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>Gen AI definitely has utility right now People keep saying that, but I don't see it. So far we have chat bots, and Copilot. Copilot is going to be in legal

>Gen AI definitely has utility right now People keep saying that, but I don't see it. So far we have chat bots, and Copilot. Copilot is going to be in legal limbo for years until the license issues are solved. Chatting with bing is fun and all but I don't see the long term utility. What is the utility right now? Which of my problems are solved?

lawrenci 4y ago
A few examples: * My company has a very large codebase, and I am not familiar with 99% of it. I can use an AI assistant like Sourcegraph Cody to explain parts of the codebase to me at a high level, and suggest areas where I should dive in to address my specific problem. * If I am working with a language, library, or framework I have not used before, I can ask ChatGPT to explain how a certain function works, and provide some code examples. If I write some code an get unexpected results, I can paste my code and results into ChatGPT, and ask it to tell me what went wrong. * Someone sends me a spreadsheet that specifies some business logic, and I want to transform that spreadsheet into a YAML file, and write some code to parse the YAML config and take some action based on user-supplied data. ChatGPT is pretty good at this. In all of these cases, I have to take the AI output with a grain of salt, and may have to do some supplementary research or debugging. But that's also the case when I ask coworkers for help. Right now, I would say generative AI provides a small boost to my productivity, but I can see that boost growing larger as language models improve.
int_19h 4y ago
It might not solve your problems, but there are a lot of people using CoPilot and/or GPT-4 for coding already, and it does save time for them.
barking_biscuit 4y ago
>People keep saying that, but I don't see it. I do. I care about my problems and what it does for me. I regularly employ ChatGPT to help me solve arbitrary tasks from writing code, debugging code, learning Korean, and cutting writing time in half.

lawrenci 4y ago

A few examples: * My company has a very large codebase, and I am not familiar with 99% of it. I can use an AI assistant like Sourcegraph Cody to explain parts of the codebase to me at a high level, and suggest areas where I should dive in to address my specific problem. * If I am working with a language, library, or framework I have not used before, I can ask ChatGPT to explain how a certain function works, and provide some code examples. If I write some code an get unexpected results, I can paste my code and results into ChatGPT, and ask it to tell me what went wrong. * Someone sends me a spreadsheet that specifies some business logic, and I want to transform that spreadsheet into a YAML file, and write some code to parse the YAML config and take some action based on user-supplied data. ChatGPT is pretty good at this. In all of these cases, I have to take the AI output with a grain of salt, and may have to do some supplementary research or debugging. But that's also the case when I ask coworkers for help. Right now, I would say generative AI provides a small boost to my productivity, but I can see that boost growing larger as language models improve.

int_19h 4y ago

It might not solve your problems, but there are a lot of people using CoPilot and/or GPT-4 for coding already, and it does save time for them.

barking_biscuit 4y ago

>People keep saying that, but I don't see it. I do. I care about my problems and what it does for me. I regularly employ ChatGPT to help me solve arbitrary tasks from writing code, debugging code, learning Korean, and cutting writing time in half.