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Ask HN: How have AI tools changed your everyday coding work in 2023?

1 points by kleiba 3y ago

gregjor 3y ago
Not at all. Tried to use, found the tools mostly useless. When ChatGPT confidently asserted that no even numbers exist that are divisible by 3 and 5 I gave up on it. I had asked it to write a trivial variation on FizzBuzz.
- kleiba 3y ago
  Okay. But on the other hand, we know that ChatGPT can be an enormous help for all kinds of programming tasks. Granted, your experience was ridiculous, but why give up so easily?
  - gregjor 3y ago
    "We" don't know that autocomplete on steroids is an enormous help. It hasn't been for me, and I've tried a few times. The time wasted on wrong answers asserted with confidence makes it useless to me. I've asked colleagues and none of them use AI regularly either, though a few had more success than I experienced. I don't doubt that such tools can help those with less experience and skill at figuring things out.
    - kleiba 3y ago
      I see. Would you be willing to give them another try in, say, one or two years as they will surely have improved?
      - gregjor 3y ago
        Maybe. I’m going to retire from programming soon and after that I hope to never look at code again. The AIs can keep it.
- Zeik 3y ago
  What was the trivial variation? I’d like to give it a try.
  - Zeik 3y ago
    This was the FizzBuzz python code from chatGPT that prints out differently if value is even and dividable by 3 and 5. Simple task and very nice implementation. def fizzbuzz_even_surprise(n): return [ (lambda x: 'Surprise' if x % 2 == 0 and x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0 else 'Fizz'(x % 3 == 0) + 'Buzz'(x % 5 == 0) or x)(x) for x in range(1, n+1) ] print(fizzbuzz_even_surprise(30))
soapdog 3y ago
Not at all. It just made me annoyed that every single company is trying to cram AI into all the tools and services.
- kleiba 3y ago
  Is there a specific reason you're opposed to these tools? As in, you don't find any value in them, or is it just that you have not has the chance to familiarize yourself with them?
  - soapdog 3y ago
    I’m not here to tell people what to use, but personally I don’t find their business method and the way the training sets been built to be ethical. As far as a “development community” exists, we have usually been very vocal when there are licenses violations and ready to give flack to companies abusing their access to FOSS code and resources. Still, when it comes to training sets, people are surprisingly lax and turn a blind eye to the millions of resources that have been slurped to train AI without any care for licenses or wish from authors. This is true for code but also for art.
Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
I use Cursor IDE, which has ChatGPT built into it and Perplexity.ai which has a few engines to choose from. I use it as an enchanced syntax checker and error message solver i.e. you get an option to just "AI this error message" and it suggests solutions. Perp has helped me set up my recent diskless booting environment. And while I could have done it myself - I've done it before - it recommended netplan, kea-dhcp, hostapd, nftables and dnsmasq all of which I would not have considered because they are not the default on debian. And, if i prompt "I have eno0 as LAN serving dhcp on 10.0.1.1, enp4 as WAN as a dhcp client and wlan0 as a Access point on 192.168.0.1, generate me configs for netplan, kea-dhcp4, nftables and hostapd for all that" it will!
kmarc 3y ago
Our organization is evaluating Codeium, and based on our feedbacks, they keep improving the product that we use. First of all: I, although normally interested in the general landscape of technologies and devx / productivity, IDGAF about the current AI hype, try to keep away from it, and generally speaking cannot care less at this stage. That said, Codeium for me (and many other colleagues) became like a kitchen utility: you turn it on, and it just works, speeds things up, and I don't have to understand all the physics / engineering behind it. By default it works with vim and vscode, I installed it and then forgot about it. Completes 1-5 lines worth of shellscript if/else branches, whole methods, etc. Also, xml, c++, python is not a problem. It's sometimes so accurate, I actually have to check if completion is coming from the LSP or Codeium. I contribute to 5-10 projects with different languages, and don't have the capacity to understand all of them. As an example, sometimes I have to git mergetool quite big patches with many conflicts. Codeium perfectly fixes pytest unit tests for me during the merge, and I don't even understand necessarily, what was broken after the merge/rebase. It offloads a lot of mental load and context switching, TBH. I understand that my use case is "fix /change a handful of most probably repetitive lines in a dynamically typed script", and won't expect it to write elaborate methods like fizzbuzz etc. It really feels like it's more of an ASSISTANT that helps me or sometimes pair programs with me

1 points by kleiba 3y ago

Not at all. Tried to use, found the tools mostly useless. When ChatGPT confidently asserted that no even numbers exist that are divisible by 3 and 5 I gave up on it. I had asked it to write a trivial variation on FizzBuzz.

kleiba 3y ago
Okay. But on the other hand, we know that ChatGPT can be an enormous help for all kinds of programming tasks. Granted, your experience was ridiculous, but why give up so easily?
- gregjor 3y ago
  "We" don't know that autocomplete on steroids is an enormous help. It hasn't been for me, and I've tried a few times. The time wasted on wrong answers asserted with confidence makes it useless to me. I've asked colleagues and none of them use AI regularly either, though a few had more success than I experienced. I don't doubt that such tools can help those with less experience and skill at figuring things out.
  - kleiba 3y ago
    I see. Would you be willing to give them another try in, say, one or two years as they will surely have improved?
    - gregjor 3y ago
      Maybe. I’m going to retire from programming soon and after that I hope to never look at code again. The AIs can keep it.
Zeik 3y ago
What was the trivial variation? I’d like to give it a try.
- Zeik 3y ago
  This was the FizzBuzz python code from chatGPT that prints out differently if value is even and dividable by 3 and 5. Simple task and very nice implementation. def fizzbuzz_even_surprise(n): return [ (lambda x: 'Surprise' if x % 2 == 0 and x % 3 == 0 and x % 5 == 0 else 'Fizz'(x % 3 == 0) + 'Buzz'(x % 5 == 0) or x)(x) for x in range(1, n+1) ] print(fizzbuzz_even_surprise(30))

soapdog 3y ago

Not at all. It just made me annoyed that every single company is trying to cram AI into all the tools and services.

kleiba 3y ago
Is there a specific reason you're opposed to these tools? As in, you don't find any value in them, or is it just that you have not has the chance to familiarize yourself with them?
- soapdog 3y ago
  I’m not here to tell people what to use, but personally I don’t find their business method and the way the training sets been built to be ethical. As far as a “development community” exists, we have usually been very vocal when there are licenses violations and ready to give flack to companies abusing their access to FOSS code and resources. Still, when it comes to training sets, people are surprisingly lax and turn a blind eye to the millions of resources that have been slurped to train AI without any care for licenses or wish from authors. This is true for code but also for art.

Baldbvrhunter 3y ago

I use Cursor IDE, which has ChatGPT built into it and Perplexity.ai which has a few engines to choose from. I use it as an enchanced syntax checker and error message solver i.e. you get an option to just "AI this error message" and it suggests solutions. Perp has helped me set up my recent diskless booting environment. And while I could have done it myself - I've done it before - it recommended netplan, kea-dhcp, hostapd, nftables and dnsmasq all of which I would not have considered because they are not the default on debian. And, if i prompt "I have eno0 as LAN serving dhcp on 10.0.1.1, enp4 as WAN as a dhcp client and wlan0 as a Access point on 192.168.0.1, generate me configs for netplan, kea-dhcp4, nftables and hostapd for all that" it will!

kmarc 3y ago

Our organization is evaluating Codeium, and based on our feedbacks, they keep improving the product that we use. First of all: I, although normally interested in the general landscape of technologies and devx / productivity, IDGAF about the current AI hype, try to keep away from it, and generally speaking cannot care less at this stage. That said, Codeium for me (and many other colleagues) became like a kitchen utility: you turn it on, and it just works, speeds things up, and I don't have to understand all the physics / engineering behind it. By default it works with vim and vscode, I installed it and then forgot about it. Completes 1-5 lines worth of shellscript if/else branches, whole methods, etc. Also, xml, c++, python is not a problem. It's sometimes so accurate, I actually have to check if completion is coming from the LSP or Codeium. I contribute to 5-10 projects with different languages, and don't have the capacity to understand all of them. As an example, sometimes I have to git mergetool quite big patches with many conflicts. Codeium perfectly fixes pytest unit tests for me during the merge, and I don't even understand necessarily, what was broken after the merge/rebase. It offloads a lot of mental load and context switching, TBH. I understand that my use case is "fix /change a handful of most probably repetitive lines in a dynamically typed script", and won't expect it to write elaborate methods like fizzbuzz etc. It really feels like it's more of an ASSISTANT that helps me or sometimes pair programs with me