7 ms·

Can you say in one or two sentences what you mean by “lazy at coding” in this context?

by omalled 3y ago

Me1000 3y ago
It has a tendency to do: "// ... the rest of your code goes here" in it's responses, rather than writing it all out.
- asaddhamani 3y ago
  It's incredibly lazy. I've tried to coax it into returning the full code and it will claim to follow the instructions while regurgitating the same output you complained about. GPT-4 was great, GPT-4 Turbo first version was pretty terrible bordering on unusable, then they came out with the Turbo second version, which almost feels worse to me, though I haven't compared, but if someone comes claiming they fixed an issue, but you still see it, it will bias you to see it more. Claude is doing much better in this area, local/open LLMs are getting quite good, it feels like OpenAI is not heading in a good direction here, and I hope they course correct.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    I have a feeling full powered LLM's are reserved for the more equal animals. I hope some people remember and document details of this era, future generations may be so impressed with future reality that they may not even think to question it's fidelity, if that concept even exists in the future.
    - akdor1154 3y ago
      > I hope some people remember and document details of this era, future generations may be so impressed with future reality that they may not even think to question it's fidelity, if that concept even exists in the future. The former sounds like a great training set to enable the latter. :(
    - bbor 3y ago
      …could you clarify? Is this about “LLMs can be biased, thus making fake news a bigger problem”?
      - mistermann 3y ago
        I confidently predict that we sheep will not have access to the same power our shepherds will have.
      - _puk 3y ago
        Imagine if the first version of ChatGPT we all saw was fully sanitised.. We know it knows how to make gunpowder (for example), but only because it would initially tell us. Now it won't without a lot of trickery. Would we even be pushing to try and trick it into doing so if we didn't know it actually could?
        ForHackernews 3y ago
        > Would we even be pushing to try and trick it into doing so if we didn't know it actually could? Would somebody try to push a technical system to do things it wasn't necessarily designed to be capable of? Uh... yes. You're asking this question on _Hacker_ News?
        bbor 3y ago
        Ah so it’s more about “forbidden knowledge” than “fake news” makes sense. I don’t personally see as that toooo much of an issue since other sources still exist, eg Wikipedia, internet archive, libraries, or that one Minecraft Library of Alexandria project. So I see knowledge storage staying there and LLMs staying put in the interpretation/transformation role, for the foreseeable future. But obviously all that social infrastructure is fragile… so you’re not wrong to be alarmed, IMO
        antupis 3y ago
        It is not that much about censorship, even that would be somewhat fine if OpenAI would do it dataset level so chatgpt would not have any knowledge about bomb-making. But it is happening lazily so system prompts get bigger which makes a signal to noise worse etc. I don't care about racial bias or what to call pope when I want chatgpt to write Python code.
  - kruxigt 3y ago
    [dead]
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    People need to be using their local machines for this. Because otherwise the result is going to be a cloud service provider having literally everyone's business logic somewhere in their system and that goes wrong real quick.
- bbor 3y ago
  It’s so interesting to see this discussion. I think this is a matter of “more experienced coders like and expect and reward that kind of output, while less experienced ones want very explicit responses”. So there’s this huge LLM Laziness epidemic that half the users cant even see
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    I'm paying for ChatGPT GPT4 to complete extremely tedious, repetitive coding tasks. The newly occurring laziness directly, negatively impacts my day to day use where I'm now willing to try alternatives. I still think I get value - indeed I'd probably pay $1,000/mo instead of $20/mo - but I'm only going to pay for one service.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  I mean, isn't that better as long as it actually writes the part that was asked? Who wants to wait for it to sluggishly generate the entire script for the 5th time and then copy the entire thing yet again.
anotherpaulg 3y ago
Short answer: Rather than fully writing code, GPT-4 Turbo often inserts comments like "... finish implementing function here ...". I made a benchmark based on asking it to refactor code that provokes and quantifies that behavior. Longer answer: I found that I could provoke lazy coding by giving GPT-4 Turbo refactoring tasks, where I ask it to refactor a large method out of a large class. I analyzed 9 popular open source python repos and found 89 such methods that were conceptually easy to refactor, and built them into a benchmark [0]. GPT succeeds on this task if it can remove the method from its original class and add it to the top level of the file with appropriate changes to the size of the abstract syntax tree. By checking that the size of the AST hasn't changed much, we can infer that GPT didn't replace a bunch of code with a comment like "... insert original method here...". The benchmark also gathers other laziness metrics like counting the number of new comments that contain "...". These metrics correlate well with the AST size tests. [0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/refactor-benchmark https://github.com/paul-gauthier/refactor-benchmark
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I have a bunch of code I need to refactor, and also write tests for. (I guess I should make the tests before the refactor). How do you do a refactor with GPT-4? Do you just dump the file in to the chat window? I also pay for github copilot, but not GPT-4. Can I use copilot for this? Any advice appreciated!
  - rkuykendall-com 3y ago
    > Do you just dump the file in to the chat window? Yes, along with what you want it to do. > I also pay for github copilot, but not GPT-4. Can I use copilot for this? Not that I know of. CoPilot is good at generating new code but can't change existing code.
    - redblacktree 3y ago
      Copilot will change existing code. (though I find it's often not very good at it) I frequently highlight a section of code that has an issue, press ctrl-i and type something like "/fix SomeError: You did it wrong"
stainablesteel 3y ago
it was really good at some point last fall, solving problems that it had previously completely failed at, albeit after a lot of iterations via autogpt. at least for the tests i was giving it which usually involved heavy stats and complicated algorithms, i was surprised it passed. despite it passing the code was slower than what i had personally solved the problem with, but i was completely impressed because i asked hard problems. nowadays the autogpt gives up sooner, seems less competent, and doesnt even come close to solving the same problems
- anon115 3y ago
  this is exactly what I noticed too
- thelittleone 3y ago
  Hamstringing high value tasks (complete code) to give forthcoming premium offerings greater differentiation could be a strategy. But in counter to this, doing so would open the door for competitors.
  - wolpoli 3y ago
    The question I have been wondering is if they are hamstringing high value tasks to creating room for premium offerings or are they trying to minimize cost per task.
    - djmips 3y ago
      I think it's the latter. Reading between the lines on costs gives me the impression they have strived to lower computational costs. They already added a cap of 30 queries per 3 hours...

Can you say in one or two sentences what you mean by “lazy at coding” in this context?

Me1000 3y ago

It has a tendency to do: "// ... the rest of your code goes here" in it's responses, rather than writing it all out.

asaddhamani 3y ago
It's incredibly lazy. I've tried to coax it into returning the full code and it will claim to follow the instructions while regurgitating the same output you complained about. GPT-4 was great, GPT-4 Turbo first version was pretty terrible bordering on unusable, then they came out with the Turbo second version, which almost feels worse to me, though I haven't compared, but if someone comes claiming they fixed an issue, but you still see it, it will bias you to see it more. Claude is doing much better in this area, local/open LLMs are getting quite good, it feels like OpenAI is not heading in a good direction here, and I hope they course correct.
- mistermann 3y ago
  I have a feeling full powered LLM's are reserved for the more equal animals. I hope some people remember and document details of this era, future generations may be so impressed with future reality that they may not even think to question it's fidelity, if that concept even exists in the future.
  - akdor1154 3y ago
    > I hope some people remember and document details of this era, future generations may be so impressed with future reality that they may not even think to question it's fidelity, if that concept even exists in the future. The former sounds like a great training set to enable the latter. :(
  - bbor 3y ago
    …could you clarify? Is this about “LLMs can be biased, thus making fake news a bigger problem”?
    - mistermann 3y ago
      I confidently predict that we sheep will not have access to the same power our shepherds will have.
    - _puk 3y ago
      Imagine if the first version of ChatGPT we all saw was fully sanitised.. We know it knows how to make gunpowder (for example), but only because it would initially tell us. Now it won't without a lot of trickery. Would we even be pushing to try and trick it into doing so if we didn't know it actually could?
      - ForHackernews 3y ago
        > Would we even be pushing to try and trick it into doing so if we didn't know it actually could? Would somebody try to push a technical system to do things it wasn't necessarily designed to be capable of? Uh... yes. You're asking this question on _Hacker_ News?
      - bbor 3y ago
        Ah so it’s more about “forbidden knowledge” than “fake news” makes sense. I don’t personally see as that toooo much of an issue since other sources still exist, eg Wikipedia, internet archive, libraries, or that one Minecraft Library of Alexandria project. So I see knowledge storage staying there and LLMs staying put in the interpretation/transformation role, for the foreseeable future. But obviously all that social infrastructure is fragile… so you’re not wrong to be alarmed, IMO
        antupis 3y ago
        It is not that much about censorship, even that would be somewhat fine if OpenAI would do it dataset level so chatgpt would not have any knowledge about bomb-making. But it is happening lazily so system prompts get bigger which makes a signal to noise worse etc. I don't care about racial bias or what to call pope when I want chatgpt to write Python code.
- kruxigt 3y ago
  [dead]
- 15457345234 3y ago
  People need to be using their local machines for this. Because otherwise the result is going to be a cloud service provider having literally everyone's business logic somewhere in their system and that goes wrong real quick.
bbor 3y ago
It’s so interesting to see this discussion. I think this is a matter of “more experienced coders like and expect and reward that kind of output, while less experienced ones want very explicit responses”. So there’s this huge LLM Laziness epidemic that half the users cant even see
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  I'm paying for ChatGPT GPT4 to complete extremely tedious, repetitive coding tasks. The newly occurring laziness directly, negatively impacts my day to day use where I'm now willing to try alternatives. I still think I get value - indeed I'd probably pay $1,000/mo instead of $20/mo - but I'm only going to pay for one service.
moffkalast 3y ago
I mean, isn't that better as long as it actually writes the part that was asked? Who wants to wait for it to sluggishly generate the entire script for the 5th time and then copy the entire thing yet again.

anotherpaulg 3y ago

Short answer: Rather than fully writing code, GPT-4 Turbo often inserts comments like "... finish implementing function here ...". I made a benchmark based on asking it to refactor code that provokes and quantifies that behavior. Longer answer: I found that I could provoke lazy coding by giving GPT-4 Turbo refactoring tasks, where I ask it to refactor a large method out of a large class. I analyzed 9 popular open source python repos and found 89 such methods that were conceptually easy to refactor, and built them into a benchmark [0]. GPT succeeds on this task if it can remove the method from its original class and add it to the top level of the file with appropriate changes to the size of the abstract syntax tree. By checking that the size of the AST hasn't changed much, we can infer that GPT didn't replace a bunch of code with a comment like "... insert original method here...". The benchmark also gathers other laziness metrics like counting the number of new comments that contain "...". These metrics correlate well with the AST size tests. [0] https://github.com/paul-gauthier/refactor-benchmark https://github.com/paul-gauthier/refactor-benchmark

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I have a bunch of code I need to refactor, and also write tests for. (I guess I should make the tests before the refactor). How do you do a refactor with GPT-4? Do you just dump the file in to the chat window? I also pay for github copilot, but not GPT-4. Can I use copilot for this? Any advice appreciated!
- rkuykendall-com 3y ago
  > Do you just dump the file in to the chat window? Yes, along with what you want it to do. > I also pay for github copilot, but not GPT-4. Can I use copilot for this? Not that I know of. CoPilot is good at generating new code but can't change existing code.
  - redblacktree 3y ago
    Copilot will change existing code. (though I find it's often not very good at it) I frequently highlight a section of code that has an issue, press ctrl-i and type something like "/fix SomeError: You did it wrong"

stainablesteel 3y ago

it was really good at some point last fall, solving problems that it had previously completely failed at, albeit after a lot of iterations via autogpt. at least for the tests i was giving it which usually involved heavy stats and complicated algorithms, i was surprised it passed. despite it passing the code was slower than what i had personally solved the problem with, but i was completely impressed because i asked hard problems. nowadays the autogpt gives up sooner, seems less competent, and doesnt even come close to solving the same problems

anon115 3y ago
this is exactly what I noticed too
thelittleone 3y ago
Hamstringing high value tasks (complete code) to give forthcoming premium offerings greater differentiation could be a strategy. But in counter to this, doing so would open the door for competitors.
- wolpoli 3y ago
  The question I have been wondering is if they are hamstringing high value tasks to creating room for premium offerings or are they trying to minimize cost per task.
  - djmips 3y ago
    I think it's the latter. Reading between the lines on costs gives me the impression they have strived to lower computational costs. They already added a cap of 30 queries per 3 hours...