4 ms·

I'll start to be afraid, when ChatGPT or anything similar will take a vague Jira issue, simulate described bug and then make a fix for it ;-) But seriously, wh

by samsk 3y ago

I'll start to be afraid, when ChatGPT or anything similar will take a vague Jira issue, simulate described bug and then make a fix for it ;-) But seriously, what developers do most of their time is maintanace, they spend a day searching for a bug, just to write maybe one line of code to fix it.

onion2k 3y ago
If GPT can improve the code that's written in the first place then a lot of that work would just go away. I strongly suspect that it will. There are whole classes of bugs that occur because some work is boring 'not quite copy paste' work that devs just don't like doing, and don't pay any attention to when they're doing it. Linters and syntax highlighters already catch a ton of those issues before they make it to production, and GPT will make the rest much less likely to happen. Maintenance is one area where GPT will also shine, because it's 'just' updating some code to do the same thing, so using the existing code as a set of tokens with a prompt like 'update this code to work with v2 of library X' will be extremely effective. It'll be like having something write a codemod for you. The future is bright. We'll get a lot more productive stuff done, and spend a lot less time on boring grunt work.
pessimizer 3y ago
It will do that now, it will just be buggy and wrong. But that's obviously just a stage that you don't even need more AI to fix. Tell it how to write tests, tell it how to justify those tests and how to make sure they make sense, tell it how to look for the bug, tell it how to attempt a fix for the bug, tell it to evaluate whether that fix satisfies the bug report, tell it how to read the errors after it tries the fix, and to iterate on that fix or to abandon it and try something else, when it reaches all standards for success, tell it how to report what it did on the ticket. If one doubts that all this can be done by an LLM, use a different LLM for each step. Use committees of LLMs that vote on proposals made by other LLMs. I don't know, I feel like the sky's the limit, especially if they can be made significantly more power efficient. I think that if they never get any better than they are now, and they just get more power efficient, they'll be useful for almost anything.

by samsk 3y ago

onion2k 3y ago

If GPT can improve the code that's written in the first place then a lot of that work would just go away. I strongly suspect that it will. There are whole classes of bugs that occur because some work is boring 'not quite copy paste' work that devs just don't like doing, and don't pay any attention to when they're doing it. Linters and syntax highlighters already catch a ton of those issues before they make it to production, and GPT will make the rest much less likely to happen. Maintenance is one area where GPT will also shine, because it's 'just' updating some code to do the same thing, so using the existing code as a set of tokens with a prompt like 'update this code to work with v2 of library X' will be extremely effective. It'll be like having something write a codemod for you. The future is bright. We'll get a lot more productive stuff done, and spend a lot less time on boring grunt work.

pessimizer 3y ago

It will do that now, it will just be buggy and wrong. But that's obviously just a stage that you don't even need more AI to fix. Tell it how to write tests, tell it how to justify those tests and how to make sure they make sense, tell it how to look for the bug, tell it how to attempt a fix for the bug, tell it to evaluate whether that fix satisfies the bug report, tell it how to read the errors after it tries the fix, and to iterate on that fix or to abandon it and try something else, when it reaches all standards for success, tell it how to report what it did on the ticket. If one doubts that all this can be done by an LLM, use a different LLM for each step. Use committees of LLMs that vote on proposals made by other LLMs. I don't know, I feel like the sky's the limit, especially if they can be made significantly more power efficient. I think that if they never get any better than they are now, and they just get more power efficient, they'll be useful for almost anything.