'why' that you are building something, not the 'how'.

zuzuleinen 4y ago
"The 10x engineer gets to the 'why' that you are building something, not the 'how'." It's a pity that our interviews are all biased towards the "how"
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  I mean, you do need to know the "how" too. It isn't unimportant, it's just a more common skill. You need to be a 1x engineer before you can be a 10x engineer (if you believe in them).
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daveslash 4y ago
RE>> Anyone can write a loop or an if statement. <-- Respectfully disagree. I had an intern a few years ago -- recent college grad in CompSci. I tried my best to lightly mentor him. One day I was talking about the diff between a compiled language and scripting, mentioned REPL. To demonstrate REPL, I opened up both the windows CMD prompt and the Chrome Developer tools. I mentioned that with a REPL like the Chrome Tools, it's trivial to do FizzBuzz in JavaScript. I explained the problem to him and asked him to take a stab at writing it. This wasn't an interview question, just a discussion and a mentoring opportunity. He couldn't. What he said next blew me away, coming from a CompSci graduate "Oh, loops, yeah, I never quite understood those. Like, for loops and while loops - I never really got that". I asked if he meant recursion, cause that can be tricky. No - he really could not write a for loop in any language. I wasn't going to shame him and I walked him through it, but I was disappoint. ಠ_ಠ [Edit: Spelling] Edit 2...Before I start claiming that CompSci programs are letting students down, I have to consider that the claim that he had a BS in CompSci may have not been accurate. I did not check or verify his transcript. The more I reflect on it, I think he may have had a degree is Web Design and we got pressured to add him to our Software Eng. team because the hiring manager (and his actual mentor outside of work) passed him off as a "Web Developer". Now that I think about it... that seems more likely....Edit 3: It was driving me crazy so I dug up the resume in my inbox ... it was def CompSci, listing C++, C#, Java, and SQL as technologies and data structures and algorithms as courses taken... I'm not sure what to think...

vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago

[flagged]

joenot443 4y ago
If you want people to look at your project, make a Show HN post. Promoting your stuff on unrelated posts isn't really encouraged.

barrysteve 4y ago

50c had a mil' in the bank and was still on the grind. Increased productivity doesn't mean freedom from more work. This article is beautiful and effective. Thank you for the information! The culture around GPT at the moment is verging on fanaticism. When car companies close down and people lose jobs, it's sad for the die-hard followers, but most people don't care so much. This closure of trivium-level programmery is being met with a ramp up in fanaticism and repetitive doubling-down on preset views. So odd...

Aperocky 4y ago

10x engineer obviously do not do 10x work, because 10x work usually means 10x bugs. 10x engineer cut the implementation complexity from 10x -> 1x, and then proceed to do that, while still satisfying business/product intention. Generating 1000x code is more like being a -1000x engineer.

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jollyllama 4y ago

Suddenly, the wisdom of the whiteboard interview dawns on me.

yosito 4y ago

A lot of people seem to be hung up on the title and totally missing how useful this tool is. People are right that the tasks that you're having this tool do aren't tasks that a 10x (or 1000x) developer would do. But what they're missing is that this is exactly why you can use this tool to multiply your productivity. If you don't have to spend your time writing silly scripts anymore or converting JSON to yaml or whatever other yak you're shaving, your time is free to spend on other stuff, making big decisions, solving truly hard problems. And that's how you become a 10x developer. Thanks for this article, I found it very inspiring.

californical 4y ago
It possibly enables you to build the wrong thing, 10x faster. Do you think the company will let you just have fun learning for the other 90% of the time that you can free up? They’ll just expect more output. Being able to write code 10x faster will likely not free your time enough to become a 10x problem solver.
- yosito 4y ago
  No, it frees you up to spend your energy on thinking about what the right thing to build is. If your head is buried in code all the time, that's when you can't stop and look at the bigger picture and ask if you're building the wrong thing or not.

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Arubis 4y ago

The 10x engineers I've met don't write 10x more or better or more well-targeted code. They enable ten other engineers to double their output. "10x engineers" are a leadership position, not a development position.

tomas789 4y ago

My experience with code assistant is strikingly similar to my current experience with Vim. Sometimes, it makes me slightly faster. Other times the experience breaks down spectacularly on previously simple things. And last but not least, it is difficult to get rid of it.

Dave3of5 4y ago

Ha we'll I'm becoming a 10,000x engineer ! ... .. . 10,000x shitter !

m3kw9 4y ago

Using Gpt is more like trying to get to point a to point b, it allows you to move faster, but you still need to decide what paths and modes of transports to take. So overall it could 1.5x you

ugiox 4y ago

One can also decide to just be a https://1x.engineer https://1x.engineer

TremendousJudge 4y ago
Or a grug brained engineer https://grugbrain.dev/ https://grugbrain.dev/
conor- 4y ago
10x being real or not aside, if there's a 1x-type they certainly don't do many of the things in this list in my experience and certainly not: >Writes code that others can read. >Reads the Docs. >Updates the Docs. In my experience, half of the differentiation between above average and solidly "1x" or middling devs is reading documentation and obtaining a deeper understanding of the tools, language, platform they're developing on top of.

elif 4y ago

Not mentioned in post this but occured to me by reading: I think I will start changing my functional prompts to require a JSON format in responses so that various aspects of the response don't need to be manually parsed, and requests can be more reliably piped to subsequent requests.

gremlinsinc 4y ago
> Not mentioned in post this but occured to me by reading: > I think I will start changing my functional prompts to require a JSON format in responses so that various aspects of the response don't need to be manually parsed, and requests can be more reliably piped to subsequent requests. that adds more characters though so maybe hits token limits faster, I was thinking about how to have better contexts then found out about langchain and creating a sort of long term memory using vector databases. still trying to figure this out, but once I do, I think it'll be amazing what I can do with it.
- fzliu 4y ago
  Beyond artificially increasing prompt length, vector DBs also allow you to inject domain knowledge into autoregressive LMs.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    yeah, it's basically like updating the 'cutoff date' on chatGPT but only w/ specific data pertinent to a specific topic, right?
beigebrucewayne 4y ago
I had other examples where I request the output in Markdown and it acts accordingly—definitely a nice feature.

simonw 4y ago

AI-assisted programming tools have already increased my personal coding productivity to the point that they've made me more ambitious: I'm building whole projects that previously I wouldn't have committed to, because they would have taken too long (just past my "worth-it" threshold) otherwise. Wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/ https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

beigebrucewayne 4y ago
Enjoy your posts - agreed!

electrondood 4y ago

The 10x trope needs to die. It's unhealthy.

penguin_booze 4y ago

Our dearly beloved tech leaders have called for pausing AI for 6 months [0]. Can HN ban AI/ChatGPT-themed posts as well? [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65110030 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65110030

usrbinbash 4y ago

Okay, let's talk about a theoretical figure, called the "1000x novelist", a very productive author who uses advanced AI to write novels really fast. Clearly super productive, because novels get written so very fast. Now, here is a question: George R.R. Martin has been writing on the 6th book of "Game of Thrones", titled "The Winds of Winter" (TWoW) for over 10 years. It still isn't finished. What do you think, which will sell more copies: TWoW, or all novels of the 1000x novelist combined?

sillysaurusx 4y ago
The latter, of course. That’d be like pitting an army of Stephen Kings against him. Their net worths show it: $65M for Martin vs $450M for King.

Zetice 4y ago

Ok, dumb question, but does the API skip over the whole, "Thanks for asking that question, here's what I found:" stuff I keep seeing in ChatGPT when I ask it to generate non-text responses? Even when I ask it the "generate a 10 row csv containing sample chipotle restaurant order data with headers" prompt, I get "Sure, here's an example CSV file with 10 rows of sample Chipotle restaurant order data, including headers:" at the top...

throwthrowuknow 4y ago
Add: I only want the CSV, don’t describe what you are doing.
- Zetice 4y ago
  Heh nope, I still get the whole "Sure, here's an example of a CSV file with 10 rows of sample Chipotle restaurant order data:" I wonder if the web UI has some additional "explain everything you do" prompt injection stuff going on.
  - claar 4y ago
    My favorite trick is to ask for JSON, and tack this onto my prompt: "Return JSON, beginning with {"
  - throwthrowuknow 4y ago
    Hmm works with GPT-4 but I see what you mean with turbo. Edit: got it to work with Output an example of a CSV document with 10 rows containing sample chipotle restaurant order data. Do not start with any other text.
macromaniac 4y ago
Are you using the API endpoint or browser chatgpt? I tried it 5 times via API and it works and then 2 times via the browser and it doesn't work. They are different models. If you are using the API try lowering the temperature mb?
4y ago

notjoemama 4y ago

I tried chatpt and asked a few questions about doing something specific in a Rails project. It was so specific that I had already found the sources online that were avaiable. It summarized the sources into directly actionable steps. At first I thought that was odd and unhelpful, but perhaps I expected too much. So then I tried giving it a prompt about setting up the devise ruby gem in a new rails project. That's one of those tasks that it helps to be familiar woth once and you can promptly forget; you'll rarely return to authentication in the lifetime of an app after its done and secure. It again presented me with the exact actionable steps for setup. I reviewed the gem's GitHub readme and found the response to be correct. As far as I can tell, chatgpt performs the action of finding and simplifying the information needed to take the next step forward, with caveats for a lack of understanding unless asked and the potential to be inaccurate or wrong. But that's all it does at the moment. No better than asking the "devise expert" on my team how to setup devise from memory. Kinda cool experience, but I doubt it's a titanic shift because it doesn't have the depth of sematic meaning you and I do.

Denzel 4y ago
> As far as I can tell, chatgpt performs the action of finding and simplifying the information needed to take the next step forward [...] But that's all it does at the moment. ChatGPT's output is certainly limited by its input. If you ask questions that can be answered by finding and simplifying information, then that's the answer you'll get. However, if you treat ChatGPT like a functioning software engineer, describe the problem space, explain the requirements, and define the boundaries, then ChatGPT will do much more. From that point on, you can ask it to explain why it chose a certain data structure, or to adjust an implementation approach, among other things. With 15 prompts in 2 hours, I was able to pair program a novel 200-line program in Go that used AST parsing, command execution, pattern matching, file parsing, and custom data structures for specific data processing. All to solve a problem one of my teams experienced in the industry. ChatGPT wrote 99% of the code; I tweaked 2 or 3 lines because it had problems correcting an error in a regex (most likely due to the fact that ChatGPT sees tokens not characters). The code compiled, ran, and produced the exact result I wanted. Researching, prototyping, and writing this code by hand would have taken me a few days probably. That's why the project sat on my TODO list for months

noncoml 4y ago

Am I the only one that doesn’t get it? I tried GPT and it’s unable to write anything but the most simple code from simple requirements. As a tiny bit of complexity and it’s lost. Are people at work dealing with tiny code bases with well defined requirements?

fastball 4y ago
I don't know what kinda code-bases you work on, but I think there are many more potential factors which determine how useful GPT might be besides "tiny and well-defined". I won't try to enumerate them here, but as an example if you are working in a much more / entirely functional way, you can think of your entire code-base as tiny and well-defined, even if it is composed of 1000s of functions. Can think similarly if the arch is microservices.
- noncoml 4y ago
  In which case the main problem an engineer is solving is how all these interact together. And not the X minutes that it takes to write each individual well defined tiny function. So, I still don’t get it.
  - blibble 4y ago
    you don't get it because it's all hype it's a slightly better version of google
  - fastball 4y ago
    Yes, GPT can model/design how all these interact together as well.

ArenaSource 4y ago

One subtle bug in your code is all it takes to go from 1000x to 0.01x

senko 4y ago

Wow. 210+ comments and maaybe 10 of those actually talk about the article! (yes, I've read them all because I can't believe almost everyone missed the point) The point of the article is actually neat: a small shell (Fish) script to send query to ChatGPT or DALL-E and get response back in the terminal. As a terminal user myself, this is really nice! (I rewrote it for myself in bash which I use, but used the curl command virtually as is) The post itself is hilariously over the top (1000x c'mon), quoting 50 Cent and including statements like: > Unfortunately, due to inflation — real and imagined, 10X just won’t cut it anymore. We need bigger gains, bigger wins, more code, more PRs, more lines, less linting, etc... Either people really need to be pointed out the sarcasm these days, or everyone's just philosophising about the title (I'm willing to bet it's the latter).

gazelle21 4y ago
[dead]
asciii 4y ago
> everyone's just philosophising about the title It's so easy to bait with a #x in a title, and especially when defining in terms of engineer (also an elusive term at times).
quasarj 4y ago
I couldn't figure out how to replicate the gpt_data one, how did you replicate the "string join" part? I'm not exactly sure what it was supposed to be putting in the json. I mean, obviously the full data in the second parameter, but I'm unsure how to encode that..
- deleted 4y ago
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- senko 4y ago
  What I did instead is just join all the args with spaces (so I don't need to use quotes around the prompt), with no care about the newlines, and it seems to work okay for me with multiline input: prompt="$*" Here's the complete script: https://gist.github.com/senko/68026864d502473eacd56b2e16e40108 https://gist.github.com/senko/68026864d502473eacd56b2e16e401... Since I can use this with multiline input I didn't create a separate data-gpt one. (Note I also used gpt-3.5-turbo model and not gpt-4 because the former is faster and cheaper and for quick one-offs from cmdline it's usually enough for me).

maerF0x0 4y ago

+1 to all the comments about deciding what problems to tackle. My nuanced 2c on it is that every line of code you write is a liability. Part of what revolutionized pricing mechanisms was FOSS and SaaS, which are 2 strategies of amortizing the cost of development across many many people. Every line you write for your company is a line with amortization across exactly 1. So first consider the value/cost tradeoff of FOSS and SaaS to see if you can compete. 1000x might be simply glueing together a few free/cheap systems which would have cost your company quarters. Putting in nice interfaces/adapters means you can easily cut them out if they become a regrettable decision.

fwungy 4y ago

It's often that little edge piece of script that kills productivity. Something you need but off your beaten track that takes a few hours or days to figure out. That's ai coding will shine.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

Note to self to try this technique plus merge it with "Call ChatGPT from any text box (thank you ibus!)" > https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9rh8/call_chatgpt_from_any_text_box_thank_you_ibus/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/11l9rh8/call_chatgpt....

gbro3n 4y ago

This is a really inspiring article and the best demonstration of ChatGPT's capabilities I've seen so far. I've repeated the "experiment" here having converted the queries to bash: https://journals.appsoftware.com/public/76/227/4223/blog/software-development/demonstrating-chatgpt-data-mining-and-querying-capabilities-via-the-openai-api-using-bash https://journals.appsoftware.com/public/76/227/4223/blog/sof...

allen-munsch 4y ago

Great post. I felt inspired and wired it up to whisper. - https://github.com/allen-munsch/hey_gpt_hey_whisper/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/allen-munsch/hey_gpt_hey_whisper/blob/mai...

42throwaway5832 4y ago

this + fish...if someone installs them via installer rather than building from source, is that a security risk? Meaning, is fish so powerful that a compromised version of fish could scrape / intercept GPT comms and either prime GPT networks or disturb them?

jakkos 4y ago

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