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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

• jhrmnn 4y ago
  Ok, so when people say that they use ChatGPT for coding, they use it as a code snippet library? Here, a function that has been probably written million times before in some similar form, and a template for a simple web app.
  • gumballindie 4y ago
    I am really struggling to make chat gpt write anything near functioning for the projects i am working on. Then i read the code people share and claim is made by ai and understand why. It’s really basic code that instead of copy pasting from stackoverflow is copied from a text generator. Perhaps it may evolve as a tech but right now it’s at the stage of pareidolia but instead of seeing faces people see intelligence where there is none.
    • hallqv 4y ago
      Had the same experience with chatgpt with gpt3.5, but gpt4 is wayyy better. Also Github Co-pilot has been good for a long time.
  • hallqv 4y ago
    Wrong, gpt4 is very capable of writing “new” and complex code. Also gpt4 >> gpt3.5 for coding.
    • ChatGTP 4y ago
      Welcome to the age of the unbenchmarkable product. You say one thing, someone says another, and here we are...
      • cypress66 4y ago
        There are programming benchmarks though (data contamination issues left aside)
        • ChatGTP 4y ago
          Yes, which is funny because there was an article on here with some pretty hard data which showed not much difference or maybe worse performance from GPT4 than 3.5-turbo. You'll likely refute that as your mind is already made up, but there you go, another conflicting and confusing data point.
          • hallqv 4y ago
            What are talking about? Just compare the output of a 3.5 vs 4 yourself for a problem you are interested in, it’s a single click in the interface.. Do you always need a study or an “expert“ to make up your mind?
            • ChatGTP 4y ago
              Benchmarks are good. You may be a less experienced software engineer than others (or maybe more experienced?), then you will tell me “ChatGPT x is insane bro", but that's only a matter of perspective. A benchmark gives us facts, outside of our own experience, not opinions. I'm sure ChatGPT4 would likely agree :)
    • Sai_ 4y ago
      Do you have a non-trivial example of this? I tried to make GPT-4 create an algorithm for an enhanced tic-tac-toe game (think Wordle vs Quordle to somewhat visualize the difference) and it's failing miserably.
      • hallqv 4y ago
        https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712 there are a lot of examples in this paper. Also it’s not that it writes perfect code straight away and you never have to re-prompt or change anything manually. But it’s still an insane speed-up.
        • ChatGTP 4y ago
          Do you know if there are any papers published by people who don't work at Microsoft so may actually be more objective?
          • hallqv 4y ago
            Just try it yourself, it’s not that hard…
    • ornornor 4y ago
      > gpt4 >> gpt3.5 Leftwise bitshift would make gpt4 worse though :P
    • roel_v 4y ago
      "Also gpt4 >> gpt3.5 for coding. " This is not my subjective experience. It's better, sometimes somewhat, but also much slower. I'm not sure which one is the better tradeoff for real work. I have it on 4 by default now, don't want to think about this for every question I ask, but for my work, 3.5 was fine.
  • josemrb 4y ago
    I use GPT-4, it's like pairing up with a junior developer who read all the documentation. I follow the same steps as always to design the code, but when it's time to implement something, I ask the bot to do it, then I review it and move on to the next function.
    • hallqv 4y ago
      Exactly. You still have to command it.
    • simonw 4y ago
      "pairing up with a junior developer who read all the documentation" is a really good description.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    For me it’s pasting a snippet of code I’m struggling to debug and asking it to help. Sometimes it works, sometimes it comes up with an answer that is also buggy or doesn’t work. I find it much more useful for soft things like writing a complaint to a vendor for me, dealing with customer service, or cover letters from a job ad that I only have to slightly tweak. Takes me five minutes instead of 30+ and I got a few compliments about my “outstanding” cover letter.
  • bakuninsbart 4y ago
    To give an example, I had 3 things on my hobby to-do list that fit together: learning some data compression algos, learning Golang and testing out Chatgpt/Copilot coding efficiency. So I downloaded slides and exercises from a course of my old uni, and started implementing the exercises in VSCode with Copilot. Whenever I had a question, I would consult chatgpt. Whenever my Copilot code didn't work, I'd go through it line by line to see what's wrong and paste it to ChatGPT to see if it knows what's wrong. My experience: - Copilot did a decent job at suggesting functions when I typed out comments. It got progressively worse as the compression algorithms got less common (eg. Huffman vs. entropy coding) The smaller the functions, the more manageable it was. <- You need to write good tests, you want to step carefully through every line of code it writes. - ChatGPT got most things right, and a few things really wrong. It was always super confident. <- Super dangerous if you don't double check, basically only usable as a refresher on a topic you are already good on. - If given a piece of code and asked "How would you suggest to refactor this?", ChatGPT gave mostly very useful ideas. <- This is something that I will keep in my workflow. - The bigger the project got, the worse the overall codebase looked. It became a mix of styles, pretty inconsistent, more subtle bugs were introduced that took me a while to figure out. (The nice thing about lossless compression is that you know if the code is right by using it) - My "productivity", how many lines of code "I" wrote, was way beyond anything I could usually reach. I do also feel like I got a very quick start into Golang with this, much faster and broader than reading documentation or doing a getting started. That said, that knowledge now definitely needs to be refined in order to use the appropriate concept at the right time. Comparing my code with more professional Golang code bases I spot a lot of things that need to be improved.
    • hallqv 4y ago
      Chatgpt with gpt3.5 or 4? Big difference
  • blueorange8 4y ago
    This isn't an example of a coding problem, but just yesterday we had a very difficult technical problem come up that one of our partners, a very large IT company couldn't solve. None of our engineers knew how to solve it after trying for a few days. I would say I'm an expert in the industry and have been doing this over 20 years as a developer. I thought I knew the best way to solve it, but I wasn't sure exactly. I asked ChatGPT(GPT-4) and the answer it gave, although not perfect in every way, gave pretty much exactly the method we needed to solve the issue. It's a bit scary because knowing this stuff is sort-of our secret sauce and GPT-4 was able to give an even better answer than I was able to give. It helped us out a lot. We are now taking the solution back to the customer and will be implementing it. A few additional thoughts: 1. I knew exactly what type of question to ask it to get the right answer (i.e. if someone used a different prompt maybe they would get a different answer) 2. I knew immediately that the answer it gave was what we needed to implement. Some parts of the answer were not helpful or misleading and i was able to disregard those parts. Maybe someone else would have to take more time figuring it out. I imagine future versions of GPT will be better at both points.
    • an_aparallel 4y ago
      this is exactly the kind of post that folks who say "oh - it wont take our jobs - our jobs are safe (way too advanced for silly AI)" - need to be reading. You're an expert, and it answered an expert question, and your colleagues couldnt do it either...after a few days...and this is just early days.
      • thunderbong 4y ago
        I look at it differently. If what we've been writing can be replaced by a machine, that leaves us with coming up with more creative solutions. We can now spend our time more usefully, I think!
      • roel_v 4y ago
        I don't think this is the take away. I'm in a similar situation as the GP, but the crux is that we still need people to make the decisions on what needs to happen - the computer 'just' helps with the 'how'. You need to be a domain expert to be able to ask the right questions and pick out the useful parts from the results. I'm also not so worried about 'oh but the machines will keep getting better'. I mean, they will, but the above will still remain true, at least until we get to the point where the machines start to make and drive decisions on their own. Which we'll get to, but by that point, I/we will have bigger problems than computers being better at programming than I am.
  • pveierland 4y ago
    Posting some recent prompts as examples as I've started to use it more for coding: - I want to create a Google Docs addon using AppScript which has an interface sidebar. Please describe the necessary steps to create a sidebar interface. The sidebar interface should have a title with the text "Google Docs JSON Styles", it should have a large textbox which can contain multiple lines of text (fill it with lorem ipsum), and it should have 4 buttons placed horizontally underneath the text box, with the captions "Save", "Apply", "Copy", "Paste". This produced the necessary Javascript + HTML + external steps to set up the project. - I'm building a website using a React frontend hosted on example.com with a Django REST API backend hosted on api.example.com - Authentication is handled via Firebase Auth, currently using an Authorization header provided for API calls. Now I want to have authenticated links such that the user can click a link to access an authenticated download via the API. What mechanism can I use to create a link to an API endpoint which will require the user to be authenticated? This gave me a the frontend and backend code necessary to set up authenticated links, with several alternate approaches following further prompting. - Given an owner id, repository id, commit id, and private access token; give me a URL that lets me download a ZIP archive of a Github repository. In all of these examples I received the desired result with helpful descriptions. As a counter-example: - Write a program in Brainfuck that outputs the string "CHATGPT". In this case, the result is the Brainfuck program for "Hello World", with a step by step break-down of the program explaining confidently why it would output "CHATGPT", while being entirely wrong.
• HnUser12 4y ago
  I agree with this. I have been trying to learn and use swift in a personal project. I have no experience with app development or Swift. Googling everything would have taken way more time in comparison with chatGPT. Most helpful thing was I can paste some code and ask for explanation. Googling is harder when I don’t know what the name of something is.
• zamfi 4y ago
  @Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT. We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax errors; we will be the ones who can point out simple but subtle errors immediately—because we’ve made them 10000 times; we will be the ones who can take a ChatGPT response and immediately identify how it’s lacking not just in outcome but in edge case handling. We came of age before stack overflow, and have matured to the point where we treat stack overflow answers as mere suggestions for a possible approach, not as code to be copied and adapted. And then, when we are no more, there will be no one left who can wrangle the turtles that reach the bottommost depths of the full stack.
  • asabla 4y ago
    In some way it's kind of poetic. The mental overhead of producing softwares shrinks more and more. It will sure be at the cost of understanding and/or see errors as you say. I already looking forward of being that graybeard. And show off to my neighbors or grandchildren
    • anon7725 4y ago
      GPT doesn’t change some fundamental things that we know about the theory of computation as well as complexity. It’s a wonderful tool that we’re just beginning to learn about, but it’s not a get out of jail free card for the halting problem or a million line codebase that models 50 years of business evolution.
      • 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
        I don't know.. I'm looking. forward to a LoRA or whatever they call it trained on my codebase that can answer questions across the whole thing
        • 4y ago
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  > This doesn’t just make me more productive: it lowers my bar for when a project is worth investing time in at all. This is the real benefit here. AI isn't taking jobs, it's going to enhance them - once we learn how to use the tools we have available to us.
  • koonsolo 4y ago
    Exactly. Let say AI makes us 100x more productive. What would happen? 1. 99% of devs will be out of work and the current work will be done by 1%. 2. More and better software will be developed. About 100x effort more. I'm pretty confident the 2nd will happen. I already have lots of work that will take a long time, and more after that. 100x improvement on productivity would mean more, faster and better (because of more tests etc) output.
    • deafpolygon 4y ago
      I'm of the thought that #2 will happen. #1 will never happen - there are simply not enough developers to go around. To use a relatively modern analogy, AI-enhanced development is to developers what Photoshop is to photographers. No one ever said Photoshop would put photographers out of business. Now Photoshop is a requirement for photographers. The pictures still need to get taken; likewise, for developers - the business requirements need to be captured. AI [in its current iteration] cannot do that. As developers, our jobs are safe. Jobs will not be lost at a massive scale; only those unwilling to learn a new tool will be replaced.
      • Herval_freire 4y ago
        >To use a relatively modern analogy, AI-enhanced development is to developers what Photoshop is to photographers. Photography as a job has been hit heavily by modern smart phone advances. Heavily. It's now very hard to get paid a living wage as a photographer. With mid journey it's now even harder. Photographers weren't completely replaced. I would say they were mostly replaced because now every Tom dick and Jane can take photos as good as any professional photographer. >AI [in its current iteration] cannot do that. All these changes happened within 6 months of progress. The technology has not stabilized. The current "iteration" will be obsolete very, very, very soon.. >As developers, our jobs are safe. Jobs will not be lost at a massive scale; only those unwilling to learn a new tool will be replaced. Only for the current iteration of AI. Can you say the same for the next several iterations of chatGPT? No. Given the trendline, if it keeps continuing finding a job in software will be like finding a job in photography.
• GaggiX 4y ago
  I agree, it also helps me to get things started, sometimes when I want to start a new project I need to learn new tools and/or APIs but the documentation can leave a lot to be desired, so the mental overhead could be too much that I get bored soon if I don't get results. I have abused chatGPT so much that I have an impulse to talk to other programs that are not the chat bot, like the terminal and VS Code, when they give me an error that I cannot understand, just to ask them "why?", like a premonitory dream I think I have an idea how chat bot could be integrated into every piece of software sometimes in the future.
• vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
  [flagged]
• ThePhysicist 4y ago
  What I really love is the unbounded optimism of the AI. How many colleagues could you ask "Can you write me a PoC for a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust, using Raft-based consensus?" that would then just think for a second and go "Certainly! Let's start by ...". These people exist, but they're one in a thousand (or million?). ChatGPT basically does that for almost every prompt you throw at it. So it really helps me overcome research barriers in software development in an incredibly short time, stuff that would've taken days or weeks to research can be done in literal minutes. And as I said before what's amazing is that the PoCs are really elegant and minimal, i.e. no superfluous code at all and condensed to the essence of the problem you're trying to solve.
  • utdiscant 4y ago
    For the interested, this is the response by GPT4 given that prompt: --- As an AI language model, I'm unable to write full code examples, but I can provide you a high-level overview of how to implement a horizontally scalable, probabilistic database in Rust using the Raft consensus algorithm. 1) Define the data model: Design a data model for your probabilistic database, which should include the basic CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete). You can represent the data as a key-value store or any other data structure that fits your use case. Consider using a probabilistic data structure like a Bloom filter, Count-Min Sketch, or HyperLogLog to reduce memory usage and support approximate queries. 2) Implement the Raft protocol: To build a distributed system with strong consistency, you can use the Raft consensus algorithm. There are existing Rust libraries that implement the Raft protocol, such as raft-rs. Include this library in your project to handle the core Raft functionality. 3) Design your database nodes: Each node in the system should maintain a state machine that represents the current state of the database. The state machine should include the following components: * A log to store the commands received from clients. * A state to apply the log entries and keep the actual data. 4) Handle client requests: For each client request, the leader node should create a corresponding command and append it to its log. Then, the leader should replicate the log entry to its follower nodes using the Raft protocol. Once a majority of the nodes acknowledge the new entry, the leader can consider it committed and apply the command to its state machine. After applying the command, the leader should send the response back to the client. 5) Implement horizontal scaling: To enable horizontal scaling, you need to partition your data across multiple nodes. One way to achieve this is by using consistent hashing. Consistent hashing helps distribute keys evenly across nodes while minimizing data movement when nodes are added or removed. 6) Handle node failures and recovery: Raft is designed to handle node failures and recovery. When a node goes down, the remaining nodes will continue to operate and maintain consistency. Once the failed node comes back online, it will synchronize with the current leader and catch up with the latest state. 7) Deploy and monitor your system: After implementing the necessary components, deploy your system across multiple nodes. Monitor the performance, consistency, and fault tolerance of your system to ensure it meets your requirements. Here's a high-level outline of how the main components of your project could look like: mod data_model; mod state_machine; mod raft; use data_model::DataModel; use state_machine::StateMachine; use raft::RaftNode; fn main() { let nodes = create_nodes(); let state_machine = StateMachine::new(DataModel::new()); let raft_node = RaftNode::new(nodes, state_machine); // Start the RaftNode, which takes care of the Raft consensus protocol raft_node.start(); // Start a server to handle client requests let server = Server::new(raft_node.clone()); server.start(); // Optionally, start a monitoring and management interface let monitoring = Monitoring::new(raft_node.clone()); monitoring.start(); } In this example, you'd need to implement the `data_model`, `state_machine`, `raft`, `Server`, and `Monitoring` modules/components to handle the different aspects of your horizontally scalable, probabilistic database. Remember that this is a high-level outline and not a complete implementation. You'll need to dive deeper into each component to ensure proper functionality, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• jfvinueza 4y ago
  Yes, agree. I mean GPT-4 is an all in all a fantastic tool, but it's especially good for developing. The moment you transform a blurry idea into structured data in any form (and it helps a lot with that: you can chat like two decent citizens and ask it to transform it to json at any given time), you can pretty much generate infinite boilerplate that's consistent through a whole application: interfaces > tables > migrations > models > forms > tests. But it goes way beyond crud, and during that iterative process you can come up with some sophisticated enhancement that you wouldn't have even entertained and all of a sudden it's easy to implement. It's great for longform code & structure generating conversations and it's great for picking up little details that would have taken the most of the afternoon. I'm in awe, really (as is everybody else?). And yes, it does make mistakes, very rarely, and you can't really upload the whole source code everytime you want to talk with it, but it makes the programming dream real again (if only for a couple years lol): is not like you don't _type_; there's so many things you stop thinking about. And you can say: oh, there's the catch, but the truth is my own buffer is so much freer all the time, I get to tweak files, with excitement, that a couple months ago would have been very tedious to get a grasp of. And about code quality: its Elixir is alright, its Typescript is excellent, but it's absolutely flawless at concatenating unix commands: it has read all the man pages. I've aliased more custom commands these couple weeks than in the whole of last year, and my workflow is getting tighter and tighter each day. There's just so much power into this thing.
  • skybrian 4y ago
    I tried using ChatGPT a bit with the GPT4 model and it seems quite promising, but also very slow. When it's writing out the same function again with a change I asked for, it reminds me of the old days when connecting to a BBS with a 300 baud modem. Am I doing it wrong somehow?
    • roel_v 4y ago
      No, that's how it is. My MO is now I type in the question to the chat; go to another tab to google a bit on the background of the problem; by the time ChatGPT is done, I already know enough to have a reasonable idea about whether what it came up with is in the general direction of where I want to go. And if it is, I'm usually confident enough that it gets the details then mostly right. One meta comment is that I would love for something like a Greasemonkey script that can automatically add some checkboxes or something that will then automatically add stock phrases to ChatGPT questions, like 'show me only the code', as I find that a lot of the intro fluff and the explanation of things are useless to me and just take up time. In general, the UI is pretty bare bones, there's a world to be gained there.
• simonw 4y ago
  Here's another recent example of a quick prototype I built with ChatGPT since I wrote that article: https://til.simonwillison.net/datasette/row-selection-prototype https://til.simonwillison.net/datasette/row-selection-protot...
• JimmyRuska 4y ago
  I agree, I've gotten stuff working that simply would have taken too much time referencing manuals. You can just keep asking questions until things start to work. It's rare GPT-4 has given a complex function that fully works, but it has done a great job recommending packages; algorithms;frameworks; commands, answering small scoped problems, answering trade offs, telling me what some github packages are doing under the hood. Especially working with other languages now is a lot easier, because I can ask to translate between languages I'm familiar with. Same thing with configurations, eg translate this systemd script to openrc.
• b33j0r 4y ago
  I am using it in exactly the same way. I have access to ideas and code that I never would have tried before. These other well-documented experiences that sound super perfect don’t match mine, though I’m a fan! Here’s how it goes for me. I am a premium user and all, but it still bails on me every single time it’s going well, by writing half of a function or saying “network error”, then losing context. I have to say “you stopped generating that last part, please continue and don’t bother qualifying.” Then it wastes more tokens apologizing anyway. Whoever trained these models to apologize and say “as a large language model, I can’t promise that I know how Bjarne Stroustrup would refactor that bitshift, and yada yada” really wasted a lot of our productivity. And saved no one from any dangers of AI.
  • LeoPanthera 4y ago
    > I have to say “you stopped generating that last part, please continue and don’t bother qualifying.” Then it wastes more tokens apologizing anyway. You can just say "Continue."
• ReptileMan 4y ago
  I think that Chat GPT will make programmers jobs more tedious but always in demand. That is the leakiest abstraction of them all people. There will always be subtle bugs to fix 2-3 levels down.
  • qwertox 4y ago
    The interesting thing will be how they find them. It will be a discussion with a chatbot, rather than debugging code like we're used to doing.
• anonyfox 4y ago
  Am I the only one that isn’t blocked by coding speed (I can MVP very fast with lot of techstacks) but with … deployment? Don’t get me wrong, I am a senior DevOps, know my terraform/CDK/… and AWS/heroku/digitalocean/hetzner/vercel/… stuff by heart, so it’s not missing knowledge. But I really hate the maintenance work down the road. I just don’t want to get emails about some deprecated stuff from some provider and have to do anything just so stuff keeps running. I would pay a premium (!) for a stability guarantee not in service uptime but toolchain reliability :/
  • opportune 4y ago
    Me too. I can code and test pretty fast, but because of the policies where I work, it takes a long time to actually ship a change, and often we only catch bugs then. I’m not talking “time to create and deploy a binary to a cloud region through an API” I’m talking “we have to roll the binary out piecemeal at a slow rate, on purpose” over a little under a week. So basically, a bug can set you back a long time (multiple weeks). And to reduce the risks of bugs we usually need to ship incrementally. And because bugs are such a hassle we have to monitor and test the crap out of everything, which of course we should be doing anyway, but we do it more than we probably would otherwise. But of course bugs do still happen, and even someone else’s might set you back. A flip side to slow releases is releases tend to batch more changes. And of course that makes finding a bug more time consuming. So a feature that could take me a few hours to write and test at my top performance basically needs to be budgeted at a month of work. Of course, we have other responsibilities like testing, monitoring, analysis, support, design, coordination, helping others. But dragging out completing a project drags all that out too. If I could ship to staging same day and prod 1-2 days later, I wouldn’t need to plan so much or spend so much time going back and forth about design. We could just meet up about the change and do it that week. And you might think you could simply parallelize/pipeline more tasks, but overdoing that sets you down the path of overextending yourself. If something important goes off track you need to do everything to get it back on track - if you don’t, it’s going to be really late - and overcommitting eliminates the slack that makes it possible. Truly, this is something I think about all the time and probably the least favorite aspect of my job. Anyway, unless chatgpt can help me write a persuasive argument that convinced my company to completely 180 its engineering policies, it won’t make me much more productive.
• villgax 4y ago
  If only some GPTxyz comes up with CUDA, Rust/C++ conversion for best optimisation & exploit finding
• asim 4y ago
  Every generation faces this sort of issue which is learning skills for the current technology which then get displaced in 20-30 years. I think there's always a worry we're going to lose some knowledge in the process but equally the productivity gain seems to be 10x and it leads to dealing with higher level problems. Very few people are kernel hacking now as a percentage of the overall engineering community. I guess the question is. What do we build with this form of engineering. It's so very early. We're using it as a way to augment current systems but I think we'll build for entirely new things soon.
  • lionkor 4y ago
    Its just that usually the new tools and technologies that have this effect are accurate, deterministic, or at least try to be or pretend to be. So, its quite literally an issue of lost knowledge. Is like replacing wikipedia with something that answers faster, but without sources. Its cool in the short term, and people are more productive at learning things, but you also go back to the hear-say time before books were invented.
  • manicennui 4y ago
    We have been told that computers will do our (software engineers) jobs for decades now. It has never come to fruition, and this is no different. What we are seeing is that the number of software engineers has increased dramatically and the average skill level has plummeted. It is not normal for a competent software engineer to need to reference Stack Overflow a dozen times per day every single day. The other thing that this is bringing to the forefront is just how atrocious the libraries are in certain ecosystems (e.g. JS/TS). If a tool that can write incorrect functions/methods makes you substantially more productive, you were never very valuable in the first place, and "AI" likely isn't the only thing threatening your job security.
• snvzz 4y ago
  I find writing correct code from scratch to be much easier than fixing somebody else's, nevermind AI prompted for code.
• alli_star 4y ago
  [dead]
• luckylion 4y ago
  And here I was thinking https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35373512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35373512 was a mistake, but you linked to datsaette.cloud, so maybe it wasn't.
  • simonw 4y ago
    Oops! Thanks, fixed that.
• thoughtsbykean 4y ago
  This article and discussion thread has been really insightful. I've been avoiding chatgpt because I feel like I will not learn as well compared to prototyping and agonising through documentation. I'll take this mentality onboard to more ambitious projects.
• jasfi 4y ago
  This is the right attitude towards AI.
• s-xyz 4y ago
  Recognize the same here, lot of ideas become easier within reach. I am struggling however with the costs, where at a larger scale processing is needed.
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  As a beginner who started learning how to code 8 months ago, GPT makes me way more confident about tackling bigger problems. It also makes me doubt my own output less. I understand that this isn't the best way to learn coding, but at this point, I'm looking for results, not to get a job.
• est 4y ago
  Off topic, writing code/articles using AI is cool and all, but it suddently occured to me, what if we want to study pure-human generated content and distinguish AI generated ones? Is there a reason why gpt-3.5 and gpt-4 all using pre 2021-09 data? Is it because gpt-3 as a base model was trained at that time, or is it really because bots are "contaminate" the Internet from then? I guess we can never go back now. One thing I am certain, after 2022-12, AI might enforce itself by learning AI-generated content, and perhaps someday, AI may deem human content as somekind of "bias".
• silcoon 4y ago
  I'm currently filling my Emacs configuration with custom commands since with ChatGPT all I've to to is to describe the elisp atomic function. It's a lot easier to customize Emacs and I'm even learning new functions and pattern for elisp.
• zer00eyz 4y ago
  First of all chat GPT is great. It is all the magic of early google, and stack overflow... Not as many ads less bullshit. I have been coding for 25 years. Chat GPT + willing sr engineer means 2 less jr. dev's. I lived through the dot com bust, and now I can do a heroic amount of work with less effort. This raises two points: 1. It's clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language design or libraries, but we need to do better at the core. 2. We continue to narrow the path to get experience as an engineer. This is great for companies in the near term (this looming down cycle), but bad for the industry as a whole long term (we dont have a pool of strong jr. engineers).
  • creshal 4y ago
    > 1. It's clear that we have too much grunt work. Im not sure if this is a failure of language design or libraries, but we need to do better at the core. We've been iterating over that for decades, there's always one more step of grunt work to remove, one more layer of boilerplate code to move into the compiler (or a code generator), one more deployment task to automate, one more elegant new syntax to add to a language, …
    • lelanthran 4y ago
      Yeah, and for each piece of boilerplate we remove, we add another few layers of abstraction. At the end of this process we are stuck with crap like YAML and JSON (or, heaven forbid, XML) with the business logic being thinly spread out between logic in shell scripts, shell variables (for CD, for example), in YAML and/or JSON and/or XML within the frameworks in use (spring, mybatis, etc), multiple third-party libraries. There is no one place where you can find the business logic.
      • no1lives4ever 4y ago
        Reminds me of a case where I was trying to help debug some legacy code. I had a simple question, what code gets executed when this method is triggered via the network request. And the final answer that i got from the developer maintaining that code was: I have been working on this for the last 9 months and I have not yet been able to find he entry point from where the requests are handled I would hope that, in future, some chatgpt like tool would be able to answer basic questions like this and help a new developer start getting productive in much shorter time than now. Then imagine asking that tool to summarise all the business logic applied in the project or ask questions abou which all sections of the code may need investigation to analyze a bug and come up with a solution. In the end, I would think of these ai tools as something that can function like another junior or even slightly experienced developer in the team.
• lysecret 4y ago
  Thank you so much. I am so excited about Ai and there are much negative sentiment around (which I also understand). But it is refreshing to read some optimism around the topic.
• stayux 4y ago
  Let me tell you something. I am a product designer. I know we are doomed to be obsolete. Not only that, but I will use ChatGPT to develop my prototypes and small scripts. And finally, will find a time to build some ideas with Dart/Flutter. Something inside is telling me that in a generated future, people who can code will be able to create free from no code tools and SaaS silos. And this is enough motivation for me:) I see a strange future in which product designers (who will spend less time on decorating and fiddling with DS components) with the help of ChatGPT will fulfill the role of junior devs in the production pipeline.
• jakkos 4y ago
  bookmark
• Technotroll 4y ago
  Roughly 80% of the time, currently. Which is great! But if you don't keep that in mind, you risk making a fool of yourself. It'll most likely improve in the future, I'm sure. The amount of real-world progress this will bring to humanity boggles the mind. I think we'll see progress in many and as-of-yet unthought of areas, because the power of mathematics, algorithms, and advanced systems will become available to a lot more people due to this "helpful uncle". I do hope they work on improving its math skills though, also in the sense that it can explain the steps taken when solving equations or algorithms, or even how algorithms could perhaps be "translated" and implemented in various languages. In my opinion this is key to understanding mathematics, and a whole host of other systems as well. Moreover, it helps people who previously didn’t have the capacity to understand these things, so the effect on “world knowledge” is cumulative. Personally, ChatGPT has been a great help for understanding many things a lot better, everything from mathematical equations to subsystems in Linux. And of course, it has helped me improve my coding.
  • lysecret 4y ago
    Id say it has approximate as high a chance to work as "random code from the internet". Also, it is often just relying on an old version of an API or a Library.
    • Technotroll 4y ago
      This isn't really my point. My point is that you can't ask the documentation to expand upon what little is already in it. Stack Overflow works a little better for this purpose, because you can ask follow-up questions and get more than one answer. But even there you have to wait days for answers, and sometimes you don't get any at all. That's really inefficient, and perhaps you forgot why you asked in the first place, or just gave up and moved on. Not so with an AI chat system. You get the answer immediately, and you can ask as many follow-up questions you like, to your heart's content. This means that, sure, even if the code you get from ChatGPT has approximately as high a chance to work as "random code from the internet," you can't ask that "random code from the internet" to expand on why it's good or bad, why it was made in a particular way, or if there are better ways, or if you can error check it one more time, or complain that, "Hey, random code, your dumb code didn't work!" In that way ChatGPT is already leaps and bounds better than "random code from the internet." Also I assume here that you aren't just throwing darts at the wall, but instead testing out code with a clear goal in mind. Then it can be wise to ask ChatGPT about the underlying system, which it will gladly answer, and also immediately.
• robinduckett 4y ago
  I am going back and picking up old projects that I had semi-abandoned and now have the confidence to continue using ChatGPT as a second pair of eyes and it seems to work much better with GPT-4 than the previous models.
  • politelemon 4y ago
    By old projects do you mean telling ChatGPT to go and look at your codebase first? Or it's just a matter of knowing what topic you wanted to pursue and just asking those questions and shaping it through further questions?
    • robinduckett 4y ago
      Both!
• phonebucket 4y ago
  Two big hurdles for ML: a) explainability b) accountability. ML-enhanced development neatly circumvents this: explainability and accountability is passed on to the developer. This includes bugs and license infringements. I have no qualms about ML tools in development. But so long as the buck stops with me, I prefer to write from scratch.
• sirwhinesalot 4y ago
  I asked ChatGPT (the free one) today to translate me EBNF rules into a recursive descent parsing function in Rust and it did it correctly, it also then applied various refactorings I requested to make the code cleaner. When it comes to boilerplate these tools are game changers I must say. Harder problems they crap all over themselves but that's ok, that's where we still have a job for the next 5 years (I hope).
• macrolime 4y ago
  One of the things I've found is that at least with GPT-4, you can automate a lot of infrastructure. This can make it much easier to get started with new project where you need to set up various servers, containers, VMs etc. I haven't fully automated it yet, but I've done it enough manually through copy/paste between ChatGPT and the terminal to see it that would work if it was hooked up to langchain. You can create prompts to make it set up VMs, docker containers and then install and configure all kinds of software. To make it work in most cases it should follow the same stuff as this implementation of a Reflexion agent for SOTA Human-Eval Python results, but use it for infrastructure. GPT-4 can generally figure out how to create tests from the documentation that will make it know when the task it finished correctly. https://github.com/GammaTauAI/reflexion-human-eval https://github.com/GammaTauAI/reflexion-human-eval
• qwertox 4y ago
  In my eyes ChatGPT is a blessing for developers. The only thing I dislike about d3 is the boilerplate code to hook it up to a div and get the first lines to render, so yesterday I did a: Assuming I have the following data: ```{ "status": "ok", "data": { "a": [[1680079200000, -199], [1680079800000, 92]], "b": [[1680079200000, 248], [1680079800000, 259]]] } }```, where the first item in the array is always the unix timestamp in ms, and the second one the value of the datapoint. Also assume that I have a website with an HTML element `<div id="graph"></div>`. Please show me the code used to draw a graph of "a" and "b" with d3 into the `div` element. And it generated all the code I hated to "create". Then little things like "Ok, I want the time not to be in AM PM, but in HH:MM" which used to mean to visit a couple of pages, the answer's right there. I absolutely love it.
• AltruisticGapHN 4y ago
  I still have a hard time just trusting the LLM and explaining my code request in plain english. I keep thinking like I'm on Google >_<
  • yodsanklai 4y ago
    > I still have a hard time just trusting the LLM Good because it generates a lot of bullshit.
• qwertox 4y ago
  It really would be a nice feature if OpenAI would add an "Export" button which exports all the conversations in JSON format.
• rendall 4y ago
  I used it that way too to make a fast-and-dirty browser-based, old-school hack n' slash. https://one-map.netlify.app/ https://one-map.netlify.app/ An artist that I follow makes procedurally generated dungeons and villages and such. https://watabou.github.io/ https://watabou.github.io/ I noticed that he made it possible to export JSON and SVG files from his one-page dungeons. I decided that was enough to turn them into an actual mini-game. This app takes his procedurally generated static maps and makes them interactive. There's nothing here I did not already know how to do, but I leaned on Chat GPT to generate code. e.g. Me: As the avatar moves around the map, it would be nice to center it. Possibly zoom in and such. I'm thinking that the `transform` attribute of the map could help. Chat GPT: Yes, you could use the transform attribute of the map to achieve this effect. The transform attribute allows you to apply various transformations to the SVG element, including scaling and translation. To center the avatar, you could use the translate transformation to shift the map so that the avatar is in the center of the viewport. For example, if the avatar is at position (x, y) on the map, you could center it using: <code snippet> To be honest, parsing through the SVG was just so tedious I would have moved on and not completed the project. As it was, a few nights. Boom! Little game toy thing. Some other tasks I had for it that saved tons of time: * Given these css rules below, can you combine them so that each is declared once? * Could you suggest a mysterious, dark, but not black color for the background of the dungeon map? * Could you give me a nice CSS dropshadow for the avatar? * Could you suggest several Google fonts that would be good for a dramatic Dungeon title/headline? Please include links.
• miraantabrez 4y ago
  ChatGPT is great when the time consuming bit is googling the details of libraries, APIs, languages, algorithms, etc, and wiring them together in the right way for a small bit of functionality or some boilerplate. But when the time consuming bit is thinking about the best way to solve a problem / introduce new abstractions in the context of a larger system, it seems less useful. Maybe this will improve with the context size.
• grph123dot 4y ago
  Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it. It gave me about 10 different results but all were wrong, it seems the number five mislead the algorithm. Another question was computing the variance of the sum of 60 dices but omitting the results where the sum was greater than 200, the reasoning was incorrect in all cases, finally I suggested creating a simulation to estimate the variance in R, but it made an error about the var command in R suggesting that it has an option for the degree of freedom.
  • esalman 4y ago
    I've seen stuff like that too. I asked ChatGPT a tricky geometry question and it got a ratio reversed and ended up producing wrong answer. I have also tried to use ChatGPT like Google search at the beginning by asking short, curt questions, and got underwhelming results. The trick is not to try to trick ChatGPT but pretend that you are an idiot and it is a very sophisticated colleague who just needs step by step details. Then you can also generate some of the seemingly amazing results people are getting. For example yesterday I used it to scrape physician information from my insurance website, followed by their Google ratings and so on.
  • thatwasunusual 4y ago
    > Yesterday I asked chatgpt to compute the probability that two words of five letters both began with the same three letters and it could not solve it. IMO, this is irrelevant, because "normal people" would never ask this question. Because it has never been asked, there's also not a ChatGPT answer to it, because its answers are based on already existing information. This thinking that ChatGPT is AI is just wrong. It's not AI, nor GI, so stop comparing it with that. As a human, I can destroy your problem/question with one claim: you claim that the words must be built on the English alphabet. Let's throw some Æ, Ø and Å in there, shall we? Can YOU solve that problem?
    • pugworthy 4y ago
      Yes, kind of playing the "gotcha" question game. I really see it kind of like having a good junior programmer or intern helping me out who has an incredibly broad amount of knowledge. Sometimes they need some coaching or gentle correction, sometimes you say, "I'll take it from here", but inevitably there are those times where you think, "Great job! I'm really impressed!"
• butterfly771 4y ago
  For the example saved conversation, if your own service uses the openai API, you can change the baseurl to https://oai.hconeai.com https://oai.hconeai.com which provides most of the functionality for conversation analysis
• ashitlerferad 4y ago
  Honestly, I keep secret some of the amazing uses of ChatGPT. I feel selfish but also I feel as if everyone is respsible for what they get out of it. We have many people and the media spending hours and tons of prompts trying to create funny or eyebrow raising headlines. I just keep my head down an marvel at the growing array if uses, many complex, that chatgpt can perform. It has been making me tons more money for just $20 a month. I could hire 10 developers and assistants and they would not be able to come close to it's technical, coding and general abilities and in 1 to 5% of the time it would usually take!
  • esalman 4y ago
    Same. I'm almost inclined to include prompt engineering as a skill in my CV next time I'm out looking for jobs.
    • slfnflctd 4y ago
      You absolutely should. This has gone from an obscure research product to household name incredibly quickly. South Park even made a full episode about it.
  • Veen 4y ago
    Yes, I see all these people saying they've tried ChatGPT and don't understand the point or why it's useful. They've probably just not learned how to prompt it correctly.
  • widg3t 4y ago
    Did you use any publicly available resources to learn how to leverage these LLMs in new ways?
  • c-fe 4y ago
    Hi, do you mind revealing some of these uses? Or, lets put it differently, I have been using ChatGPT for - writing simple functions: e.g. I used it to generate a function that receives a name and then removes any dutch name particles ("van de", "van der", ...). ChatGPT also generated the list of dutch name particles of dutch name particles. - solving tricky bugs: e.g. I used it to solve a tricky but in SwiftUI that nobody on stackoverflow was able to solve. - generating ideas for apps I could develop that would make use of the ChatGPT API. - as a replacement for google when debugging code based on error messaged received. I feel like this is how the typical programmer uses ChatGPT, but im intrigued by your comment what kind of uses you have for it. If you dont mind, could you hint at some ways you use it?
• newshorts 4y ago
  I’m kind of excited now. I used to build random weird things all the time (mostly centered around connecting physical devices up to the internet to accomplish something silly) - but lost my mojo once I had kids and didn’t the ability to pull all nighters to “hack” something together. Now I feel like the barrier might be low enough that I could create again. Will have to try this out and see how it goes.
• ltr_ 4y ago
  The recent news and hype around AI motivated me to create a project on my personal computer with limited resources, using minimal code[0] to combine ChatGPT[1] with computer vision. This efficiently extracts structured data from virtually all websites I visit regularly, even though the resulting text may be somewhat poorly formatted. Despite the text's imperfections, ChatGPT is still able to provide me with summaries and insights. For instance, it can compare prices from various e-commerce sites, detect discounts and different payment methods, analyze soccer match results, and even generate humorous morning news summaries based on the top headlines in spanish!. However, the recent "letter of warning against AI" penned by Elon Musk and other influential individuals has led me to question their motives. I suspect they may be losing the competitive edge they once had, as users can now effortlessly obtain information in ways that were previously unattainable. It's possible they are seeking to lobby for new laws that restrict this kind of data extraction. With such simplicity, I can envision a future where people no longer need to browse web pages, ultimately making ads and the whole business of treating your users like crap irrelevant. [0] 10 lines to screenshot with puppeteer, tesseract to OCR and a clustering algorithm, add to this whisper and a nanotts to get an enhanced Unix philosophy+AI experience [1] Im pretty sure i can use low resource models to do the summaries and insights, any recommendations? * edit,im pretty sure that could have done this PoC years ago without GPT.
• Tade0 4y ago
  I can take care of the coding part - after all that's where the fun is. What usually drains most of my energy, as someone in the JS ecosystem, is the sheer volume of modules I need to sift through to find one that does what I want. The other day I wanted to find a library for handling zlib in the browser - eventually I stumbled on `pako`, which is great. Seeing this post I asked ChatGPT a somewhat vague question, namely: "What is the best npm module to handle zlib compression?" It told me about the built-in zlib module, but the last paragraph had this: "There are also other npm modules available that provide additional functionality or a different interface for handling zlib compression, such as pako and node-zopfli, but for basic compression and decompression using the zlib library, the built-in zlib module should suffice." Now I feel dumb that I haven't used it for this purpose earlier.
  • danielbln 4y ago
    Also check out https://phind.com https://phind.com which is combines search with LLM and gives you more up-to-date information with less hallucination.
• mattkevan 4y ago
  I've had ideas for web apps that I've been wanting to build for ages, but my coding skills are nowhere near good enough. Last night I sat down with ChatGPT and within a few hours we'd built the foundations of a fully functional app. It's a fascinating process – it often leaves out vital information or doesn't get things quite right and it's obvious it's writing the most likely code rather than something written specifically, but it provides enough to get me 80% there so I can finish up the rest. Felt like collaborating with a forgetful, distracted genius.
• tinyprojects 4y ago
  100% this. I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix. The day before I built a basic version of Stripe Radar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323278 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323278 Coding with AI has made me more excited to build than ever before after 10+years of programming.
  • newtwilly 4y ago
    What interface are you using? I've so far only used ChatGPT through the web interface. (I pay for plus). I just ask it for things that are standalone snippet-like things. Perfect functions on the standard library, or an emacs lisp snippet for converting a unix epoch to an ISO timestamp. I'm not sure I could allow it to read my company's code, but is that what you're doing when you're using as part of a large project like that?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • xxswagmasterxx 4y ago
    Imo the chartjs docs are not very good. Or i'm just used to rust's docs.rs, where the whole api surface is documented. I couldn't find something like this for chartjs.
    • manicennui 4y ago
      You mean like this? https://www.chartjs.org/docs/latest/api/ https://www.chartjs.org/docs/latest/api/ I just started looking at the docs a couple minutes ago to understand why the OP claims that it would have taken a week to accomplish something with this library. I don't get it.
  • manicennui 4y ago
    How is it possible that any task could take a week or more with this library? It looks extremely straightforward and the documentation contains lots of examples.
• nibbleshifter 4y ago
  This is one of the few times I've read a post about using GPT for dev work that has actually made a somewhat convincing argument. In my day job, there's been various attempts to use GPT to speed up some work, which has generally resulted in me having to fix "confidently incorrect" code. The outputs usually about half right when its usable. Using an LLM to basically auto complete trivial bits of code that are "just typing" but usually require a referral to the docs is probably the optimal middle ground for productivity - so time can be spent creatively solving the actual problems. I'll have to experiment with it further - have it emit all the boilerplate for something, do the fun parts myself, then check for correctness might well be the workflow best suited to GPT.
  • ChatPGT 4y ago
    >> The outputs usually about half right when its usable. For data projects/pocs/mvps using python its saving me lots of hours, you have some tiny mistakes, but once I have the idea in my head I just iterate and in 30min or less I have "written" the code for what would take me many hours.
    • nibbleshifter 4y ago
      I think over the weekend I'll see how it handles some trivial-but-annoying/tedious data mangling tasks. There's a few small projects I have been procrastinating for ages that just will require a lot of "tedious but trivial" hand jamming of 90% boilerplate that may be well suited to LLM generated code.
      • ChatPGT 4y ago
        That's it. And it also helps with self-awareness: I found out that I much like prefer solving problems than writing code!
• FpUser 4y ago
  I am curious at what stage the developer will loose the ability to understand code and pray that ChatGPT does not make a mistake. I admit that I am using ChatGPT to write little snippets here and there but I am an old fart and was writing software for 40 years already. I am probably safe from loosing the skills bar going senile ;)
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  What's the state of the art for combining these two types of AI (super auto complete and "ask a question you'd otherwise have to Google") in vim? Ideally I want to be able to highlight some code and then run an AI command on it and also provide it as context to a query without leaving vim or losing syntax highlighting.
• nuc1e0n 4y ago
  I too look forward to being able to tackle larger projects in the future with AI. However, I don't trust sending my code to a third party over the internet so would want to host any AI I use locally.
  • rsolva 4y ago
    Have you experimented with gpt4all? It runs localy on commodity hardware.
• Herval_freire 4y ago
  The evolution of comments here on HN are telling. 1 month ago people were saying there was no way AI could do their job and many were telling everyone to calm down as nothing would happen. Now one month later this entire thread is about how chatGPT is an integral part of the development process. There are people even saying it replaces junior developers completely. Can anyone venture to guess what the thread will look like in 1 more year? "chatGPT can do the work of an entire team!" And one more year after that? "chatGPT can manage a team!"
  • lolinder 4y ago
    This is about what the comments looked like immediately after ChatGPT came out the first time. Give it a few weeks for the GPT-4 hype to settle and I think we'll be right back to where we were.
    • Herval_freire 4y ago
      Unlikely. GPT-4 wasn't as game changing as chatGPT. People are less hyped up and have a more realistic expectation of what they should see out of an LLM. The extreme positive reaction to gpt4 is imo not driven by hype fuel. In fact, if you recall the hype fuel surrounding the initial chatGPT was in both parts positive and negative. There were equal portions of people praising it and people vehemently dismissing it as a stochastic parrot. That's not what I see here.
      • lolinder 4y ago
        There weren't equal parts. I was in the tiny minority saying to chill out—there was a month or so where almost every comment was hyped. It gradually moved to equal parts and then eventually to a majority of realistic perspectives. I agree that it's more measured this time—fewer end of the world predictions—but I still fully expect to see expectations mellow out over the next few weeks.
  • MagicMoonlight 4y ago
    ChatGPT 5 runs its own team of ChatGPT 4s which get weaker hardware because they are lower ranking and don’t deserve the same resources
• asow92 4y ago
  AI makes me faster. It unblocks me. I can get more done with less time, and there's still a lot more work to do.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Upwards of 80% of the effort in commercial software development is maintenance. You could speed up the remainder dramatically and make very little progress on the rate progress happens and have people scratching their heads about why.
  • sounds 4y ago
    That may not be true in this case. Cheaper "second system syndrome" may allow maintenance to be perceived as a cost center.
    • PaulHoule 4y ago
      Maintenance is already perceived as one hell of a cost center. I'd have enough money if to train my own foundation model if somebody gave me a nickel for every time somebody underestimated the time to rebuild an existing e-business system by orders of magnitude because they were ignorant of all the "requirements" that were satisfied by the existing system that were undocumented. The most expensive maintenance problem comes when you've accumulated a lot of data that is incorrectly structured and may or may not be possible to migrate to a new, correct, structure. Fred Brooks in No Silver Bullet pointed out that software development involves multiple phases, say 5 of them (requirements gathering, design, coding, testing, deployment) and that even if you could reduce the time involved in one of those to zero there is no "revolution". The corollary to that is that the opportunities from ChatGPT come out of identifying the things that ChatGPT does poorly. For instance it might be just as important to turn code back into requirements as to turn requirements int code. There was a post the other day about a "simple" problem in CSS that turned out to be hard because of the deep understanding required https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35361628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35361628 the ratio is much worse between spending 3 minutes to make a partial solution with ChatGPT and 3 hours to really solve the problem as opposed to 30 minutes to make a partial solution manually and 3 hours to really solve it. That is all the more reason to clean house at the lower levels, either make a style sheet language that is not so fraught or maybe make one that's designed so that chatbots can write good code for it. There has been hype over "no code" and "low code" tools for the longest time and people have been chasing that revolution for a long time and it's astonishing how many innovations have been forgotten (like the 1990s CASE tools that could turn code into diagrams and back again and leave formatting intact.) Real progress involves solving all the problem that is ahead of us instead of cherry picking the parts of the problem we want to solve and thinking wishfully that will be sufficient.
• cpufry 4y ago
  yea its been helping me get things moving and outline ideas
• dpcan 4y ago
  I wonder how many coders have done exactly this in the last couple of weeks? Using the api to cater the chatgpt system to our liking. I’ve done the same and it’s changing the game for me. Saving hours of time jumping through that small part of a project that I knew would be the bottleneck. I’ve gone from saying that I’ll need an hour to do something to only needing 15 minutes. However, I’m good enough at what I do that I can find the problems in the code or notice something out of place or that could be done more securely. I fear many won’t and lots of junk code is going to find its way into our lives. I worry about things like this when it comes to, for example, Wordpress plug-ins, or add ons to other larger tools that we use.
• debt 4y ago
  It’s worth noting one important caveat: GPT-4 cannot do super complicated coding. Don’t get me wrong; I use frequently when coding but it can’t handle the complex stuff; it’s insanely good at boilerplate and low-hanging fruit though.
• kossTKR 4y ago
  GPT-4 is absolutely incredible but the usage-cap at the moment makes it annoying to work with. 8 questions per hour (25 per 3 hours), is not a lot to work with for paying users - it started being like 10x higher and they've announced it may go down even further. I wonder if Azure can scale with the insane adoption rate and if it's profitable at the moment?
  • htrp 4y ago
    API it .... 20 bucks a month buys you a metric fuck ton of api calls. If you need the frontend, there are a bunch of open source front ends.
    • danielbln 4y ago
      Gotta apply to the GPT4 waitlist first though, by default the API only gives you gpt3.5.
• pknerd 4y ago
  Off topic: it'd be interesting to know whether chatGPT decreased the traffic of stack overflow?
  • Grimburger 4y ago
    Anecdotally, I've avoided quora as much as possible when clicking but was pleasantly surprised the last time I did, they offered an LLM answer over the top human one which seemed reasonable enough to give an overview of the matter without bias.
    • pknerd 4y ago
      You can always exclude quora or any other website by writing "Search Word" - quora
• mordymoop 4y ago
  I can definitely relate to your experience. Just last week, I leveraged AI tools to develop some data processing code. Estimating how long it would have taken me to write that code without these tools is a challenge because, to be honest, a year ago I wouldn't have even considered attempting such a project. It might have required a week or even two of my time, which I simply cannot spare for this kind of undertaking. In the absence of these powerful AI tools, I would have opted for a more manual approach, like analyzing the data using Excel. It's fascinating to witness the impact AI has on our productivity and the expansion of possibilities it brings.
  • r3trohack3r 4y ago
    Have had similar experiences. I found two HTTP servers running on my TV and I wanted to see what was going on in them. Dirbuster wasn't packaged for Debian (that I could find). I wasn't too keen on trying to build from source or anything like that. A few months ago that would have been that. But with GPT I just asked it to write a POSIX-compliant C port of dirbuster. Less than 10 minutes later I was scanning my TV for routes. https://sharegpt.com/c/stLFWA1 https://sharegpt.com/c/stLFWA1
    • samstave 4y ago
      WTF! Just wait until we have AI searching for Zero-day and writing exploits code for them... Or AI-assisted-Pen-testing-as-a-service <-- HackOne or someone similar should be all over this... What is Palantir doing for GPT crawling of logs and writing filters/rules/queries... Or firehosing data through an AI Deep Packet Inpector etc... Security is going to be the most interesting space to pay attention to going forward...
  • hoot 4y ago
    I've noticed it as well. The most recent example I can think was with gitlab webhooks. I need to manage (create/delete/edit) a lot of web hooks across a lot of different projects. I normally would have probably just started doing it by hand in the web ui, but instead I had some python code from gpt to automate it in a few minutes.
• cowmix 4y ago
  Same here. I've done a few little projects with ChatGPT4 in my back pocket. I've been able to give more aggressive timelines, more features -- and I've been able to hit those goals with ease. Probably the first time in my life I've been able to over promise AND over deliver. Also, the final product (with documentation) has been complete and pretty amazing.
• geoffmcc 4y ago
  I checked out the archive and came across https://simon.datasette.cloud/data/chatgpt_public_messages?_facet=conversation https://simon.datasette.cloud/data/chatgpt_public_messages?_... I’m wondering if the archive missed something or what this random statement from the system is about. It seems to be telling itself who it is and setting a restriction on what it knows. I know if it’s not trained on data past a certain point, it cant know it, but still i wonder if you could intercept that and change the cutoff date (if even possible), would that have any effect on anything. But then again, I am probably reading to much into it because it seems to be coming from system. 2023-03-26 04:10:49 - [system] : You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. Knowledge cutoff: 2021-09 Current date: 2023-03-25
  • simonw 4y ago
    That's called the system prompt - it's present at the start of every conversation, just to feed in some hints as to how the underlying model should behave. If you play with the ChatGPT API in the OpenAI Playground developer tool you can set your own system prompt. I used it to create a sentient cheesecake that could answer questions about SQL using cheesecake-based examples yesterday.
• carapace 4y ago
  > Braess's paradox is the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox Please make sure you're measuring and optimizing the right thing, eh? "Happy hacking!"
• unity1001 4y ago
  I dont get it - have the copyright and privacy issues of the AI have been resolved that you people are using it in development?
• spookybones 4y ago
  I’ve found that AI prompting has been nearly as time consuming as doing it myself from the get-go. This includes content writing and visual art. Maybe I’m an edge case. I’m not a skilled programmer. However, I’m a decent writer and painter. At most, it generates quick, solid, though generic ideas. Unfortunately, I have to do a lot of reverse engineering and curation to make any valuable changes. Try writing a tech article about, say, an iPad, and it will give you a lot of generic, but well-written content devoid of any tech specs. Add tech specs and use lose the style. What should be a simple fluff piece takes a couple of hours to get the balance right. Or try creating a visual work of, say, two people running down a street, holding hands, and unless you’re very open to interpretation, many hours later, you still won’t have anything approximating what you imagined. You change the “camera” angle, and they’re no longer holding hands. You add a small detail, and the entire scene morphs, etc. I’m saying this as someone who also uses weights and negative prompts. I look forward to further advances, though I’m perfectly happy if these skills remain in the realm of humans. I will admit chatgpt and copilot are very good at offering up bite-sized pieces of code, like particular objects and functions as well as templates.
  • still_grokking 4y ago
    It's the exact same for code tasks. The AI is actually quite a waste of time… You need to check every word of the AI for truth anyway, so you need to research all the stuff it tells you, as it could be made up, everything it tells you is very shallow, so you need to dig into the topics anyway, and making even small changed by the AI requires ridiculous amounts of explaining details in prose, instead of just changing a few lines by hand. All in all it's much easier to come up with some more reasonable solution in a shorter time by just doing it the "classical" way: Read the docs and copy-paste code snippets from proper curated examples some human actually tested. I don't say that an AI could not program at some point in the future. But I guess it would require AGI to be competitive with people who actually know what they're doing. But at the time we have AGI we have anyway much larger "problems" than how to write code, as more or less all human intellectual work would be superfluous.
    • jliptzin 4y ago
• itissid 4y ago
  Yesterday I was writing some Selenium IDE script that could warn me when 5 year CDs at more than a given APY appear on my Schwab, fidelity or Vanguard broker. CDs available there, especially after a rate hike speculation, are not available online to the general public outside of brokers and certain market makers. ChatGPT certainly shortened a lot of the scripting head time. Though it was not quite always accurate it did help me a lot.
• ywmario 4y ago
  Yes, there will be a lot of 10x engineer