5 ms·

I suppose Rust can finally become a mainstream language, just let the AI deal with massaging our code to appease the compiler.

by srgpqt 3y ago

drdaeman 3y ago
Current LLMs are notoriously bad at design. They can produce code snippets that may even work, but they can't stay focused to make it all fit nicely into a consistent architecture. If you ask it to write you some larger and reasonably complex codebase, you'll end up with a weird junior-grade patchwork. And even if you talk architecture first, they behave as if they have super-short attention spans, so they mostly disregard it and get carried away. (Of course that's not what really happens, I'm kind of anthropomorphising it, but that how it feels like).
- vidarh 3y ago
  You need to iterate. I've had decent luck having it "fill in the blanks" of a spec, then produce outlines of code with placeholders, then fill in placeholders. Granted, each time with me in the loop to go "hold on, do this slightly differently". So basically treating it as a junior doing the typing and gruntwork, while providing regular feedback on the direction. But you need to effectively constantly refine and narrow down a harness it can be told to work within. But that's often how I work on my own as well, so that's fine.
  - moonchrome 3y ago
    My problem with this is that the interface sucks and the iteration is slow. Supposedly copilot x will have a deeper IDE integration and voice commands.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      The iteration is faster than asking a person to do the same tasks. I've started toying with the API to address the interface bit, though.
  - drdaeman 3y ago
    That’s exactly what I did when I’ve experimented with it teaching me how to make a watchOS app (with me having zero iOS and Swift experience), but the issue us that it started to “forget” what we have talked about. It helped me to bootstrap the project and pointed out at some APIs I needed, but then it was a constant fight for code quality. I wanted proper actor abstraction (because I was dealing with Bluetooth, even if I don’t know the language I can see the patterns) and it just loved to write code in style of some cheapest-grade “how to use CoreBluetooth in Swift for dummies” blog articles.
    - mlyle 3y ago
      Were you using vanilla ChatGPT or GPT4? Vanilla ChatGPT uses a GPT-3.5turbo version with a context window of 4096 tokens. GPT-4 has twice the context window by default, and has a variant with a context window 8x as big. It's not "8x better" with regards to forgetting what it's doing, but it's substantially better.
      - drdaeman 3y ago
        Yes, that was GPT-3.5. GPT-4's 25 messages/3 hours ratelimit wouldn't have led us anywhere, even with me doing my own research and compiling larger lists of change requests would've exhausted that very quickly.
        mlyle 3y ago
        Yup, GPT-4 is still likely too expensive for this application at a dollar or two per interaction with the huge context window (or 30 cents-ish with an 8k window). Especially with the tooling not proven for strong interactive use in big codebases. But we don't need to make much improvement in tooling and economics for it to start to look pretty good.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      That's why I have it iterate on a spec first, and then an outline, and then specifics. The point is to have it produce something that narrows the scope so I can feed it specific sections back in again and have it fill in the details.

I suppose Rust can finally become a mainstream language, just let the AI deal with massaging our code to appease the compiler.

by srgpqt 3y ago

I suppose Rust can finally become a mainstream language, just let the AI deal with massaging our code to appease the compiler.

drdaeman 3y ago

Current LLMs are notoriously bad at design. They can produce code snippets that may even work, but they can't stay focused to make it all fit nicely into a consistent architecture. If you ask it to write you some larger and reasonably complex codebase, you'll end up with a weird junior-grade patchwork. And even if you talk architecture first, they behave as if they have super-short attention spans, so they mostly disregard it and get carried away. (Of course that's not what really happens, I'm kind of anthropomorphising it, but that how it feels like).

vidarh 3y ago
You need to iterate. I've had decent luck having it "fill in the blanks" of a spec, then produce outlines of code with placeholders, then fill in placeholders. Granted, each time with me in the loop to go "hold on, do this slightly differently". So basically treating it as a junior doing the typing and gruntwork, while providing regular feedback on the direction. But you need to effectively constantly refine and narrow down a harness it can be told to work within. But that's often how I work on my own as well, so that's fine.
- moonchrome 3y ago
  My problem with this is that the interface sucks and the iteration is slow. Supposedly copilot x will have a deeper IDE integration and voice commands.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    The iteration is faster than asking a person to do the same tasks. I've started toying with the API to address the interface bit, though.
- drdaeman 3y ago
  That’s exactly what I did when I’ve experimented with it teaching me how to make a watchOS app (with me having zero iOS and Swift experience), but the issue us that it started to “forget” what we have talked about. It helped me to bootstrap the project and pointed out at some APIs I needed, but then it was a constant fight for code quality. I wanted proper actor abstraction (because I was dealing with Bluetooth, even if I don’t know the language I can see the patterns) and it just loved to write code in style of some cheapest-grade “how to use CoreBluetooth in Swift for dummies” blog articles.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Were you using vanilla ChatGPT or GPT4? Vanilla ChatGPT uses a GPT-3.5turbo version with a context window of 4096 tokens. GPT-4 has twice the context window by default, and has a variant with a context window 8x as big. It's not "8x better" with regards to forgetting what it's doing, but it's substantially better.
    - drdaeman 3y ago
      Yes, that was GPT-3.5. GPT-4's 25 messages/3 hours ratelimit wouldn't have led us anywhere, even with me doing my own research and compiling larger lists of change requests would've exhausted that very quickly.
      - mlyle 3y ago
        Yup, GPT-4 is still likely too expensive for this application at a dollar or two per interaction with the huge context window (or 30 cents-ish with an 8k window). Especially with the tooling not proven for strong interactive use in big codebases. But we don't need to make much improvement in tooling and economics for it to start to look pretty good.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    That's why I have it iterate on a spec first, and then an outline, and then specifics. The point is to have it produce something that narrows the scope so I can feed it specific sections back in again and have it fill in the details.