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One thing that really bothers me is that I want it to use best practices and it doesn't really know which ones I'm talking about, and then I realize they are _m

One thing that really bothers me is that I want it to use best practices and it doesn't really know which ones I'm talking about, and then I realize they are _my_ set of best practices, made from others' nameless best practices. So I have to decide if it's just a matter of manually converting the 5-10 little things like using `env bash` in the header, etc. Or do I ask it to remember that and proceed to the next layer of the project, and feel like Katamari Coder, which is quite a feeling of what-is-this-fresh-encumbrance at times. There is a nascent sense that the interface is not even close to where it needs to be to efficiently support that kind of recall for working memory on the coder's end. I can definitely see a new LLM relativistic-symbolic instruction code & IDE-equivalent (with yet-unseen presentational and let's even say modal editing factors) being extremely useful, which is a bit funny but also that's what those things are good for... Right now I can scroll up through my prompts to supplement my working memory, but that's another place where the whole activity starts to seem very tedious. (Is the LLM coming for the coders, or are coders coming for the LLM?)

mason55 3y ago
I think that Copilot is much better/more promising for this kind of thing because it's looking at the code you've already written without you having to constantly prompt it. I had a lot of the same hangups as you when I had played around with ChatGPT. How do I get it to handle the monotonous stuff without me having to spend all my time teaching it? I finally tried Copilot the other day and it was stunning. I had a half-written golang client that was a wrapper around an undocumented and poorly structured API for a tool we use. I had written the get and create methods. Then I added a comment with an example URL for delete and Copilot auto-completed the entire method in the same style as the two methods I had already written. In some cases, like formatting & error handling, it was exactly the same as what I'd written, but other cases, like variable naming, string templating, etc., it replicated the spirit of my style but adapted for this new "delete" method. I think ChatGPT is just the wrong interface for this kind of thing (at least right now).
- Filligree 3y ago
  They’re complementary, I’d say. GPT-4 handles greenfield development better; you can tell it to write a quick script, and usually it more or less works. Copilot doesn’t do much when you’re looking at a blank page. This would make copilot the better tool in 90% of cases, but I’ve been using GPT-4 to script a lot of things I previously would never have scripted at all. It reduces the cost to where even one-off scripts for a twenty minute job are usually worth writing.
dpkirchner 3y ago
> Or do I ask it to remember that and proceed to the next layer of the project I think this could be solved with a good browser extension. Something that provides an easy to access (e.g., keyboard-only) way to paste customized prompt preludes that enforce your style (or styles if, say, you're using multiple languages). It looks like Maccy could do the job, albeit not as an extension. I haven't tried it yet.
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  I tried one kinda like this. Setting aside the extension feel of it, what I'd like to see is a move from prompt-helper to pattern language for visually reporting the process of working with the LLM, to which the LLM has parsing access. So, let's say you can see your conversation as normal, but you can also see your actual code project as a node-based procedural design layout in an editable window. The relevant conversation details are used to draw the nodes. You go to one node representing a bash script and click its Patterns tab and search-to-type for the community pattern, "Joe's Best Bash Practices". It's added to your quick palette and LLM offers to add similar patterns to other nodes in Nim and Pascal and ABS, but actually for ABS there's a "concept" symbol that indicates it's only going to be able to guess what you would want based on the others. Then it offers to gradually teach you node-shorthand as you edit the project, so eventually you don't need to write any prompts, just basic shorthand syntax. Where the syntax gets clunky, or when you buy a custom keyboard just for this syntax but with a few gotchas, you can work together and change syntax to fit. Nbdy hus lrnd shrtnd nos knda whr m gng wths.

mason55 3y ago

I think that Copilot is much better/more promising for this kind of thing because it's looking at the code you've already written without you having to constantly prompt it. I had a lot of the same hangups as you when I had played around with ChatGPT. How do I get it to handle the monotonous stuff without me having to spend all my time teaching it? I finally tried Copilot the other day and it was stunning. I had a half-written golang client that was a wrapper around an undocumented and poorly structured API for a tool we use. I had written the get and create methods. Then I added a comment with an example URL for delete and Copilot auto-completed the entire method in the same style as the two methods I had already written. In some cases, like formatting & error handling, it was exactly the same as what I'd written, but other cases, like variable naming, string templating, etc., it replicated the spirit of my style but adapted for this new "delete" method. I think ChatGPT is just the wrong interface for this kind of thing (at least right now).

Filligree 3y ago
They’re complementary, I’d say. GPT-4 handles greenfield development better; you can tell it to write a quick script, and usually it more or less works. Copilot doesn’t do much when you’re looking at a blank page. This would make copilot the better tool in 90% of cases, but I’ve been using GPT-4 to script a lot of things I previously would never have scripted at all. It reduces the cost to where even one-off scripts for a twenty minute job are usually worth writing.

dpkirchner 3y ago

> Or do I ask it to remember that and proceed to the next layer of the project I think this could be solved with a good browser extension. Something that provides an easy to access (e.g., keyboard-only) way to paste customized prompt preludes that enforce your style (or styles if, say, you're using multiple languages). It looks like Maccy could do the job, albeit not as an extension. I haven't tried it yet.

themodelplumber 3y ago
I tried one kinda like this. Setting aside the extension feel of it, what I'd like to see is a move from prompt-helper to pattern language for visually reporting the process of working with the LLM, to which the LLM has parsing access. So, let's say you can see your conversation as normal, but you can also see your actual code project as a node-based procedural design layout in an editable window. The relevant conversation details are used to draw the nodes. You go to one node representing a bash script and click its Patterns tab and search-to-type for the community pattern, "Joe's Best Bash Practices". It's added to your quick palette and LLM offers to add similar patterns to other nodes in Nim and Pascal and ABS, but actually for ABS there's a "concept" symbol that indicates it's only going to be able to guess what you would want based on the others. Then it offers to gradually teach you node-shorthand as you edit the project, so eventually you don't need to write any prompts, just basic shorthand syntax. Where the syntax gets clunky, or when you buy a custom keyboard just for this syntax but with a few gotchas, you can work together and change syntax to fit. Nbdy hus lrnd shrtnd nos knda whr m gng wths.