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Yeah, I think there's a "stone soup" effect going on with AI. It's the same sort of thing you see happening with the customers of psychics. People often have p
by wpietri 4y ago
Yeah, I think there's a "stone soup" effect going on with AI.
It's the same sort of thing you see happening with the customers of psychics. People often have poor awareness of how much they're putting in to a conversation. Or it's a bit like the way Tom Sawyer tricks other kids into painting the fence for him. For me a lot of the magic here is in knowing what questions to ask and when the answers aren't right. If you have those skills, is pounding out the code that hard?
The interesting part for me is not generating new bits of code, but the long-term maintenance of a whole thing. A while back there was a fashion for coding "wizards", things that would ask some questions and then generate code for you. People were very excited, as they saw it as lowering the barrier to entry. But the fashion died out because it just pushed all the problems a bit further down the road. Now you had novice developers trying to understand and improve code they weren't competent to write.
I suspect that in practice, anything a person can get a LLM to wholly write is also something that could be turned into a library or framework or service or no-code tool that they can just use. That, basically, if the novelty is low enough that an LLM can produce it, the novelty is low enough that there are better options than writing the code from scratch over and over.
- harlanlewis 4y agoGreat points (and after checking your user name, I’ve been nodding my head to posts of yours for about a decade now). This is a bot tangential - your reference to stone soup is a wonderful example of the information density possible with natural language. And all the meaning and story behind the phrase is accessible to LLMs. I’ll have to start experimenting with idiom driven development, especially when prompt golfing.
- baq 4y agoI mostly agree except one critical detail: LLMs are the low code/no code service. You literally tell them what you want and if they’re fine tuned on the problem domain, you’re all set. Microsoft demo’d the office 365 integration and if it works half as well in practice they’ll own the space as much as they have in 1997.
- wpietri 4y agoMaybe they will be, but that's not proven yet. We'll see! If anything, the article we're looking at suggests that the "tell them what you want" step is not obviously much less rigorous or effortful than coding. Tuning could make the difference, or it could be one of those things that produces better demos than results.
- 62951413 4y agoI believe the Model Driven Architecture fad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-driven_architecture) is a better analogy than wizards. Back then the holy grail of complete round trip UML->code->UML didn't get practical enough to justify the effort.
- wpietri 4y agoDefinitely also a good analogy. But MDA at least was about supporting users in understanding what's going on. Wizards and "AI" both are about users avoiding the work of understanding.
- fijiaarone 4y agoOne strange coincidence with the emergence of ChatGPT is that at almost the exact same time, Google became practically unusable as a search engine. Like at least an order of magnitude worse. People used to use Google the same way they use ChatGPT. They would ask a question in plain English, and get sent back a list of relevant links to blog posts, articles, stack overflow, or whatever that had answers to their questions, including example code. Sometimes that code or information was outdated or completely wrong and sometimes it was too basic to be useful, or just the code-generated docs. Google has been getting gradually worse over the years due to spam, algorithm gaming, and ads, but circa late November 2022 it became practically worthless.