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I get your point, but it only applies to the most simple of these examples. This can do all kinds of stuff, for example look further into that thread and you’ll

I get your point, but it only applies to the most simple of these examples. This can do all kinds of stuff, for example look further into that thread and you’ll see it implementing tic tac toe. The tool works by basically sending a screenshot of your diagram to GPT4 and saying “implement this”.

lolinder 3y ago
Which in turn only works for simple stuff that GPT-4 can implement from a single screenshot, and is, as OP pointed out, non-deterministic. The code OP is referring to would have been written to integrate with the rest of the project, to connect to data stores and services that the screenshot has no way of knowing about. People built huge applications in VB and similar tools. Don't get me wrong, these new tools are cool, and I imagine they'll be great for prototyping small things quickly!
- MattRix 3y ago
  Human beings build stuff non deterministically too. The key is just to give the tool more information along with the screenshot, for example showing it your current codebase so it writes code using the same conventions.
  - 95014_refugee 3y ago
    ... and our opinions about how badly this is going to pan out are based on decades of experience with how badly that panned out. Nobody that has ever had to maintain software is going to look at this and be impressed. Without a reproducible and predictable set of transforms from the source artifact to the product artifact(s), maintenance of software generated in this fashion will be impossible. The concept of a "localized" change doesn't exist; you have to assume that any and every change risks breaking the entire product. This is, of course, just another version of folks looking at something that mimics a (structured, evolved) human activity and assuming that it is in fact reproducing that activity, rather than just copying some subset of the visible consequences of that activtiy.
    - MattRix 3y ago
      I don’t know why you’d assume the AI behind this wouldn’t end up with access to both the source and product artifacts, implementing changes in the most constrained/localized way possible.
NoGravitas 3y ago
The tic-tac-toe example really makes it clear that oh — this works by plagiarism. Until you see that one, it's kind of easy to forget.
- MattRix 3y ago
  What about that example makes it clear?
  - 95014_refugee 3y ago
    Where do you think it got the game logic from? Recall that this is an LLM; it doesn't "think", it's just cutting and pasting "likely" scraps of things from its training set. At this point, the vast majority of those scraps were human-generated, so a) many of them work, and b) copying them in this fashion is plagiarism ("the offense of taking passages from another's compositions, and publishing them, either word for word or in substance, as one's own")
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      From someone else describing it, just as you did?
    - MattRix 3y ago
      It really doesn’t work by just cutting and pasting scraps, I think you might need to do a bit more research on how this stuff works.
- nine_k 3y ago
  The industry has a number of repeating tasks ("Make me a CRUD app"), so "plagiarism", aka "following an example", can go a relatively long way. The interesting part is going to be stitching such parts together into a whole which has no direct analogs, but each stitching step does.

lolinder 3y ago

Which in turn only works for simple stuff that GPT-4 can implement from a single screenshot, and is, as OP pointed out, non-deterministic. The code OP is referring to would have been written to integrate with the rest of the project, to connect to data stores and services that the screenshot has no way of knowing about. People built huge applications in VB and similar tools. Don't get me wrong, these new tools are cool, and I imagine they'll be great for prototyping small things quickly!

MattRix 3y ago
Human beings build stuff non deterministically too. The key is just to give the tool more information along with the screenshot, for example showing it your current codebase so it writes code using the same conventions.
- 95014_refugee 3y ago
  ... and our opinions about how badly this is going to pan out are based on decades of experience with how badly that panned out. Nobody that has ever had to maintain software is going to look at this and be impressed. Without a reproducible and predictable set of transforms from the source artifact to the product artifact(s), maintenance of software generated in this fashion will be impossible. The concept of a "localized" change doesn't exist; you have to assume that any and every change risks breaking the entire product. This is, of course, just another version of folks looking at something that mimics a (structured, evolved) human activity and assuming that it is in fact reproducing that activity, rather than just copying some subset of the visible consequences of that activtiy.
  - MattRix 3y ago
    I don’t know why you’d assume the AI behind this wouldn’t end up with access to both the source and product artifacts, implementing changes in the most constrained/localized way possible.

NoGravitas 3y ago

The tic-tac-toe example really makes it clear that oh — this works by plagiarism. Until you see that one, it's kind of easy to forget.

MattRix 3y ago
What about that example makes it clear?
- 95014_refugee 3y ago
  Where do you think it got the game logic from? Recall that this is an LLM; it doesn't "think", it's just cutting and pasting "likely" scraps of things from its training set. At this point, the vast majority of those scraps were human-generated, so a) many of them work, and b) copying them in this fashion is plagiarism ("the offense of taking passages from another's compositions, and publishing them, either word for word or in substance, as one's own")
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    From someone else describing it, just as you did?
  - MattRix 3y ago
    It really doesn’t work by just cutting and pasting scraps, I think you might need to do a bit more research on how this stuff works.
nine_k 3y ago
The industry has a number of repeating tasks ("Make me a CRUD app"), so "plagiarism", aka "following an example", can go a relatively long way. The interesting part is going to be stitching such parts together into a whole which has no direct analogs, but each stitching step does.