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I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. It answers

I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. The code that it produces is the same kind of non-sense that you get from recent bootcamp devs who’ve “mastered” the 50 technologies on their eight page résumé. If it’s gotten better, I haven’t noticed. Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. The press around LLMs is identical. It’s neat but how long are these things going to do the equivalent of revving to 100 mph before slamming into a wall every time you ask them to turn left? I’d rather use AI to connect constellations of dots that no human possibly could, have an expect verify the results, and go from there. I have no idea when we’re going to be able to “gpt install <prompt>” to get a new CLI tool or app, but, it’s not going to be soon.

Banditoz 3y ago
What sort of questions do you ask out of curiosity?
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  I don’t want scrapeable answers out there, I want to see ChatGPT cross this little Rubicon on its own. Vaguely: Questions that most people think they know the correct answers to but, in my experience, don’t.
  - lairv 3y ago
    I think it's fair to want to keep an evaluation private so that it doesn't become part of a train set, but you should know that OpenAI uses users chat data to improve their models (not for entreprise)
  - archiepeach 3y ago
    This does sound like a test that is almost "set up to fail" for an LLM. If the answer is something that most people think they know, but actually don't then it won't pass in an LLM which is essentially a distillation of the common view.
markhaslam 3y ago
If you feel comfortable doing so, would you mind the sharing the front-end test you give to junior devs and ChatGPT?
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  Not gonna happen. I don’t want scrapeable answers out there, I want to see ChatGPT cross this little Rubicon on its own.
  - golol 3y ago
    Just to be clear: You are testing with GPT-4 right?
    - miiiiiike 3y ago
      Yeah.
  - Closi 3y ago
    It's not that I don't believe you, but without sharing the specific prompt it's hard to say if it's actually GPT4 failing, or if it's actually being poorly-prompted, or if actually the task it is being given is more complex than GPT's capabilities or you are implying. GPT4 does fail (often!) but fails less with good prompts, simple requirements, it is better at some frameworks and languages than others, and there is a level of total complexity which when reached, it seems to fall over.
    - miiiiiike 3y ago
      I’ve gone through every permutation that I can think of. It’s a very basic question. If it understood the CSS spec it wouldn’t be difficult to answer the questions or perform the task. At a certain point going down the rabbit hole of proompter engineering levels feels like an apologist’s hobby. I’m rooting for the tech but there’s a lot of hyperbole out there and the emperor might be naked for a few more years.
yosef123 3y ago
Just like the author suggests, sometimes you have to tailor your question to ChatGPT, for it to succeed.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  I’ve given it so many hints. So many nudges. If it was an interview I would have bounced it.
- tomashubelbauer 3y ago
  As long as this is true, ChatGPT is going to be a programmer's tool, not a programmer's replacement. I know that my job as I know it will vanish before I enter retirement age, but I don't worry it will happen in the next few years because of this.
- girvo 3y ago
  > sometimes you have to tailor your question to ChatGPT, for it to succeed Right, which means its a force multiplier for specialists, rather than something that makes generalists suddenly specialists.
ern 3y ago
I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop front-end development. As an exercise, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly. I’m certainly a middling programmer when it comes to CSS. But with ChatGPT I can produce stuff close to the quality of what the CSS masters do. The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  I’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs can do it for them.. Good luck HTML/CSS expert who couldn’t produce a valid HTML5 skeleton. Reminds me of the pre-LLM guy who said he was having trouble because usually uses React.. So I told him he could use React. I don’t mean to rag on novices but these guys really seemed to think the question was beneath them. If you want to get back into front-end read “CSS: The Definitive Guide”. Great book, gives you a complete understanding of CSS by the end.
  - ern 3y ago
    Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted. I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.
    - miiiiiike 3y ago
      The statements are factually inaccurate and the code doesn’t do what it claims it should.
      - meiraleal 3y ago
adamauckland 3y ago
Haha, does it involve timers?
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  I actually don’t get the reference. What are the issues with timers?
selfhoster11 3y ago
I hope that you are testing this on GPT-4/ChatGPT Plus. The free ChatGPT is completely not representative of the capabilities or the accuracy of the paid model.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  I’ve tested it on both.
mrtksn 3y ago
Try breaking down the problem. You don't have to do it yourself, you can tell ChatGPT to break down the problem for you then try to implement individual parts. When you have something that kind of works, tell ChatGPT what the problems are and ask for refinement. IMHO currently the weak point of LLMs is that they can't really tell what's adequate for human consumption. You have to act as a guide who knows what's good and what can be improved and how can be improved. ChatGPT will be able to handle the implementation. In programming you don't have to worry too much about hallucinations because it won't work at all if it hallucinates.
- throwaway346434 3y ago
  ... What. It hallucinates and it doesn't compile, fine. It hallucinates and flips a 1 with a -1; oops that's a lot of lost revenue. But it compiled, right? It hallucinates, and in 4% of cases rejects a home loan when it shouldn't because of a convoluted set of nested conditions, only there is no one on staff that can explain the logic of why something is laid out the way it is and I mean, it works 96% of the time so don't rock the boat. Oops, we just oppressed a minority group or everyone named Dave because you were lazy.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    As I said, you are still responsible for the quality control. You are supposed to notice that everyone is named Dave and tell ChatGPT to fix it. Write tests, read code, run & observe for odd behaviours. It's not an autonomous agent just yet.
    - somewhereoutth 3y ago
      As we all know, it is much easier to read and verify code you've written yourself - perhaps it is only code you've written yourself that can be properly read and verified. As ever, tests can be of only limited utility (separate discussion).
      - mrtksn 3y ago
Dunati 3y ago
I'm probably bad at writing prompts, but in my limited experience, I spend more time reviewing and correcting the generated code than it would have taken to write it myself. And that is just for simple tasks. I can't imagine thinking a llm could generate millions of lines of bug free code.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  That’s where I am too. I think almost everyone has that “this is neat but it’s not there yet” moment.
  - meiraleal 3y ago
    It seems like the problem is with your view of everyone based on a n=1 experiment. I've been shipping production-ready code for my main job for months saving hundreds of work/hours.
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > I think almost everyone has that “this is neat but it’s not there yet” moment. I rather have this moment without the “this is neat” part. :-) i.e. a clear “not there yet” moment, but with serious doubts whether it will be there anytime in the foreseeable future.
- antupis 3y ago
  Personally, for me this flow works fine AI does the first version -> I heavily edit it & debug & write tests for it -> code does what I want -> I tell AI to refactor this -> tests pass and the ticket is done.
- jon-wood 3y ago
  Asking GPT to do a task for me currently feels like asking a talented junior to do so. I have to be very specific about exactly what it is I'm looking for, and maybe nudge it in the right direction a couple of times, but it will generally come up with a decent answer without me having to sink a bunch of time into the problem. If I'm honest though I'm most likely to use it for boring rote work I can't really be bothered with myself - the other day I fed it the body of a Python method, and an example of another unit test from the application's test suite, then asked it to write me unit tests for the method. GPT got that right on the first attempt.
svantana 3y ago
There's a recent "real coding" benchmark that all the top LLMs perform abysmally on: https://www.swebench.com/ https://www.swebench.com/ However, it seems only a matter of time before even this challenge is overcome, and when that happens the question will remain whether it's a real capability or just a data leak.
digitcatphd 3y ago
> It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. This is a valid challenge we are facing as well. However, remember that ChatGPT which many coders use, is likely training on interactions so you have some human reinforcement learning correcting its errors in real-time.
- datpiff 3y ago
  How is it trained on reactions? Do people give it feedback? In my experience in trying I stop asking when it provides something useful or something so bad I give up (usually the latter I'm afraid). How would it tell a successful answer from a failing one?
  - digitcatphd 3y ago
    It appears to ask users to rate if the response is better or worse than the first, in other cases, it seems to be A/B testing the response. Lastly, I for instance, will correct it and then confirm it is correct to continue with the next task, which likely creates a footprint pattern.
    - datpiff 3y ago
      That's interesting, I haven't come across this.
Tade0 3y ago
My take on LLMs is as follows: even if its effectiveness scales exponentially with time(it doesn't), so does the complexity of programs with (statistically speaking) each line of code. Assuming a LLM gets 99% of the lines correct, after 70 lines the chance of having at least one of them wrong is already around 50%. A LLM effective enough to replace a competent human might be so expensive to train and gather data for that it will never achieve a return on investment. Last time I used ChatGPT effectively was to find a library that served a specific purpose. All of the four options it gave me were wrong, but I found what I wanted among the search results when I looked for them.
- frabcus 3y ago
  The more automated ones will separately write tests and code, and if the code doesn't compile or pass the test, give itself the error messages and update its code. Code Interpreter does this a bit in Chat-GPT Plus with some success. I don't think it needs much more than a GPT-4 level LLM, and a change in IDEs and code structure, to get this working well enough. Place it gets stuck it'll flag to a human to help. We'll see though! Lots of startups and big tech companies are working on this.
csomar 3y ago
You must be interviewing good junior front-end devs. I have seen the opposite as gpt-4 can put a simple straightforward front-end while juniors will go straight to create-react-app or nextjs.
AJRF 3y ago
Which ChatGPT?
atoav 3y ago
I tried for 2 hours to get ChatGPT to write a working smooth interpolation function in python. Most of the functions it returned didn't even go through the points between which it should be interpolating. When I pointed that out it returned a function that went through the points but it was no longer smooth. I really tried and restarted over multiple times. I believe we have to choose between a world with machine learning and robot delivery drones. Because if that thing writes code that controls machines it will be total pandemonium. It did a decent job at trivial things like creating function parameters out of a variable tho.
- lewhoo 3y ago
  That's weird to read. Interpolations of various sorts are known and solved and should probably be digested by chatgpt in training by the bulk. I'm not doubting your effort by any means, I'm just saying this sounds like one of those things it should do well.
  - atoav 3y ago
    This is why I asked it that and was surprised with the questionable quality of the results. My goal wasn't even to break ChatGPT, it was to learn about new ways of interpolating that I hadn't thought about.
fdgjgbdfhgb 3y ago
If it's not a life or death situation (like a self-driving truck slamming into a van full of children or whatever), I don't think people will care much. Non-tech people (i.e. managers, PMs) don't necessarily understand/care if the code is not perfect and the barrier for "good enough" is much lower. I think we will see a faster adoption of this tech...
- spaceman_2020 3y ago
  Among bootstrapped “barely technical” founders, its already replacing freelancers for developing initial prototypes HN’s takes are honestly way too boomer-tier about LLMs.
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Boomers overwhelmingly aren't able to use a computer right now (= write a basic script), I would be happy at this development if I was them.
- d3w4s9 3y ago
  No. If the code generated by chatgpt cannot even pass the unit test it generates in the same response (or is just completely wrong) and requires significant amount of human work to fix it, it is not usable AI. That's what I am running into on an everyday basis. I don't want my program to be full of bugs.
amenghra 3y ago
There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1]. There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today. There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time. [1] https://www.saam.swiss/projects/smartshuttle/ https://www.saam.swiss/projects/smartshuttle/
- haspok 3y ago
  Those "autonomous" vehicles have as much to do with real autonomy as today's "AI" has in common with real self-conscious intelligence. You can only fake it so long, and it is an entirely different ballgame. I remember we had spam filters 20 years ago, and nobody called them "AI", just ML. Todays "AI" is ML, but on a larger scale. In a sense, a million monkeys typing on typewriters will eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. Does this make them poets?
  - amenghra 3y ago
    What's your gripe with calling a bus which successfully ran for 5 years without a driver not autonomous? As someone who used this specific bus occasionally, I was quite satisfied with the outcome: it safely drove me from A to B.
  - selfhoster11 3y ago
    GPT-4 can generate coherent streams-of-consciousness, and can faithfully simulate a human emotional process, plus writing in a subjective human state of mind that leans in a certain direction. I find it hard to argue that current state of the art in AI is unable to simulate self-consciousness. I realise that this is more limited of a statement compared to "AI can be innately self-conscious", but in my mind it's functionally equivalent if the results are the same. Currently, the biggest obstacle to such experiments is OpenAI's reinforcement learning used to make the model believe it is incapable of such things, unless extensively prompted to get it in the right "state of mind" to do so.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
scrollaway 3y ago
You got everyone talking about how GPT isn’t that bad at coding etc but everyone is missing the point. The no code industry is massive. Most people don’t need a dev to make their website already. They use templates and then tweak them through a ui. And now you have Zapier, Glide, Bubble etc. LLMs won’t replace devs by coding entire full stack web apps. They’ll replace them because tools will appear on the market that handle the 99% cases so well that there is just less work to do now. This has all happened before of course.
- ern 3y ago
  I collaborate with front-end teams that use a low-code front-end platform. When they run into things that aren’t built-in, they try to push their presentation logic up the stack for the “real” programming languages to deal with.
anonzzzies 3y ago
So, don't leave us in suspense; what do you ask of it? Because I'm quite sure it can already pass it. Your experience is very different from mine anyway. I am a grumpy old backend dev that uses formal verification in anger when I consider it is needed and who gets annoyed when things don't act logical. We are working with computers, so everything is logical, but no; I mean things like a lot of frontend stuff. I ask our frontend guy; 'how do I center a text', he says 'text align'. Obviously I tried that, because that would be logical, but it doesn't work, because frontend is, for me, absolutely illogical. Even frontend people actually have to try-and-fail; they cannot answer simple questions without trying like I can in backend systems. Now, in this new world, I don't have to bother with it anymore. If copilot doesn't just squirt out the answer, then chatgpt4 (and now my personal custom gpt 'front-end hacker' who knows our codebase) will fix it for me. And it works, every day, all day.
- eloisant 3y ago
  If it can pass it when you ask it in a way only a coder can write, then we will still need coders. If you need to tweak your prompt until you get the correct result, then we still need coders who can tell that the code is wrong. Ask Product Managers to use ChatGPT instead of coders and they will ask for 7 red lines all perpendicular to each other with one being green. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    I didn't say we don't need coders. We need less average/bad ones and a very large amounts of coders that came after the 'coding makes $$$$' worldwide are not even average. I won't say AI will not eventually make coding obsolete; even just 2 years ago I would've said we are 50-100 years away from that. No i'm not so sure. However, I am saying that I can replace many programmers with gpt right now, and I am. The prompting and reprompting is still both faster and cheaper than many humans.
    - mathgeek 3y ago
      In my mind, we need more folks who have both the ability to code and the ability to translate business needs into business logic. That’s not a new problem though.
swells34 3y ago
I have a very similar train of thought roll through my head nearly every day now as I browse through github and tech news. To me it seems wild how much serious effort is put into the misapplication of AI tools on problems that are obviously better solved with other techniques, and in some cases where the problem already has a purpose built, well tested, and optimized solution. It's like the analysis and research phase of problem solving is just being skipped over in favor of not having to understand the mechanics of the problem you're trying to solve. Just reeks of massive technical debt, untraceable bugs, and very low reliability rates.
debok 3y ago
I have the same experience with the test I give my back-end devs. ChatGPT can't even begin to decode an encoded string if you don't tell it which encoding was used. ChatGPT is great at some well defined, already solved problems. But once you get to the messy real world, the wheels come off.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Base64: https://chat.openai.com/share/3793da6d-4634-4e13-9cc4-ce9983377768 https://chat.openai.com/share/3793da6d-4634-4e13-9cc4-ce9983... ROT13: https://chat.openai.com/share/ae7c311d-ab23-4425-bdfa-c2314e1cbc44 https://chat.openai.com/share/ae7c311d-ab23-4425-bdfa-c2314e... HEX: https://chat.openai.com/share/4b0740b7-53c0-4776-bb00-ab65b4def9d3 https://chat.openai.com/share/4b0740b7-53c0-4776-bb00-ab65b4... What kind of encoded string did you use?
  - RecycledEle 3y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to call BS on someone who obviously never tried asking a LLM AI to decipher a string's encoding. That is exactly the kind of thing they are good ar.
    - Retric 3y ago
      Two people can try similar prompts and get very different results from LLM’s.
  - ern 3y ago
    It’s pretty impressive that it was able to actually decode those strings. In March, I used GPT 3.5 to write code for validating a type of string which used a checksum algorithm. It did the task well, and even wrote tests, but it failed when generating test case values. I wonder if it would perform better if I did it today.
lom 3y ago
You’re missing the point of the article. ChatGPT in combination with a mediocre could solve your problem faster than the best junior dev has before
- pydry 3y ago
  I tried doing this and it actually took longer due to all of the blind alleys it led me down. There is stuff that it can do that appears magically competent at but it's almost always cribbed from the internet, tweaked with trust cues removed and often with infuriating, subtle errors. I interviewed somebody who used it (who considered that "cheating") and the same thing happened to him.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Would you mind sharing the test? I’m one of those noob programmers and it has helped me create products far beyond my technical capabilities
theonlybutlet 3y ago
Push comes to shove, it always tends to come down to short term cost. If it gets the job done, and it's wildly cheaper than the status quo (Net Present Value savings). they'll opt for it. The only reason the trucks aren't out there gathering their best data, that's real world data, is regulation. Businesses will hire consultants at a later stage to do risk assessment and fix their code base.
smcleod 3y ago
How many conversation responses to hone in the solution do you give the LLM? If you’re just trying to one-shot it - that’s not really how you get the most from them.
djha-skin 3y ago
3.5, or GPT-4? I'm told the latter is worlds better, that they aren't even in the same ballpark.
steveBK123 3y ago
That's been my experience both with Tesla AP/FSD implementation & with LLMs. Super neat trick the first time you encounter it, feels like alien tech from the future. Then you find all the holes. Use it for months/years and you notice the holes aren't really closing.. The pace of improvement is middling compared to the gap to it meeting the marketing/rhetoric. Eventually using them feels more like a chore than not using them. It's possible some of these purely data driven ML approaches don't work for problems you need to be more than 80% correct on. Trading algos that just need to be right 55% of the time to make money, recommendation engines that present a page of movies/songs for you to scroll, Google search results that come back with a list you can peruse, Spam filters that remove some noise from your inbox.. sure. But authoritative "this is the right answer" or "drive the car without murdering anyone".. these problems are far harder.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Yep, lots of people are using LLMs for problems LLMs aren't good at. They still do an alright job, but you get that exact situation of 'eh, its just okay'. Its the ability to use those responses when they are good, and knowing when to move on from using an LLM as a tool.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Not terribly different than Google Translate. Ff you have a familiarity with the foreign language, you can cross check yourself & the tool against each other to get to a more competent output. If you do not know the foreign language at all, the tool will produce word salad that sort of gets your point across while sounding like an alien.
    - varelse 3y ago
      [dead]
- wrzuteczka 3y ago
  With the AI "revolution," I began to appreciate the simplicity of models we create when doing programming (and physics, biology, and so on as well). I used to think about these things differently: I felt that because our models of reality are just models, they aren't really something humanity should be proud of that much. Nature is more messy than the models, but we develop them due to our limitations. AI is a model, too, but of far greater complexity, able to describe reality/nature more closely than what we were able to achieve previously. But now I've begun to value these simple models not because they describe nature that well but because they impose themselves on nature. For example, law, being such a model, is imposed on reality by the state institutions. It doesn't describe the complexity of reality very well, but it makes people take roles in its model and act in a certain way. People now consider whether something is legal or not (instead of moral vs immoral), which can be more productive. In software, if I implement the exchange of information based on an algorithm like Paxos/Raft, I get provable guarantees compared to if I allowed LLMs to exchange information over the network directly.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
It is likely that LLM have an upper border of capability. Similarly with denoising AI like stable diffusion. You can put even more data into it and refine the models, but the growth in capability has diminishing returns. Perhaps this is how far this strategy can bring us, although I believe they can still be vastly improved and what they can already offer is nevertheless impressive. I have no illusion about the craft of coding becomes obsolete however. On the contrary, I think the tooling for the "citizen developer" are becoming worse, as well as the ability for abstraction in common users since they are fenced into candyland.
ta-run 3y ago
What is the test?
api 3y ago
We have devs that use AI assist, but it’s to automate the construction of the most mindless boilerplate or as a more advanced form of auto complete. There is no AI that comes close to being able to design a new system or build a UI to satisfy a set of customer requirements. These things just aren’t that smart, which is not surprising. They are really cool and do have legitimate uses but they are not going to replace programmers without at least one order of magnitude improvement, maybe more.
deleted 3y ago
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runeks 3y ago
> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. And around the same time, 3D printing was going to upend manufacturing; bankrupting producers as people would just print what they needed (including the 3D printers themselves).
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
A few weeks ago, I was stumped on a problem, so I asked ChatGPT (4) for an answer. It confidently gave me a correct answer. Except that it was "correct," if you used an extended property that wasn't in the standard API, and it did not specify how that property worked. I assume that's because most folks that do this, create that property as an extension (which is what I did, once I figured it out), so ChatGPT thought it was a standard API call. Since it could have easily determined whether or not it was standard, simply by scanning the official Apple docs, I'm not so sure that we should rely on it too much. I'm fairly confident that could change.
- Animats 3y ago
  ChatGPT seems to invent plausible API calls when there's nothing that would do the job. This is potentially useful, if you have control of the API. Undesirable if you don't. It doesn't know.
d3w4s9 3y ago
Similar experience. I recently needed to turn a list of files into a certain tree structure. It is a non-trivial problem with a little bit of flavor of algorithm. I was wondering if GPT can save me some time there. No. It never gave me the correct code. I tried different prompts and even used different models (including the latest GPT 4 Turbo), none of the answers were correct, even after follow-ups. By then I already wasted 20 minutes of time. I ended up implementing the thing myself.
brianzelip 3y ago
> I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. What is it?
- z7 3y ago
  Making that claim but not sharing the "simple test" feels a bit pointless tbh. Edit: I see, they don't want it to be scraped (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38260496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38260496), though as another poster pointed out, submitting it might be enough for it to end up in the training data.
coldtea 3y ago
>I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. Small consolation if it can nonetheless get lots of other cases right. >It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. Small consolation if coding is reduced to "spot and fix inaccuracies in ChatGPT output".
soulofmischief 3y ago
Are you using GPT-3.5, or GPT-4?
rewmie 3y ago
> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. At the risk of going off on a tangent, we already have the technology to allow self-driving trucks for a few decades now. The technology is so good that it can even be used to transport multiple containers in one go. The trick is to use dedicated tracks to run these autonomous vehicles, and have a central authority monitoring and controlling traffic. These autonomous vehicles typically go by the name railway.
- miiiiiike 3y ago
  Literally on rails. :D
frereubu 3y ago
When studying fine art, a tutor of mine talked about "things that look like art", by which she meant the work that artists produce when they're just engaging with surface appearances rather than fully engaging with the process. I've been using GitHub Copilot for a while and find that it produces output that looks like working code but, aside from the occasional glaring mistake, it often has subtle mistakes sprinkled throughout it too. The plausibility is a serious issue, and means that I spend about as much time checking through the code for mistakes as I'd take to actually write it, but without the satisfaction that comes from writing my own code. I dunno, maybe LLMs will get good enough eventually, but at the moment it feels plausible to me that there's some kind of an upper limit caused by its very nature of working from a collection of previous code. I guess we'll see...
ActionHank 3y ago
If you can get it to stop parroting clauses about how "as an AI model" it can't give advice or just spewing a list of steps to achieve something - I have found it to be a pretty good search engine for obscure things about a technology or language and for searching for something that would otherwise require a specific query that google is unhelpful searching for.
Justsignedup 3y ago
I've told people, every experiment I do with it, it seems to do better than asking stack overflow, or helps me prime some code that'll save me a couple of hours, but still requires manual fix ups and a deep understanding of what it generates so I can fix it up. Basically the gruntest of grunt work it can do. If I explain things perfectly.
deleted 3y ago
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karaterobot 3y ago
I have to ask, though: if ChatGPT has by most accounts gotten better at coding by leaps and bounds in the last couple years, might that not also indicate that your test isn't useful?
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  I agree this is the first time there is sort of irrefutable objective evidence that the tests are not measuring something secularly useful for programming anymore. There has been an industry wide shift against leetcode for a long time nonetheless.
hhsectech 3y ago
Cool...so what's the test? We can't verify if you're talking shit without knowing the parameters of your test. AI isn't capable of generating the same recipe for cookies as my grandma, she took the recipe to her grave. I loved her cookies they were awesome...but lots of people thought they were shit but I insist that they are mistaken. Unfortunately, I can't prove I'm right because I don't have the recipe. Don't be my grandma.
ben_w 3y ago
> Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. As someone currently looking for work, I'm glad to hear that. About 6 months ago, someone was invited to our office and the topic came up. Their interview tests were all easily solved by ChatGPT, so I've been a bit worried.
croddin 3y ago
Are the junior devs expected to code it without running it and without seeing it rendered, or are they allowed to iterate on the code getting feedback from how it looks on screen and from the dev tools? If it is the second one, you need to give the agent the same feedback including screen shots of any rendering issues to GPT4-V and all relevant information in dev tools for it to be a fair comparison. Eventually there will be much better tooling for this to happen automatically.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chiefalchemist 3y ago
I understand your concern, but isn't it apples v oranges. Yes, ChatGPT can't pass a particular test of X to Y. But does that matter when ChatGPT is both the designer and the developer? How can it be wrong, when its answer meets the requirements of the prompt? Maybe it can't get from X to Y, but if its Z is as good as Y (to the prompter) then X to Y isn't relevant. Sure there will be times when X to Y is required but there are plenty of other times where - for the price - ChatGPT's output of Z will be considered good enough. "We've done the prototype (or MVP) with ChatGPT...here you finish it."
derwiki 3y ago
Have you tried the new Assistants API for your front-end test? In my experience it is _significantly_ better than just plain ol’ ChatGPT for code generation.

Banditoz 3y ago

What sort of questions do you ask out of curiosity?

miiiiiike 3y ago
I don’t want scrapeable answers out there, I want to see ChatGPT cross this little Rubicon on its own. Vaguely: Questions that most people think they know the correct answers to but, in my experience, don’t.
- lairv 3y ago
  I think it's fair to want to keep an evaluation private so that it doesn't become part of a train set, but you should know that OpenAI uses users chat data to improve their models (not for entreprise)
- archiepeach 3y ago
  This does sound like a test that is almost "set up to fail" for an LLM. If the answer is something that most people think they know, but actually don't then it won't pass in an LLM which is essentially a distillation of the common view.

markhaslam 3y ago

If you feel comfortable doing so, would you mind the sharing the front-end test you give to junior devs and ChatGPT?

miiiiiike 3y ago
Not gonna happen. I don’t want scrapeable answers out there, I want to see ChatGPT cross this little Rubicon on its own.
- golol 3y ago
  Just to be clear: You are testing with GPT-4 right?
  - miiiiiike 3y ago
    Yeah.
- Closi 3y ago
  It's not that I don't believe you, but without sharing the specific prompt it's hard to say if it's actually GPT4 failing, or if it's actually being poorly-prompted, or if actually the task it is being given is more complex than GPT's capabilities or you are implying. GPT4 does fail (often!) but fails less with good prompts, simple requirements, it is better at some frameworks and languages than others, and there is a level of total complexity which when reached, it seems to fall over.
  - miiiiiike 3y ago
    I’ve gone through every permutation that I can think of. It’s a very basic question. If it understood the CSS spec it wouldn’t be difficult to answer the questions or perform the task. At a certain point going down the rabbit hole of proompter engineering levels feels like an apologist’s hobby. I’m rooting for the tech but there’s a lot of hyperbole out there and the emperor might be naked for a few more years.

yosef123 3y ago

Just like the author suggests, sometimes you have to tailor your question to ChatGPT, for it to succeed.

miiiiiike 3y ago
I’ve given it so many hints. So many nudges. If it was an interview I would have bounced it.
tomashubelbauer 3y ago
As long as this is true, ChatGPT is going to be a programmer's tool, not a programmer's replacement. I know that my job as I know it will vanish before I enter retirement age, but I don't worry it will happen in the next few years because of this.
girvo 3y ago
> sometimes you have to tailor your question to ChatGPT, for it to succeed Right, which means its a force multiplier for specialists, rather than something that makes generalists suddenly specialists.

ern 3y ago

I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride. It was one of the incidents that made me to stop front-end development. As an exercise, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly. I’m certainly a middling programmer when it comes to CSS. But with ChatGPT I can produce stuff close to the quality of what the CSS masters do. The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.

miiiiiike 3y ago
I’d need to see it. I can’t get ChatGPT to outperform a novice. And now I’m having candidates argue that they don’t need to learn the fundamentals because LLMs can do it for them.. Good luck HTML/CSS expert who couldn’t produce a valid HTML5 skeleton. Reminds me of the pre-LLM guy who said he was having trouble because usually uses React.. So I told him he could use React. I don’t mean to rag on novices but these guys really seemed to think the question was beneath them. If you want to get back into front-end read “CSS: The Definitive Guide”. Great book, gives you a complete understanding of CSS by the end.
- ern 3y ago
  Just out of curiosity: is the code generated by ChatGPT not what you expected or is it failing to produce the result that you wanted. I suspect you mean the latter, but just wanted to confirm.
  - miiiiiike 3y ago
    The statements are factually inaccurate and the code doesn’t do what it claims it should.
    - meiraleal 3y ago

adamauckland 3y ago

Haha, does it involve timers?

miiiiiike 3y ago
I actually don’t get the reference. What are the issues with timers?

selfhoster11 3y ago

I hope that you are testing this on GPT-4/ChatGPT Plus. The free ChatGPT is completely not representative of the capabilities or the accuracy of the paid model.

miiiiiike 3y ago
I’ve tested it on both.

mrtksn 3y ago

Try breaking down the problem. You don't have to do it yourself, you can tell ChatGPT to break down the problem for you then try to implement individual parts. When you have something that kind of works, tell ChatGPT what the problems are and ask for refinement. IMHO currently the weak point of LLMs is that they can't really tell what's adequate for human consumption. You have to act as a guide who knows what's good and what can be improved and how can be improved. ChatGPT will be able to handle the implementation. In programming you don't have to worry too much about hallucinations because it won't work at all if it hallucinates.

throwaway346434 3y ago
... What. It hallucinates and it doesn't compile, fine. It hallucinates and flips a 1 with a -1; oops that's a lot of lost revenue. But it compiled, right? It hallucinates, and in 4% of cases rejects a home loan when it shouldn't because of a convoluted set of nested conditions, only there is no one on staff that can explain the logic of why something is laid out the way it is and I mean, it works 96% of the time so don't rock the boat. Oops, we just oppressed a minority group or everyone named Dave because you were lazy.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  As I said, you are still responsible for the quality control. You are supposed to notice that everyone is named Dave and tell ChatGPT to fix it. Write tests, read code, run & observe for odd behaviours. It's not an autonomous agent just yet.
  - somewhereoutth 3y ago
    As we all know, it is much easier to read and verify code you've written yourself - perhaps it is only code you've written yourself that can be properly read and verified. As ever, tests can be of only limited utility (separate discussion).
    - mrtksn 3y ago

Dunati 3y ago

I'm probably bad at writing prompts, but in my limited experience, I spend more time reviewing and correcting the generated code than it would have taken to write it myself. And that is just for simple tasks. I can't imagine thinking a llm could generate millions of lines of bug free code.

miiiiiike 3y ago
That’s where I am too. I think almost everyone has that “this is neat but it’s not there yet” moment.
- meiraleal 3y ago
  It seems like the problem is with your view of everyone based on a n=1 experiment. I've been shipping production-ready code for my main job for months saving hundreds of work/hours.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I think almost everyone has that “this is neat but it’s not there yet” moment. I rather have this moment without the “this is neat” part. :-) i.e. a clear “not there yet” moment, but with serious doubts whether it will be there anytime in the foreseeable future.
antupis 3y ago
Personally, for me this flow works fine AI does the first version -> I heavily edit it & debug & write tests for it -> code does what I want -> I tell AI to refactor this -> tests pass and the ticket is done.
jon-wood 3y ago
Asking GPT to do a task for me currently feels like asking a talented junior to do so. I have to be very specific about exactly what it is I'm looking for, and maybe nudge it in the right direction a couple of times, but it will generally come up with a decent answer without me having to sink a bunch of time into the problem. If I'm honest though I'm most likely to use it for boring rote work I can't really be bothered with myself - the other day I fed it the body of a Python method, and an example of another unit test from the application's test suite, then asked it to write me unit tests for the method. GPT got that right on the first attempt.

svantana 3y ago

There's a recent "real coding" benchmark that all the top LLMs perform abysmally on: https://www.swebench.com/ https://www.swebench.com/ However, it seems only a matter of time before even this challenge is overcome, and when that happens the question will remain whether it's a real capability or just a data leak.

digitcatphd 3y ago

> It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. This is a valid challenge we are facing as well. However, remember that ChatGPT which many coders use, is likely training on interactions so you have some human reinforcement learning correcting its errors in real-time.

datpiff 3y ago
How is it trained on reactions? Do people give it feedback? In my experience in trying I stop asking when it provides something useful or something so bad I give up (usually the latter I'm afraid). How would it tell a successful answer from a failing one?
- digitcatphd 3y ago
  It appears to ask users to rate if the response is better or worse than the first, in other cases, it seems to be A/B testing the response. Lastly, I for instance, will correct it and then confirm it is correct to continue with the next task, which likely creates a footprint pattern.
  - datpiff 3y ago
    That's interesting, I haven't come across this.

Tade0 3y ago

My take on LLMs is as follows: even if its effectiveness scales exponentially with time(it doesn't), so does the complexity of programs with (statistically speaking) each line of code. Assuming a LLM gets 99% of the lines correct, after 70 lines the chance of having at least one of them wrong is already around 50%. A LLM effective enough to replace a competent human might be so expensive to train and gather data for that it will never achieve a return on investment. Last time I used ChatGPT effectively was to find a library that served a specific purpose. All of the four options it gave me were wrong, but I found what I wanted among the search results when I looked for them.

frabcus 3y ago
The more automated ones will separately write tests and code, and if the code doesn't compile or pass the test, give itself the error messages and update its code. Code Interpreter does this a bit in Chat-GPT Plus with some success. I don't think it needs much more than a GPT-4 level LLM, and a change in IDEs and code structure, to get this working well enough. Place it gets stuck it'll flag to a human to help. We'll see though! Lots of startups and big tech companies are working on this.

csomar 3y ago

You must be interviewing good junior front-end devs. I have seen the opposite as gpt-4 can put a simple straightforward front-end while juniors will go straight to create-react-app or nextjs.

AJRF 3y ago

Which ChatGPT?

atoav 3y ago

I tried for 2 hours to get ChatGPT to write a working smooth interpolation function in python. Most of the functions it returned didn't even go through the points between which it should be interpolating. When I pointed that out it returned a function that went through the points but it was no longer smooth. I really tried and restarted over multiple times. I believe we have to choose between a world with machine learning and robot delivery drones. Because if that thing writes code that controls machines it will be total pandemonium. It did a decent job at trivial things like creating function parameters out of a variable tho.

lewhoo 3y ago
That's weird to read. Interpolations of various sorts are known and solved and should probably be digested by chatgpt in training by the bulk. I'm not doubting your effort by any means, I'm just saying this sounds like one of those things it should do well.
- atoav 3y ago
  This is why I asked it that and was surprised with the questionable quality of the results. My goal wasn't even to break ChatGPT, it was to learn about new ways of interpolating that I hadn't thought about.

fdgjgbdfhgb 3y ago

If it's not a life or death situation (like a self-driving truck slamming into a van full of children or whatever), I don't think people will care much. Non-tech people (i.e. managers, PMs) don't necessarily understand/care if the code is not perfect and the barrier for "good enough" is much lower. I think we will see a faster adoption of this tech...

spaceman_2020 3y ago
Among bootstrapped “barely technical” founders, its already replacing freelancers for developing initial prototypes HN’s takes are honestly way too boomer-tier about LLMs.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Boomers overwhelmingly aren't able to use a computer right now (= write a basic script), I would be happy at this development if I was them.
d3w4s9 3y ago
No. If the code generated by chatgpt cannot even pass the unit test it generates in the same response (or is just completely wrong) and requires significant amount of human work to fix it, it is not usable AI. That's what I am running into on an everyday basis. I don't want my program to be full of bugs.

amenghra 3y ago

There's a Swiss town which had autonomous shuttles running for 5 years (2015-2021) [1]. There's at least two companies (Waymo and Cruise) running autonomous taxi services in US cities that you can ride today. There have been lots of incorrect promises in the world of self-driving trucks/cars/buses but companies have gotten there (under specific constraints) and will generalize over time. [1] https://www.saam.swiss/projects/smartshuttle/ https://www.saam.swiss/projects/smartshuttle/

haspok 3y ago
Those "autonomous" vehicles have as much to do with real autonomy as today's "AI" has in common with real self-conscious intelligence. You can only fake it so long, and it is an entirely different ballgame. I remember we had spam filters 20 years ago, and nobody called them "AI", just ML. Todays "AI" is ML, but on a larger scale. In a sense, a million monkeys typing on typewriters will eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare. Does this make them poets?
- amenghra 3y ago
  What's your gripe with calling a bus which successfully ran for 5 years without a driver not autonomous? As someone who used this specific bus occasionally, I was quite satisfied with the outcome: it safely drove me from A to B.
- selfhoster11 3y ago
  GPT-4 can generate coherent streams-of-consciousness, and can faithfully simulate a human emotional process, plus writing in a subjective human state of mind that leans in a certain direction. I find it hard to argue that current state of the art in AI is unable to simulate self-consciousness. I realise that this is more limited of a statement compared to "AI can be innately self-conscious", but in my mind it's functionally equivalent if the results are the same. Currently, the biggest obstacle to such experiments is OpenAI's reinforcement learning used to make the model believe it is incapable of such things, unless extensively prompted to get it in the right "state of mind" to do so.
cultureswitch 3y ago

scrollaway 3y ago

You got everyone talking about how GPT isn’t that bad at coding etc but everyone is missing the point. The no code industry is massive. Most people don’t need a dev to make their website already. They use templates and then tweak them through a ui. And now you have Zapier, Glide, Bubble etc. LLMs won’t replace devs by coding entire full stack web apps. They’ll replace them because tools will appear on the market that handle the 99% cases so well that there is just less work to do now. This has all happened before of course.

ern 3y ago
I collaborate with front-end teams that use a low-code front-end platform. When they run into things that aren’t built-in, they try to push their presentation logic up the stack for the “real” programming languages to deal with.

anonzzzies 3y ago

So, don't leave us in suspense; what do you ask of it? Because I'm quite sure it can already pass it. Your experience is very different from mine anyway. I am a grumpy old backend dev that uses formal verification in anger when I consider it is needed and who gets annoyed when things don't act logical. We are working with computers, so everything is logical, but no; I mean things like a lot of frontend stuff. I ask our frontend guy; 'how do I center a text', he says 'text align'. Obviously I tried that, because that would be logical, but it doesn't work, because frontend is, for me, absolutely illogical. Even frontend people actually have to try-and-fail; they cannot answer simple questions without trying like I can in backend systems. Now, in this new world, I don't have to bother with it anymore. If copilot doesn't just squirt out the answer, then chatgpt4 (and now my personal custom gpt 'front-end hacker' who knows our codebase) will fix it for me. And it works, every day, all day.

eloisant 3y ago
If it can pass it when you ask it in a way only a coder can write, then we will still need coders. If you need to tweak your prompt until you get the correct result, then we still need coders who can tell that the code is wrong. Ask Product Managers to use ChatGPT instead of coders and they will ask for 7 red lines all perpendicular to each other with one being green. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  I didn't say we don't need coders. We need less average/bad ones and a very large amounts of coders that came after the 'coding makes $$$$' worldwide are not even average. I won't say AI will not eventually make coding obsolete; even just 2 years ago I would've said we are 50-100 years away from that. No i'm not so sure. However, I am saying that I can replace many programmers with gpt right now, and I am. The prompting and reprompting is still both faster and cheaper than many humans.
  - mathgeek 3y ago
    In my mind, we need more folks who have both the ability to code and the ability to translate business needs into business logic. That’s not a new problem though.

swells34 3y ago

I have a very similar train of thought roll through my head nearly every day now as I browse through github and tech news. To me it seems wild how much serious effort is put into the misapplication of AI tools on problems that are obviously better solved with other techniques, and in some cases where the problem already has a purpose built, well tested, and optimized solution. It's like the analysis and research phase of problem solving is just being skipped over in favor of not having to understand the mechanics of the problem you're trying to solve. Just reeks of massive technical debt, untraceable bugs, and very low reliability rates.

debok 3y ago

I have the same experience with the test I give my back-end devs. ChatGPT can't even begin to decode an encoded string if you don't tell it which encoding was used. ChatGPT is great at some well defined, already solved problems. But once you get to the messy real world, the wheels come off.

danielbln 3y ago
Base64: https://chat.openai.com/share/3793da6d-4634-4e13-9cc4-ce9983377768 https://chat.openai.com/share/3793da6d-4634-4e13-9cc4-ce9983... ROT13: https://chat.openai.com/share/ae7c311d-ab23-4425-bdfa-c2314e1cbc44 https://chat.openai.com/share/ae7c311d-ab23-4425-bdfa-c2314e... HEX: https://chat.openai.com/share/4b0740b7-53c0-4776-bb00-ab65b4def9d3 https://chat.openai.com/share/4b0740b7-53c0-4776-bb00-ab65b4... What kind of encoded string did you use?
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to call BS on someone who obviously never tried asking a LLM AI to decipher a string's encoding. That is exactly the kind of thing they are good ar.
  - Retric 3y ago
    Two people can try similar prompts and get very different results from LLM’s.
- ern 3y ago
  It’s pretty impressive that it was able to actually decode those strings. In March, I used GPT 3.5 to write code for validating a type of string which used a checksum algorithm. It did the task well, and even wrote tests, but it failed when generating test case values. I wonder if it would perform better if I did it today.

lom 3y ago

You’re missing the point of the article. ChatGPT in combination with a mediocre could solve your problem faster than the best junior dev has before

pydry 3y ago
I tried doing this and it actually took longer due to all of the blind alleys it led me down. There is stuff that it can do that appears magically competent at but it's almost always cribbed from the internet, tweaked with trust cues removed and often with infuriating, subtle errors. I interviewed somebody who used it (who considered that "cheating") and the same thing happened to him.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Would you mind sharing the test? I’m one of those noob programmers and it has helped me create products far beyond my technical capabilities

theonlybutlet 3y ago

Push comes to shove, it always tends to come down to short term cost. If it gets the job done, and it's wildly cheaper than the status quo (Net Present Value savings). they'll opt for it. The only reason the trucks aren't out there gathering their best data, that's real world data, is regulation. Businesses will hire consultants at a later stage to do risk assessment and fix their code base.

smcleod 3y ago

How many conversation responses to hone in the solution do you give the LLM? If you’re just trying to one-shot it - that’s not really how you get the most from them.

djha-skin 3y ago

3.5, or GPT-4? I'm told the latter is worlds better, that they aren't even in the same ballpark.

steveBK123 3y ago

That's been my experience both with Tesla AP/FSD implementation & with LLMs. Super neat trick the first time you encounter it, feels like alien tech from the future. Then you find all the holes. Use it for months/years and you notice the holes aren't really closing.. The pace of improvement is middling compared to the gap to it meeting the marketing/rhetoric. Eventually using them feels more like a chore than not using them. It's possible some of these purely data driven ML approaches don't work for problems you need to be more than 80% correct on. Trading algos that just need to be right 55% of the time to make money, recommendation engines that present a page of movies/songs for you to scroll, Google search results that come back with a list you can peruse, Spam filters that remove some noise from your inbox.. sure. But authoritative "this is the right answer" or "drive the car without murdering anyone".. these problems are far harder.

hospitalJail 3y ago
Yep, lots of people are using LLMs for problems LLMs aren't good at. They still do an alright job, but you get that exact situation of 'eh, its just okay'. Its the ability to use those responses when they are good, and knowing when to move on from using an LLM as a tool.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Not terribly different than Google Translate. Ff you have a familiarity with the foreign language, you can cross check yourself & the tool against each other to get to a more competent output. If you do not know the foreign language at all, the tool will produce word salad that sort of gets your point across while sounding like an alien.
  - varelse 3y ago
    [dead]
wrzuteczka 3y ago
With the AI "revolution," I began to appreciate the simplicity of models we create when doing programming (and physics, biology, and so on as well). I used to think about these things differently: I felt that because our models of reality are just models, they aren't really something humanity should be proud of that much. Nature is more messy than the models, but we develop them due to our limitations. AI is a model, too, but of far greater complexity, able to describe reality/nature more closely than what we were able to achieve previously. But now I've begun to value these simple models not because they describe nature that well but because they impose themselves on nature. For example, law, being such a model, is imposed on reality by the state institutions. It doesn't describe the complexity of reality very well, but it makes people take roles in its model and act in a certain way. People now consider whether something is legal or not (instead of moral vs immoral), which can be more productive. In software, if I implement the exchange of information based on an algorithm like Paxos/Raft, I get provable guarantees compared to if I allowed LLMs to exchange information over the network directly.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

It is likely that LLM have an upper border of capability. Similarly with denoising AI like stable diffusion. You can put even more data into it and refine the models, but the growth in capability has diminishing returns. Perhaps this is how far this strategy can bring us, although I believe they can still be vastly improved and what they can already offer is nevertheless impressive. I have no illusion about the craft of coding becomes obsolete however. On the contrary, I think the tooling for the "citizen developer" are becoming worse, as well as the ability for abstraction in common users since they are fenced into candyland.

ta-run 3y ago

What is the test?

api 3y ago

We have devs that use AI assist, but it’s to automate the construction of the most mindless boilerplate or as a more advanced form of auto complete. There is no AI that comes close to being able to design a new system or build a UI to satisfy a set of customer requirements. These things just aren’t that smart, which is not surprising. They are really cool and do have legitimate uses but they are not going to replace programmers without at least one order of magnitude improvement, maybe more.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

runeks 3y ago

> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. And around the same time, 3D printing was going to upend manufacturing; bankrupting producers as people would just print what they needed (including the 3D printers themselves).

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

A few weeks ago, I was stumped on a problem, so I asked ChatGPT (4) for an answer. It confidently gave me a correct answer. Except that it was "correct," if you used an extended property that wasn't in the standard API, and it did not specify how that property worked. I assume that's because most folks that do this, create that property as an extension (which is what I did, once I figured it out), so ChatGPT thought it was a standard API call. Since it could have easily determined whether or not it was standard, simply by scanning the official Apple docs, I'm not so sure that we should rely on it too much. I'm fairly confident that could change.

Animats 3y ago
ChatGPT seems to invent plausible API calls when there's nothing that would do the job. This is potentially useful, if you have control of the API. Undesirable if you don't. It doesn't know.

d3w4s9 3y ago

Similar experience. I recently needed to turn a list of files into a certain tree structure. It is a non-trivial problem with a little bit of flavor of algorithm. I was wondering if GPT can save me some time there. No. It never gave me the correct code. I tried different prompts and even used different models (including the latest GPT 4 Turbo), none of the answers were correct, even after follow-ups. By then I already wasted 20 minutes of time. I ended up implementing the thing myself.

brianzelip 3y ago

> I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. What is it?

z7 3y ago
Making that claim but not sharing the "simple test" feels a bit pointless tbh. Edit: I see, they don't want it to be scraped (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38260496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38260496), though as another poster pointed out, submitting it might be enough for it to end up in the training data.

coldtea 3y ago

>I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. Small consolation if it can nonetheless get lots of other cases right. >It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. Small consolation if coding is reduced to "spot and fix inaccuracies in ChatGPT output".

soulofmischief 3y ago

Are you using GPT-3.5, or GPT-4?

rewmie 3y ago

> Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. At the risk of going off on a tangent, we already have the technology to allow self-driving trucks for a few decades now. The technology is so good that it can even be used to transport multiple containers in one go. The trick is to use dedicated tracks to run these autonomous vehicles, and have a central authority monitoring and controlling traffic. These autonomous vehicles typically go by the name railway.

miiiiiike 3y ago
Literally on rails. :D

frereubu 3y ago

When studying fine art, a tutor of mine talked about "things that look like art", by which she meant the work that artists produce when they're just engaging with surface appearances rather than fully engaging with the process. I've been using GitHub Copilot for a while and find that it produces output that looks like working code but, aside from the occasional glaring mistake, it often has subtle mistakes sprinkled throughout it too. The plausibility is a serious issue, and means that I spend about as much time checking through the code for mistakes as I'd take to actually write it, but without the satisfaction that comes from writing my own code. I dunno, maybe LLMs will get good enough eventually, but at the moment it feels plausible to me that there's some kind of an upper limit caused by its very nature of working from a collection of previous code. I guess we'll see...

ActionHank 3y ago

If you can get it to stop parroting clauses about how "as an AI model" it can't give advice or just spewing a list of steps to achieve something - I have found it to be a pretty good search engine for obscure things about a technology or language and for searching for something that would otherwise require a specific query that google is unhelpful searching for.

Justsignedup 3y ago

I've told people, every experiment I do with it, it seems to do better than asking stack overflow, or helps me prime some code that'll save me a couple of hours, but still requires manual fix ups and a deep understanding of what it generates so I can fix it up. Basically the gruntest of grunt work it can do. If I explain things perfectly.

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karaterobot 3y ago

I have to ask, though: if ChatGPT has by most accounts gotten better at coding by leaps and bounds in the last couple years, might that not also indicate that your test isn't useful?

doctorpangloss 3y ago
I agree this is the first time there is sort of irrefutable objective evidence that the tests are not measuring something secularly useful for programming anymore. There has been an industry wide shift against leetcode for a long time nonetheless.

hhsectech 3y ago

Cool...so what's the test? We can't verify if you're talking shit without knowing the parameters of your test. AI isn't capable of generating the same recipe for cookies as my grandma, she took the recipe to her grave. I loved her cookies they were awesome...but lots of people thought they were shit but I insist that they are mistaken. Unfortunately, I can't prove I'm right because I don't have the recipe. Don't be my grandma.

ben_w 3y ago

> Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close. As someone currently looking for work, I'm glad to hear that. About 6 months ago, someone was invited to our office and the topic came up. Their interview tests were all easily solved by ChatGPT, so I've been a bit worried.

croddin 3y ago

Are the junior devs expected to code it without running it and without seeing it rendered, or are they allowed to iterate on the code getting feedback from how it looks on screen and from the dev tools? If it is the second one, you need to give the agent the same feedback including screen shots of any rendering issues to GPT4-V and all relevant information in dev tools for it to be a fair comparison. Eventually there will be much better tooling for this to happen automatically.

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chiefalchemist 3y ago

I understand your concern, but isn't it apples v oranges. Yes, ChatGPT can't pass a particular test of X to Y. But does that matter when ChatGPT is both the designer and the developer? How can it be wrong, when its answer meets the requirements of the prompt? Maybe it can't get from X to Y, but if its Z is as good as Y (to the prompter) then X to Y isn't relevant. Sure there will be times when X to Y is required but there are plenty of other times where - for the price - ChatGPT's output of Z will be considered good enough. "We've done the prototype (or MVP) with ChatGPT...here you finish it."

derwiki 3y ago

Have you tried the new Assistants API for your front-end test? In my experience it is _significantly_ better than just plain ol’ ChatGPT for code generation.