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Bertrand Meyer is always worth reading. The real question: > What use do I have for a sloppy assistant? I can be sloppy just by myself, thanks, and an assista

Bertrand Meyer is always worth reading. The real question: > What use do I have for a sloppy assistant? I can be sloppy just by myself, thanks, and an assistant who is even more sloppy than I is not welcome. The basic quality that I would expect from a supposedly intelligent assistant—any other is insignificant in comparison —is to be right. > It is also the only quality that the ChatGPT class of automated assistants cannot promise.

SargeZT 3y ago
Show me one assistant who can promise they are right 100% of the time and I will show you one liar. Copilot & Copilot Chat cut down my coding time on a brand-new ML optimizer that was released in a paper last week from what would have been 20+ hours into a 4-hour session and I got fancy testing code as a free bonus. If I had coded it by myself and taken the full amount of time it would have taken to figure out which parameter was being sent on which layer for which gradient was currently being processed, I wouldn't have had the energy to write any tests. I don't understand what people's expectations are of AI that they're being disappointed. You figure out the limitations quickly if you use it on a regular basis, and you just adapt those shortcomings into your mental calculus. I still code plenty by myself in a good old vim session because I don't think copilot would actually be very useful in reducing the amount of time it would take me to code something up, but I don't count that as a "failure" of AI, I view it as knowing when to use a tool and when not to.
vidarh 3y ago
I find this notion deeply unconvincing. An assistant being consistently right matters when you give them simple gruntwork that you yourself can do fairly fast, and where it so is not helpful if you need to spend much time checking it. You quickly learn which types of tasks like that ChatGPT can do precisely enough to be worth it. But for many other tasks, getting an outline - even a broken one - can often unblock things. I've noodled with fixing a bug in a compiler for a while, and asking ChatGPT gave me a solution that didn't work, but that was close enough to give me an outline of an approach that unblocked my own thinking. It's more productive of you don't look at ChatGPT as a piece of software you expect flawless output from, but more like a slightly dense and annoying junior dev that you need to learn to work around: When you know its limits and use it accordingly, it can still save you time. If you expect it to do too complex tasks on its own, on the other hand, you end up with a time consuming mess.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  > But for many other tasks, getting an outline - even a broken one - can often unblock things. I've noodled with fixing a bug in a compiler for a while, and asking ChatGPT gave me a solution that didn't work, but that was close enough to give me an outline of an approach that unblocked my own thinking. I suspect Meyer would agree with you: >> Help me produce a basic framework for a program that will "kind-of" do the job, including in a programming language that I do not know well? By all means.
pixl97 3y ago
The particular issue is the assistant is not sloppiler then the person using it, and it is less sloppy than the other alternative, that is no code at all. This is common thing we in people selling stuff. Engineers think a product has to be perfect, they never develop a perfect product and never sell anything. In the meantime some salesperson has made a billion of their imperfect crappy product.

SargeZT 3y ago

Show me one assistant who can promise they are right 100% of the time and I will show you one liar. Copilot & Copilot Chat cut down my coding time on a brand-new ML optimizer that was released in a paper last week from what would have been 20+ hours into a 4-hour session and I got fancy testing code as a free bonus. If I had coded it by myself and taken the full amount of time it would have taken to figure out which parameter was being sent on which layer for which gradient was currently being processed, I wouldn't have had the energy to write any tests. I don't understand what people's expectations are of AI that they're being disappointed. You figure out the limitations quickly if you use it on a regular basis, and you just adapt those shortcomings into your mental calculus. I still code plenty by myself in a good old vim session because I don't think copilot would actually be very useful in reducing the amount of time it would take me to code something up, but I don't count that as a "failure" of AI, I view it as knowing when to use a tool and when not to.

vidarh 3y ago

I find this notion deeply unconvincing. An assistant being consistently right matters when you give them simple gruntwork that you yourself can do fairly fast, and where it so is not helpful if you need to spend much time checking it. You quickly learn which types of tasks like that ChatGPT can do precisely enough to be worth it. But for many other tasks, getting an outline - even a broken one - can often unblock things. I've noodled with fixing a bug in a compiler for a while, and asking ChatGPT gave me a solution that didn't work, but that was close enough to give me an outline of an approach that unblocked my own thinking. It's more productive of you don't look at ChatGPT as a piece of software you expect flawless output from, but more like a slightly dense and annoying junior dev that you need to learn to work around: When you know its limits and use it accordingly, it can still save you time. If you expect it to do too complex tasks on its own, on the other hand, you end up with a time consuming mess.

Jtsummers 3y ago
> But for many other tasks, getting an outline - even a broken one - can often unblock things. I've noodled with fixing a bug in a compiler for a while, and asking ChatGPT gave me a solution that didn't work, but that was close enough to give me an outline of an approach that unblocked my own thinking. I suspect Meyer would agree with you: >> Help me produce a basic framework for a program that will "kind-of" do the job, including in a programming language that I do not know well? By all means.

pixl97 3y ago

The particular issue is the assistant is not sloppiler then the person using it, and it is less sloppy than the other alternative, that is no code at all. This is common thing we in people selling stuff. Engineers think a product has to be perfect, they never develop a perfect product and never sell anything. In the meantime some salesperson has made a billion of their imperfect crappy product.