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I mean, right now the only thing at risk is the todo.app industry... I've yet to see anything maintaining legacy apps, or generating line of business apps with

I mean, right now the only thing at risk is the todo.app industry... I've yet to see anything maintaining legacy apps, or generating line of business apps with requirements... even simple stuff, like departure needs to be before arrival, etc. I do see a whole bunch of youtube videos about generating a whole codebase, but it's the kind of stuff that there's a hundred tutorials covering.

anotherpaulg 3y ago
My open source command line tool aider [0] is specifically for this use case of working with GPT on an existing code base. Let me know if you have a chance to try it out. Here is a chat transcript [1] that illustrates how you can use aider to explore an existing git repo, understand it and then make changes. As another example I needed a new feature in the glow tool and was able to make a PR [2] for it, even though I don't know anything about that codebase or even how to write golang. [0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider [1] https://aider.chat/examples/2048-game.html https://aider.chat/examples/2048-game.html [2] https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow/pull/502 https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow/pull/502
- amusingimpala75 3y ago
  This is an instance of the dangers of LLM. Because you (self-admittedly) know nothing about the language or codebase, you have no idea the semantically correct way to do things, so if GPT tells you to metaphorically jump off a cliff, you won’t know that it isn’t the right thing to do.
  - anotherpaulg 3y ago
    That certainly could be a concern. You are right, it’s important to review the code written by LLMs. Did you look at the PR? I reviewed it before submitting it. While I would have struggled to write it myself, I was able to review it and conclude that it was sensible and unlikely to be risky. Of course it could have bugs that I missed. But so could any code I write myself in any language.
    - ehutch79 3y ago
      That’s not the promise though. The promise is “this app will generate a whole codebase”.

anotherpaulg 3y ago

My open source command line tool aider [0] is specifically for this use case of working with GPT on an existing code base. Let me know if you have a chance to try it out. Here is a chat transcript [1] that illustrates how you can use aider to explore an existing git repo, understand it and then make changes. As another example I needed a new feature in the glow tool and was able to make a PR [2] for it, even though I don't know anything about that codebase or even how to write golang. [0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider [1] https://aider.chat/examples/2048-game.html https://aider.chat/examples/2048-game.html [2] https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow/pull/502 https://github.com/charmbracelet/glow/pull/502

amusingimpala75 3y ago
This is an instance of the dangers of LLM. Because you (self-admittedly) know nothing about the language or codebase, you have no idea the semantically correct way to do things, so if GPT tells you to metaphorically jump off a cliff, you won’t know that it isn’t the right thing to do.
- anotherpaulg 3y ago
  That certainly could be a concern. You are right, it’s important to review the code written by LLMs. Did you look at the PR? I reviewed it before submitting it. While I would have struggled to write it myself, I was able to review it and conclude that it was sensible and unlikely to be risky. Of course it could have bugs that I missed. But so could any code I write myself in any language.
  - ehutch79 3y ago
    That’s not the promise though. The promise is “this app will generate a whole codebase”.