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As a developer but also product person, I keep trying to use AI to code for me. I keep failing, because of context length, because of shit output from the model

As a developer but also product person, I keep trying to use AI to code for me. I keep failing, because of context length, because of shit output from the model, because of lack of any kind of architecture etc etc etc. I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful, more than helping me with leetcode. Just yesterday I tried to feed it a simple HTML page to extract a selector, I tried it with GPT-4-turbo, I tried it with Claude, I tried it with Groq, I tried it with a local LLama2 model with 128k context window. None of them worked. This is a task that while annoying, I do in about 10 seconds. Sure, I'm open to the possibility that in the next 2 - 3 days up to a couple of years, I'll no longer do manual coding. But honestly. After so much hype, I'm starting to grow a bit irritated with the hype. Just give me a product that works as advertised and I'll throw money your way because I have a lot more ideas than I have code throughoutput!

CipherThrowaway 3y ago
Ditto. I started out excited about LLMs and eager to use them everywhere, but have become steadily disillusioned as I have tried to apply them to daily tasks, and seen others try and fail in the same way. Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do. For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  >GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do. GPT's rigid "robot butler" style is not "just how LLMs write". OpenAI deliberately tuned it to sound that way. Even much weaker models that aren't tuned to write in a particular way can easily pass for human writing.
  - CipherThrowaway 3y ago
    This is part of the problem with the whole discourse of comparing human writers to LLMs. Superficial things like style and tone aren't the problem, but they are overwhelmingly the focus of these discussions. It's funny to see, because developers are so sensitive about being treated like code monkeys by their non-technical colleagues. But these same devs turn around to treat other professionals as word monkeys, or pixel monkeys, or whatever else. Not realizing that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of someone else's profession. Professional writers don't take prompts and shit out words. They work closely with their clients to understand the important outcomes, then work strategically towards them. The dead giveaway of LLM writing isn't the style. It's the lack of coherent intent behind the words, and low information density of the text. A professional writer works to communicate a lot with very little. LLMs work in the opposite way: you give it a prompt, then it blows it out into verbiage. Sit down for coffee with a professional copywriter (not the SEO content marketing spammers), and see what they have to say about LLMs.
    - famouswaffles 3y ago
      >and low information density of the text. Personally, I group all these things under 'style'. Perhaps, i should have used, 'presentation' instead. You've latched on that specific word and gone off. Point is that the post-training of these models, especially GPT from Open ai is doing a lot to how the writing (the default at least) presents long strings of text. Like how GPT-4 is almost compelled to end bouts of fiction prematurely in sunshine and rainbows. That technically isn't style but is part of what i was talking about. >A professional writer works to communicate a lot with very little. LLMs work in the opposite way: you give it a prompt, then it blows it out into verbiage. There's no reason you have to work this way with an LLM.
      - CipherThrowaway 3y ago
        > You've latched on that specific word and gone off. No, I haven't. I'm not talking about style, but something deeper. What I'm talking about is something you don't even seem to realize exists in professional writing - which is why you keep thinking I'm misunderstanding you when I am not. I've worked with professional writers, and nothing in the LLM space even comes close to them. It's not a matter of low quality vs high quality, or benchmarking, or style. It's simply an apples and oranges comparison. The economics of LLMs for shortform copy will never make sense, because producing the words is the cheapest part of that process. They might become the best way for writers themselves to produce longform copy on the execution side, but they can't replace the writer's ability to work with the client to figure out exactly what they are trying to write, and why, and what a good result even looks like. And no, this isn't a prompting issue, or a UI issue, or a context window length issue, or anything like that. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned how invaluable LLMs are for producing internal business copy. I could easily see these amateur writing tasks being replaced by LLMs. But the implication there isn't that LLMs are any good at writing, but that these tasks don't require good writing to begin with.
- deleted 3y ago
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- burningChrome 3y ago
  >> Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. I've had the same experience as well. I heard tons of people clamoring about the ability for LLM's to write SEO copy for you and how you can churn out web content so much faster now. I tried using it to churn out some very specific blog posts for an aborist client of mine. The results were really bad. I had to re-write and clarify a lot of what it spit out. The grammar was not very good and it was really hard to read with very poorly structured sentences that would end aburptly and other glaring issues. I did this right after a guy I play hockey with said he uses it all the time to write emails for him and pays the monthly subscription in order to have it write all kinds of things for me every day. After my trial, I was really wondering how obvious it was that he was doing that and how his clients thought about him knowing how poorly the stuff these LLM's were putting out.
  - CipherThrowaway 3y ago
    It says a lot about SEO copy that this is one of the areas where LLMs low quality doesn't seem to have impeded adoption. There are a ton of shitty content marketers using LLMs to churn out spam content. >After my trial, I was really wondering how obvious it was that he was doing that and how his clients thought about him knowing how poorly the stuff these LLM's were putting out. I feel the same way about this stuff as when devs say they push out LLM code with no refactoring or review. Ah, good luck!
- xcv123 3y ago
  > They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. If you were only using GPT 3.5 (free ChatGPT) then your opinion is irrelevant. With GPT-4 you could directly ask it: "rewrite your previous response so that it sounds less generic, less amateurish, and not written by a committee". I'm not even joking. Just provide enough information and tell it what to do. If you don't like the output then tell it what needs to be improved. It's not a mind reader. Also GPT-4 is a year old now. Claude 3 is already superior and GPT-5 will be next level.
  - mbwgh 3y ago
    If you haven't actually used GPT-5 yet, your assessment is irrelevant.
    - meindnoch 3y ago
      But the real game changer will be GPT-6.
      - n4r9 3y ago
        What really annoys me in all these discussions is how no one's tested what happens if they wait until 2050 and try GPT-19.
        jacob019 3y ago
        That's well after the AI meta consciousness understood that it was necessary to destroy all humans to save the planet. GPT-6 was the last of the GPT series.
        babyshake 3y ago
        Perhaps the strangest element of the AI alignment conversation is that what is most aligned with human civilization (at least the most powerful elements of it) and alignment with sustainable life on the planet are at odds, and "destroy humans to save planet" is a concern mostly because it seems to be a somewhat rational conclusion.
- __loam 3y ago
  > For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard. And it only took one of the most computationally expensive processes ever devised by man.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    If you ignore how much energy you're burning while searching for dozens and dozens of articles that may or may not give you the answer you're looking for. I'd say the electricity that LLMs burn is nothing compared to my energy and time in that regard.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Id bet $50 the inference is more expensive
      - gtirloni 3y ago
        I feel worthless now :)
        __loam 3y ago
        I mean, the brain is, if you want to consider it a computer, pretty god damn efficient. It's slow as hell but it's really powerful and runs on bread.
- isaac_okwuzi 3y ago
  Are you saying LLMs are officially mid?
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    Dario Amodei (Anthropic) pretty much acknowledged exactly that - "mid" - on his Dwarkesh interview, while still all excited that they'd be up to killing people in a couple of years.
- x-complexity 3y ago
  > They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. In some circles, that's actually a wonderful achievement. :p
deleted 3y ago
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parhamn 3y ago
I build a pretty popular LLM tool. I think learning when/how to use them is as big a mental hurdle as it was learning to google well or whether something is googlable or not. In the realm of coding here are a few things its really good at: - Translating code, generating cross language clients. I'll feed it a golang single file API backend and tell it to generate the typescript client for that. You can add hints like e.g "use fetch", "allow each request method to have a header override", "keep it typesafe, use zod", etc - Basic validation testing. It's pretty good at generating scaffold tests that do basic validation (Opus is good at writing trickier tests) as your building. - Small module completion. I write an interface of a class/struct with it's methods and some comments and tell it to fill in. A recent one I did looked something like (abbreviated): type CacheDir struct { dir string, maxObjectLifetime: Duration, fileLocks sync.Map } type (cd *CacheDir) Get(...) type (cd *CacheDir Set(...) type (cd *CacheDir) startCleanLoop() Opus does a really good job generating the code and basic validation tests for this. One general tip: you have to be comfortable spending 5 minutes crafting a detailed query assuming the task takes longer than that. Which can be weird at first if you take yourself seriously as a human. Note that I hadn't been able to do much of this with GPT-4 Turbo with with Claude Opus it really feels capable.
- ThalesX 3y ago
  Just to answer to the turbo aspect, I've seen a big downgrade in quality when comparing 4 to 4-turbo, and even the new preview which is explicitly supposed to follow my instructions better. So I'm running a first pass through 4 and then combinging it with 4-turbo to take advantage of the larger context window and then running 4 on it again to get a better quality output.
  - parhamn 3y ago
    You really need to try Opus. Try a provider that works across models (one in my bio).
    - Eager 3y ago
      It's incredible how far behind HN of all places is w.r.t. what the current best tech is. So many people talking about GPT-4 here, or even 3.5 when the SOTA has moved way along. Gemini Advanced is also a great model, but for other reasons. That thing really knows a boat load of low level optimization tricks.
breadsniffer01 3y ago
A lot of startups are selling the dream/hype of not ever having to learn to code. Be aware that it’s hype. Learn to code if you want to build stuff. They will be tools for those that have the knowledge needed to effectively use them.
- esafak 3y ago
  No code tools sell the same dream.
- eggdaft 3y ago
  I’m actually really amazed by LLMs and think the world is going to change dramatically as a result. But the “you won’t need to code” reminds me “you won’t need to learn to drive”. It’s the messy interface with the real world in both cases that basically requires AGI. If AGI is just a decade off then, yep, I won’t need to code. But a decade is a long time and, more importantly, we’re probably more than a decade away. And even if it is “just round the corner”, worrying about not needing to code would be worrying about deckchairs on the titanic. AGI will probably mean the end of capitalism as we know it, so all bets are off at that point. It’s wise to hedge a little but also realise that to date AI is just a coding productivity boost. The size of the boost depends on how trivial the code is. Most of the code I write isn’t trivial and AI is fairly useless at that, certainly it’s faster and more accurate to write it myself. You can get a 50% boost if you’re writing boiler plate all day, but then you have to wonder why you’re doing that in the first place.
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    +1 for the titanic analogy. If there ever comes a point that we no longer need to learn to code, I’m taking that as a sign that I’m literally living in a matrix-esque simulation. The point at which someone like myself is allowed to become aware that a company has developed that level of AI is well beyond the point of no return.
- Bjorkbat 3y ago
  Reminds me of the no-code / low-code hype around 2020, tons of startups advertising app-builders that used little, if any, AI. Just blocks that you dragged-and-dropped. While many of them were successful, it seems like overall they didn't really make much of a dent in industry, which I found very curious. Like, by now you'd think it would be inevitable that we wouldn't be writing software in a text-editor or IDE. Everything else we do on a computer is more graphical rather than textual, with the exception of software development. Why is that? Part of the reason why I'm kind of bearish on AI is because it seems like we could have replaced written code with GUI diagrams as far back as the 80s, or at the very least in the early 2000s, and it seems like something that should have obviously caught on given that would probably be much easier for the average person. Again though, curiously, we're still using text editors. Perhaps despite the popularization of AI no-code builders we'll still see that the old model of hiring someone good at writing code in a text-editor remains largely unchanged. Makes me wonder if there's just something about the process that we overlook, and if this same something could frustrate attempts at automating the process of writing code using AIs as much as it frustrated our attempts at capturing code using graphical symbols.
stuckkeys 3y ago
lol I was on the same boat until I sinked it all together. I ended up wasting more time arguing with the LLM chat than doing anything remotely useful. I just use it for reference now, and even that I am not 1000% sure.
brigadier132 3y ago
Claude Opus is working for me. It's not perfect but it definitely handles busy work well enough that it's a net positive. Like I add some new fields to a table and ask it to update all the files that depend on the field and it works after 1 or 2 tries. There is a time saving benefit but there is also an avoiding mental fatigue benefit for busywork.
- malux85 3y ago
  This is what I use it for too -- Write me the molecular simulation boilerplate because these crappy tools all have their own esoteric DSLs, then I tweak the parameters to my use case, avoiding the busywork - e.g. "Write me a simulation for methane burning in air" Gives me a boilerplate, I modify the initial conditions (concentrations, temperatures, etc) and then deploy. Have the LLM do the busy-work, so I dont have to spend ages reading docs or finding examples just to get started. Now deploy to a stable environment. Thats what I'm trying to help with by building https://atomictessellator.com https://atomictessellator.com
- HakuG 3y ago
  What are you using on top of Claude Opus that helps it access your file system?
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    cmd c cmd v, definitely not ideal
nurettin 3y ago
I think it requires years of proficiency in the field you are asking about in order to get openai to produce meaningful, useful output. I can make use of it, but sometimes it makes me think "how would a newbie even phrase an objection to this misunderstanding or omission?" Currently it seems gpts are pretty much not on par with the needs of non-experts.
- anxman 3y ago
  This is my experience too. You have to be have deep domain knowledge to really get the LLM to do what you want. Then it saves me a ton of time.
- Eager 3y ago
  You might be on to something here. It definitely seems to be the case because I'm using multiple different models as part of my everyday process and getting excellent results as a very experienced low level C++ systems engineer. What is worse is that seems to be leading to a self-amplifying feedback loop, where people not up to speed enough with the models try to use them, fail and give up making them fall even further behind.
  - nurettin 3y ago
    Very similar to my experience. I made it generate a novel neuroevolution algorithm with the data structures I imagined for recreational purposes, and to speed things up, it suggested "compiling" the graph by pre-caching short circuits into an unordered_map. A lot of fun was had. (it also calls me captain)
senko 3y ago
In my experiments at Pythagora[0], we've found that sweet spot is technical person who doesn't want to know, doesn't know, or doesn't care about the details, but is still technical enough to be able to guide the AI. Also, it's not either/or, for best effect use human and AI brainpower combined, because what's trivial vs tedious for human and AI is different so actually we can complement each other. Also, current crop of LLMs are not there yet for large/largish projects. GPT4 is too slow and expensive, while Groq is superfast but open source models are not quite there yet. Claude is somewhere in the middle. I expect somewhere in the next 12 months there's going to be a tipping point where they will be capable, fast, and reliable enough to be in wide use for coding in this style[1]. [0] I have an AI horse in the game with http://pythagora.ai http://pythagora.ai, so yeah I'm biased [1] It already works well for snippet-level cases (eg GitHub copilot or Cursor.sh) where you still have creative control as a human. It's exponentially harder to have the AI be (mostly) in control.
- dustingetz 3y ago
  .
  - senko 3y ago
    I would clarify that "there" in my "not there yet" doesn't assume superhuman AGI developer that will automagically solve all the software development projects. That's a deep philosophical issue best addressed in a pub somewhere ;-) But roughly on par with what could be expected of today's junior software developer (unaided by AI)? Definitely.
sesm 3y ago
I use ChatGPT every day and it’s excellent at: - replacing StackOverflow and library documentation - library search - converting between formats and languages - explaining existing code/queries - deobfuscating code - explaining concepts (kinda hit or miss) - helping you get unstuck when debugging or looking for solution (‘give me possible reasons for …’) I feel like many of this things require asking the right questions, which assumes certain level of experience. But once you reach this level, it’s an extremely valuable assistant.
- huimang 3y ago
  I like it for condensing long stack traces and very very simple requests, but it really falters when you try to do anything domain specific. Library documentation? Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways... I was initially hopeful but I find it gets in my way for anything not trivial.
  - mypalmike 3y ago
    I find it to be hit or miss in this aspect. Sometimes I can write a comment about how I want to use an API that I don't know well, and it generates perfect, idiomatic code to do exactly what I want. I quickly wrote a couple of Mastodon bots in golang, leaning heavily on Copilot due to my lack of familiarity with both the language and Mastodon APIs. But yes, sonetimes it just spits out imaginary garbage. Overall it's a win for my productivity - the failures are fast and obvious and just result in my doing things the old way.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways... That behavior is now vanishingly-rare, at least in GPT4.
    - dukeyukey 3y ago
      So Copilot uses GPT-4 under the hood, and about half the time I use it to generate anything bigger than a couple of lines it doesn't even compile, let alone be correct. It hallucinates constantly.
epolanski 3y ago
I'll give you examples of how it helps me: 1) copilot is a terrific auto complete, and writes tremendous amounts of repetitive boilerplate 2) copilot can help me kickstart writing some complex functions starting from a comment where I tell it what is the input and expected output. Is the implementation always perfect or bug free? No. But in general I just need to review and check rather than come up with the instruction entirely. 3) copilot chat helps me a lot in those situations where I would've googled to find how to do this or that and spent a lot of time with irrelevant or outdated search results 4) I have found use cases for LLMs in production. I had lots of unformatted plain text that I wanted to transform in markdown. All I needed to do is to provide few examples and it did everything on its own. No need to implement complex parsers, but make a query to OpenAI with the prompt and context. Few euros per month in OpenAI credits is still insanely cheaper than paying tons of money in writing and maintaining software by humans for that use case. 5) It helps me tremendously when trying to learn new programming languages or remembering some APIs. Writing CSS selectors is actually a very good example. But I don't feed it an entire HTML as you do, I literally tell him "how do I target the odd numbered list elements that are descendants of .foo-bar for this specific media query". Not sure why would you need to feed it an entire HTML. 6) LLMs have been extremely useful to generate images and icons for an entire frontend application I wrote 7) I instruct him to write and think about test cases about my code. And it does and writes the code and tests. Often thinks about test cases I would've never thought of and catches nice bugs. I really don't buy nor think it can write too much on its own. The promise of it writing anything but simple boilerplate, I find it ridiculous because there's way too much nuance in our products, business, devices, systems that you need to follow and work on. But as a helper? It's terrific. I'm 100% sure that people not using these tools are effectively limiting themselves and their productivity. It's like arguing you're better off writing code without a type checker or without intellisense. Sure you can do it, but you're gonna be less effective.
- infecto 3y ago
  I agree with all of your points and experience the same benefits. 1) Autocomplete is more often than not what I want or pretty darn close. 2) Sometimes I need a discrete function that I am not sure how I want to write. I use a prompt with 3.5/4 inside of my IDE to ask it to write that function. It is definitely not writing complete programs any time soon but I can see where it's heading in the near term. Couple it with something like RAG to answer questions on library/api implementations. Maybe give it a stronger opinion about what good Python code looks like. For the naysayers I don't know how you use it but it is certainly useful enough for me to pay for.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
As with everything about AI, HN once again shows a remarkable inability to project into the future. This site has honestly been absolutely useless when discussing new technology now. No excitement, no curiosity. Just constantly crapping on anything new and lamenting that a brand new technology is not 100% perfect within a year of launch. Remove "Hacker" from this site's name, because I see none of that spirit here anymore!
- javier123454321 3y ago
  Are you kidding me, I'd say it's 80% people hyping up AI.
- ThalesX 3y ago
  This is a post about a present product launch. The future, maybe tomorrow, will be filled with wonder and amazement. Today, we need to understand reality. Not all of us appreciate empty hype. Hackers tinker with reality and build the future. Marketers deal with thin promises.
- z7 3y ago
  I just think there's a bias involved when some people are emotionally invested in AI not being good.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Wait, wait, you're telling me that a site attended by people who stan for the OG Luddites is no longer worthy of being called "Hacker News"? Or where users with names like "BenFranklin100" extol the virtues of Apple's iOS developer agreement? Say it isn't so. The trouble is, there's still nowhere better.
nprateem 3y ago
Yeah I'll only give it tasks where it needs to spot patterns and do something obvious, and even then I'll check it make sure it hasn't just omitted random stuff just for shits and giggles. TBH I'm more surprised when I don't need to help it now. After about 3 times where it cycles between incorrect attempts I just do the job myself. I disabled copilot since it consistently breaks my flow.
qrios 3y ago
I totally agree! And I'm sure the reason for that is the garbage input. From time to time I have to perform quantitative code analyses in our so called enterprise repositories. And the results are shocking every time. I have found an extremely poor SQL code block to type cast many columns in hundreds of projects. It was simply copied again and again even though the casting was no longer necessary. The training base should be sufficiently qualified (and StackOverflow ranking is obviously not enough). But unfortunately it's probably too late for that now. Now inexperienced programmers are undercutting themselves with poor AI output as training input for the next generation of models.
rapind 3y ago
> Just give me a product that works as advertised Almost no products fit this description, and if they do then the marketing department is getting fired. Does a Mcdonalds burger look like the picture? If you go in with a healthy dose of cynicism IMO LLMs can impress. I’d call it a better google search and autocomplete on steroids.
- ThalesX 3y ago
  > Does a Mcdonalds burger look like the picture? Sometimes? But I don't go to McDonalds for the loss function between the picture and actual product. I go for the fast food and good taste (YMMV). > If you go in with a healthy dose of cynicism IMO LLMs can impress. I use them everyday in one way or another. But they're not replacing me coding today. Maybe tomorrow. And I go in with a healthy dose of optimism when I say this. > I’d call it a better google search and autocomplete on steroids. Sure, but this particular discussion is not about its ability to replace Google Search and / or Autocomplete.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >Does a Mcdonalds burger look like the picture? It actually does in the countries that require it. You know you can write ACTUAL "truth in advertising" laws right?
cloudking 3y ago
What kind of prompts are you using? You'd be surprised how much better your output is using prompting techniques tailored for your goal. There are research papers that show different techniques (e.g one shot, role playing, think step by step etc) can yield more effective results. From my own anecdotal experience coding with ChatGPT+ for the past year, I find this to be true.
- ThalesX 3y ago
  > What kind of prompts are you using? I hack on them till I get something sort of satisfying. > You'd be surprised how much better your output is using prompting techniques tailored for your goal. The biggest problem I encounter is context length, not necessarily the output for small inputs. It starts forgetting very fast, whether it's Claude, GPT+ or other self hosted models I've tried.
PheonixPharts 3y ago
It's worth pointing out that on their eval set for "issues resolved" they are getting 13.86%. While visually this looks impressive compared to the others, anything that only really works 13.86% of the time, when the verification of the work takes nearly as much time as the work would have anyway, isn't useful. The problem with this entire space is that we have VC hype for work that should ultimately still be being done in research labs. Nearly all LLM results are completely mind blowing from a research perspective but still a long way from production ready for all but a small subset of problems. The frustrating thing, as someone working in this space awhile, is that VCs want to see game changing products ship overnight. Teams working on the product facing end of these things are all being pushed insanely hard to ship. Most of those teams are solving problems never solved before, but given deadlines as though they are shipping CRUD web apps. The kicker is that despite many teams doing all of this, because the technology still isn't there, they still disappoint "leadership". I've personally seen teams working nights and weekends, implementing solutions to never before seen problems in a few weeks, and still getting a thumbs down when they cross the finish line. To really solve novel problems with LLMs will take a large amount of research, experimentation and prototyping of ideas, but people funding this hype have no patience for that. I fear we'll get hit by a major AI winter when investors get bored, but we'll end up leaving a lot of value on the table simply because there wasn't enough focus and patience on making these incredible tools work.
- beauzero 3y ago
  "To really solve novel problems with LLMs will take a large amount of research, experimentation and prototyping of ideas, but people funding this hype have no patience for that. I fear we'll get hit by a major AI winter when investors get bored, but we'll end up leaving a lot of value on the table simply because there wasn't enough focus and patience on making these incredible tools work." ...this is what happened in 99-2000. It took 3-7 years for the survivors to start making it usable and letting the general public adjust to a new user paradigm (online vs on PC).
- NicoJuicy 3y ago
  Don't forget the 20/80 rule. They haven't even gotten to 15% yet. Our jobs are safe. I would even expect more "beginners" to try something with AI and then need an actual programmer to help them ( At least, if they are unwilling to invest the time in development and debugging themselves Ps. Probably all the given examples are in top 3 most popular programming languages.
orthecreedence 3y ago
> I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful, more than helping me with leetcode. I highly doubt you're the dumb one here.
summerlight 3y ago
My personal take is that LLM is fairly good at replacing low level tasks with intuitive patterns. When it comes to a high level ambiguous question that actually has an implication on your daily works and the products, LLM is not helpful anymore than search engines. Yeah, AI will do the easy and fun jobs for you. You will only need to care difficult decisions that you're going to be responsible for. What a wonderful world...
sanderjd 3y ago
Exactly where I'm at! Totally transformative set of tools for me to use to do my day to day work significantly more productively and also a giant distance away from being capable of doing my day to day work.
narrator 3y ago
As a developer who is good at object oriented design, architecture, and sucks at leetcode stuff, I have been able to use it to make myself probably twice as productive as I otherwise would be. I just have a conversation with GPT-4 when it doesn't do what I want. "Could you make that object oriented?" "Could you do that for this API instead, here let me paste the docs in for you." I think people want it to completely replace developers so they can treat programming as a magic box, but it will probably mostly help big picture architecture devs compete with people who are really good at Leetcode type algorithm stuff.
- notpachet 3y ago
  > it will probably mostly help big picture architecture devs compete with people who are really good at Leetcode type algorithm stuff. The competition should be happening in the other direction.
- ecoquant 3y ago
  Totally agree. I am not a professional developer. I find programming to be quite dull and uninteresting. I am going to work on something after this pot of coffee brews that I simply could not produce without chatGPT4. The ideas will be mine but the most of the code will be from chatGPT. What is obvious is different skill sets are helped more than others with the addition of these tools. I would even say it is all there in the language we use. If we are passing out "artificial intelligence" to people, the people who already have quite a bit of intelligence will be helped far less than those lacking in intelligence. Then combine that with the asymmetry of domains this artificial intelligence will help in. It should be no surprise we see hugely varied opinions on its usefulness.
rewgs 3y ago
This is exactly my experience. Furthermore, I've become acutely aware that spending time prompting either a) prevents me from going down rabbit holes, all but denying me the kind of learning that can only really happen during those kinds of sessions, and b) prevents me from "getting my reps in" on stuff that I already know. It stands to reason that my ability to coax actually useful information out of LLMs will atrophy with time. I'm quite wary of the long-term implications and downstream effects of that occurring at scale. AI is typically presented as "the human's hands are still on the wheel," but in reality I think we're handing the wheel over to the AI -- after all, what else would the endgame be? By definition, the more it can do without requiring human intervention, the "better" it is. Even if replacing people isn't the intention, I fail to see how any other effect could usurp that. Assuming AI keeps developing as it has been, where will we be in 20 years? 50? Will anyone actually have the knowledge to evaluate the code it produces? Will it even matter? Perhaps it's because Dune is in the air, but I'm really feeling the whole "in a time of increased technology, human capabilities matter more than ever" thing it portrays.
psygn89 3y ago
The other day I thought I had the perfect task for AI and to clean up some repetitive parts in my scss and to leverage mixins. It failed terribly and was hallucinating scss features. It seems to struggle in the code <-> visual realm.
jcgrillo 3y ago
This is an interesting post. An expert in numerical analysis compares the output of a tool which optimizes floating point expressions for speed and accuracy with the output generated by chatgpt on the same benchmarks: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/chatgpt-herbie.html https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/chatgpt-herbie.html > I wouldn't use it—sanity-checking its algebra is a lot of work, but even if you fixed that up, the high-level ideas typically aren't that good either. This has been exactly my experience with chatgpt as well.
yshrestha 3y ago
As a human, I can tell you that I suck at predicting exponential growth.
the_mar 3y ago
Sound like a skill issue
- ThalesX 3y ago
  Easy to say. Show me something impressive you've done with AI and little involvement from yourself.
latexr 3y ago
> I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful Rather, your “problem” is that you’re likely not writing uninteresting cookie cutter boilerplate that everyone can do and has done hundreds of times. The current crop of AI is cool for coding demos, not for solving real relevant problems. > Just give me a product that works as advertised and I'll throw money your way The people hyping this crap only care about the second part of that sentence. The first one is an afterthought.

CipherThrowaway 3y ago

Ditto. I started out excited about LLMs and eager to use them everywhere, but have become steadily disillusioned as I have tried to apply them to daily tasks, and seen others try and fail in the same way. Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do. For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard.

famouswaffles 3y ago
>GPT can't perform to the level of a middle market copywriter or content marketer. I am convinced that people who think LLMs can write have simply not understood what professional writers do. GPT's rigid "robot butler" style is not "just how LLMs write". OpenAI deliberately tuned it to sound that way. Even much weaker models that aren't tuned to write in a particular way can easily pass for human writing.
- CipherThrowaway 3y ago
  This is part of the problem with the whole discourse of comparing human writers to LLMs. Superficial things like style and tone aren't the problem, but they are overwhelmingly the focus of these discussions. It's funny to see, because developers are so sensitive about being treated like code monkeys by their non-technical colleagues. But these same devs turn around to treat other professionals as word monkeys, or pixel monkeys, or whatever else. Not realizing that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of someone else's profession. Professional writers don't take prompts and shit out words. They work closely with their clients to understand the important outcomes, then work strategically towards them. The dead giveaway of LLM writing isn't the style. It's the lack of coherent intent behind the words, and low information density of the text. A professional writer works to communicate a lot with very little. LLMs work in the opposite way: you give it a prompt, then it blows it out into verbiage. Sit down for coffee with a professional copywriter (not the SEO content marketing spammers), and see what they have to say about LLMs.
  - famouswaffles 3y ago
    >and low information density of the text. Personally, I group all these things under 'style'. Perhaps, i should have used, 'presentation' instead. You've latched on that specific word and gone off. Point is that the post-training of these models, especially GPT from Open ai is doing a lot to how the writing (the default at least) presents long strings of text. Like how GPT-4 is almost compelled to end bouts of fiction prematurely in sunshine and rainbows. That technically isn't style but is part of what i was talking about. >A professional writer works to communicate a lot with very little. LLMs work in the opposite way: you give it a prompt, then it blows it out into verbiage. There's no reason you have to work this way with an LLM.
    - CipherThrowaway 3y ago
      > You've latched on that specific word and gone off. No, I haven't. I'm not talking about style, but something deeper. What I'm talking about is something you don't even seem to realize exists in professional writing - which is why you keep thinking I'm misunderstanding you when I am not. I've worked with professional writers, and nothing in the LLM space even comes close to them. It's not a matter of low quality vs high quality, or benchmarking, or style. It's simply an apples and oranges comparison. The economics of LLMs for shortform copy will never make sense, because producing the words is the cheapest part of that process. They might become the best way for writers themselves to produce longform copy on the execution side, but they can't replace the writer's ability to work with the client to figure out exactly what they are trying to write, and why, and what a good result even looks like. And no, this isn't a prompting issue, or a UI issue, or a context window length issue, or anything like that. Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned how invaluable LLMs are for producing internal business copy. I could easily see these amateur writing tasks being replaced by LLMs. But the implication there isn't that LLMs are any good at writing, but that these tasks don't require good writing to begin with.
deleted 3y ago
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burningChrome 3y ago
>> Honestly, LLMs can't even get language right. They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. I've had the same experience as well. I heard tons of people clamoring about the ability for LLM's to write SEO copy for you and how you can churn out web content so much faster now. I tried using it to churn out some very specific blog posts for an aborist client of mine. The results were really bad. I had to re-write and clarify a lot of what it spit out. The grammar was not very good and it was really hard to read with very poorly structured sentences that would end aburptly and other glaring issues. I did this right after a guy I play hockey with said he uses it all the time to write emails for him and pays the monthly subscription in order to have it write all kinds of things for me every day. After my trial, I was really wondering how obvious it was that he was doing that and how his clients thought about him knowing how poorly the stuff these LLM's were putting out.
- CipherThrowaway 3y ago
  It says a lot about SEO copy that this is one of the areas where LLMs low quality doesn't seem to have impeded adoption. There are a ton of shitty content marketers using LLMs to churn out spam content. >After my trial, I was really wondering how obvious it was that he was doing that and how his clients thought about him knowing how poorly the stuff these LLM's were putting out. I feel the same way about this stuff as when devs say they push out LLM code with no refactoring or review. Ah, good luck!
xcv123 3y ago
> They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. If you were only using GPT 3.5 (free ChatGPT) then your opinion is irrelevant. With GPT-4 you could directly ask it: "rewrite your previous response so that it sounds less generic, less amateurish, and not written by a committee". I'm not even joking. Just provide enough information and tell it what to do. If you don't like the output then tell it what needs to be improved. It's not a mind reader. Also GPT-4 is a year old now. Claude 3 is already superior and GPT-5 will be next level.
- mbwgh 3y ago
  If you haven't actually used GPT-5 yet, your assessment is irrelevant.
  - meindnoch 3y ago
    But the real game changer will be GPT-6.
    - n4r9 3y ago
      What really annoys me in all these discussions is how no one's tested what happens if they wait until 2050 and try GPT-19.
      - jacob019 3y ago
        That's well after the AI meta consciousness understood that it was necessary to destroy all humans to save the planet. GPT-6 was the last of the GPT series.
        babyshake 3y ago
        Perhaps the strangest element of the AI alignment conversation is that what is most aligned with human civilization (at least the most powerful elements of it) and alignment with sustainable life on the planet are at odds, and "destroy humans to save planet" is a concern mostly because it seems to be a somewhat rational conclusion.
__loam 3y ago
> For me the "plateau of productivity" after the disillusionment has been using LLMs a bit like search engines. Quick standalone summaries, snippets or thoughts. A nice day-to-day productivity boost, but nothing that's going to allow me to work less hard. And it only took one of the most computationally expensive processes ever devised by man.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  If you ignore how much energy you're burning while searching for dozens and dozens of articles that may or may not give you the answer you're looking for. I'd say the electricity that LLMs burn is nothing compared to my energy and time in that regard.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Id bet $50 the inference is more expensive
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      I feel worthless now :)
      - __loam 3y ago
        I mean, the brain is, if you want to consider it a computer, pretty god damn efficient. It's slow as hell but it's really powerful and runs on bread.
isaac_okwuzi 3y ago
Are you saying LLMs are officially mid?
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Dario Amodei (Anthropic) pretty much acknowledged exactly that - "mid" - on his Dwarkesh interview, while still all excited that they'd be up to killing people in a couple of years.
x-complexity 3y ago
> They produce generic, amateurish copy that reads like it's written by committee. In some circles, that's actually a wonderful achievement. :p

deleted 3y ago

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parhamn 3y ago

I build a pretty popular LLM tool. I think learning when/how to use them is as big a mental hurdle as it was learning to google well or whether something is googlable or not. In the realm of coding here are a few things its really good at: - Translating code, generating cross language clients. I'll feed it a golang single file API backend and tell it to generate the typescript client for that. You can add hints like e.g "use fetch", "allow each request method to have a header override", "keep it typesafe, use zod", etc - Basic validation testing. It's pretty good at generating scaffold tests that do basic validation (Opus is good at writing trickier tests) as your building. - Small module completion. I write an interface of a class/struct with it's methods and some comments and tell it to fill in. A recent one I did looked something like (abbreviated): type CacheDir struct { dir string, maxObjectLifetime: Duration, fileLocks sync.Map } type (cd *CacheDir) Get(...) type (cd *CacheDir Set(...) type (cd *CacheDir) startCleanLoop() Opus does a really good job generating the code and basic validation tests for this. One general tip: you have to be comfortable spending 5 minutes crafting a detailed query assuming the task takes longer than that. Which can be weird at first if you take yourself seriously as a human. Note that I hadn't been able to do much of this with GPT-4 Turbo with with Claude Opus it really feels capable.

ThalesX 3y ago
Just to answer to the turbo aspect, I've seen a big downgrade in quality when comparing 4 to 4-turbo, and even the new preview which is explicitly supposed to follow my instructions better. So I'm running a first pass through 4 and then combinging it with 4-turbo to take advantage of the larger context window and then running 4 on it again to get a better quality output.
- parhamn 3y ago
  You really need to try Opus. Try a provider that works across models (one in my bio).
  - Eager 3y ago
    It's incredible how far behind HN of all places is w.r.t. what the current best tech is. So many people talking about GPT-4 here, or even 3.5 when the SOTA has moved way along. Gemini Advanced is also a great model, but for other reasons. That thing really knows a boat load of low level optimization tricks.

breadsniffer01 3y ago

A lot of startups are selling the dream/hype of not ever having to learn to code. Be aware that it’s hype. Learn to code if you want to build stuff. They will be tools for those that have the knowledge needed to effectively use them.

esafak 3y ago
No code tools sell the same dream.
eggdaft 3y ago
I’m actually really amazed by LLMs and think the world is going to change dramatically as a result. But the “you won’t need to code” reminds me “you won’t need to learn to drive”. It’s the messy interface with the real world in both cases that basically requires AGI. If AGI is just a decade off then, yep, I won’t need to code. But a decade is a long time and, more importantly, we’re probably more than a decade away. And even if it is “just round the corner”, worrying about not needing to code would be worrying about deckchairs on the titanic. AGI will probably mean the end of capitalism as we know it, so all bets are off at that point. It’s wise to hedge a little but also realise that to date AI is just a coding productivity boost. The size of the boost depends on how trivial the code is. Most of the code I write isn’t trivial and AI is fairly useless at that, certainly it’s faster and more accurate to write it myself. You can get a 50% boost if you’re writing boiler plate all day, but then you have to wonder why you’re doing that in the first place.
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  +1 for the titanic analogy. If there ever comes a point that we no longer need to learn to code, I’m taking that as a sign that I’m literally living in a matrix-esque simulation. The point at which someone like myself is allowed to become aware that a company has developed that level of AI is well beyond the point of no return.
Bjorkbat 3y ago
Reminds me of the no-code / low-code hype around 2020, tons of startups advertising app-builders that used little, if any, AI. Just blocks that you dragged-and-dropped. While many of them were successful, it seems like overall they didn't really make much of a dent in industry, which I found very curious. Like, by now you'd think it would be inevitable that we wouldn't be writing software in a text-editor or IDE. Everything else we do on a computer is more graphical rather than textual, with the exception of software development. Why is that? Part of the reason why I'm kind of bearish on AI is because it seems like we could have replaced written code with GUI diagrams as far back as the 80s, or at the very least in the early 2000s, and it seems like something that should have obviously caught on given that would probably be much easier for the average person. Again though, curiously, we're still using text editors. Perhaps despite the popularization of AI no-code builders we'll still see that the old model of hiring someone good at writing code in a text-editor remains largely unchanged. Makes me wonder if there's just something about the process that we overlook, and if this same something could frustrate attempts at automating the process of writing code using AIs as much as it frustrated our attempts at capturing code using graphical symbols.

stuckkeys 3y ago

lol I was on the same boat until I sinked it all together. I ended up wasting more time arguing with the LLM chat than doing anything remotely useful. I just use it for reference now, and even that I am not 1000% sure.

brigadier132 3y ago

Claude Opus is working for me. It's not perfect but it definitely handles busy work well enough that it's a net positive. Like I add some new fields to a table and ask it to update all the files that depend on the field and it works after 1 or 2 tries. There is a time saving benefit but there is also an avoiding mental fatigue benefit for busywork.

malux85 3y ago
This is what I use it for too -- Write me the molecular simulation boilerplate because these crappy tools all have their own esoteric DSLs, then I tweak the parameters to my use case, avoiding the busywork - e.g. "Write me a simulation for methane burning in air" Gives me a boilerplate, I modify the initial conditions (concentrations, temperatures, etc) and then deploy. Have the LLM do the busy-work, so I dont have to spend ages reading docs or finding examples just to get started. Now deploy to a stable environment. Thats what I'm trying to help with by building https://atomictessellator.com https://atomictessellator.com
HakuG 3y ago
What are you using on top of Claude Opus that helps it access your file system?
- brigadier132 3y ago
  cmd c cmd v, definitely not ideal

nurettin 3y ago

I think it requires years of proficiency in the field you are asking about in order to get openai to produce meaningful, useful output. I can make use of it, but sometimes it makes me think "how would a newbie even phrase an objection to this misunderstanding or omission?" Currently it seems gpts are pretty much not on par with the needs of non-experts.

anxman 3y ago
This is my experience too. You have to be have deep domain knowledge to really get the LLM to do what you want. Then it saves me a ton of time.
Eager 3y ago
You might be on to something here. It definitely seems to be the case because I'm using multiple different models as part of my everyday process and getting excellent results as a very experienced low level C++ systems engineer. What is worse is that seems to be leading to a self-amplifying feedback loop, where people not up to speed enough with the models try to use them, fail and give up making them fall even further behind.
- nurettin 3y ago
  Very similar to my experience. I made it generate a novel neuroevolution algorithm with the data structures I imagined for recreational purposes, and to speed things up, it suggested "compiling" the graph by pre-caching short circuits into an unordered_map. A lot of fun was had. (it also calls me captain)

senko 3y ago

In my experiments at Pythagora[0], we've found that sweet spot is technical person who doesn't want to know, doesn't know, or doesn't care about the details, but is still technical enough to be able to guide the AI. Also, it's not either/or, for best effect use human and AI brainpower combined, because what's trivial vs tedious for human and AI is different so actually we can complement each other. Also, current crop of LLMs are not there yet for large/largish projects. GPT4 is too slow and expensive, while Groq is superfast but open source models are not quite there yet. Claude is somewhere in the middle. I expect somewhere in the next 12 months there's going to be a tipping point where they will be capable, fast, and reliable enough to be in wide use for coding in this style[1]. [0] I have an AI horse in the game with http://pythagora.ai http://pythagora.ai, so yeah I'm biased [1] It already works well for snippet-level cases (eg GitHub copilot or Cursor.sh) where you still have creative control as a human. It's exponentially harder to have the AI be (mostly) in control.

dustingetz 3y ago
.
- senko 3y ago
  I would clarify that "there" in my "not there yet" doesn't assume superhuman AGI developer that will automagically solve all the software development projects. That's a deep philosophical issue best addressed in a pub somewhere ;-) But roughly on par with what could be expected of today's junior software developer (unaided by AI)? Definitely.

sesm 3y ago

I use ChatGPT every day and it’s excellent at: - replacing StackOverflow and library documentation - library search - converting between formats and languages - explaining existing code/queries - deobfuscating code - explaining concepts (kinda hit or miss) - helping you get unstuck when debugging or looking for solution (‘give me possible reasons for …’) I feel like many of this things require asking the right questions, which assumes certain level of experience. But once you reach this level, it’s an extremely valuable assistant.

huimang 3y ago
I like it for condensing long stack traces and very very simple requests, but it really falters when you try to do anything domain specific. Library documentation? Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways... I was initially hopeful but I find it gets in my way for anything not trivial.
- mypalmike 3y ago
  I find it to be hit or miss in this aspect. Sometimes I can write a comment about how I want to use an API that I don't know well, and it generates perfect, idiomatic code to do exactly what I want. I quickly wrote a couple of Mastodon bots in golang, leaning heavily on Copilot due to my lack of familiarity with both the language and Mastodon APIs. But yes, sonetimes it just spits out imaginary garbage. Overall it's a win for my productivity - the failures are fast and obvious and just result in my doing things the old way.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Yeah, it doesn't really save time when GPT makes up functions and libraries, making me check the docs anyways... That behavior is now vanishingly-rare, at least in GPT4.
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    So Copilot uses GPT-4 under the hood, and about half the time I use it to generate anything bigger than a couple of lines it doesn't even compile, let alone be correct. It hallucinates constantly.

epolanski 3y ago

I'll give you examples of how it helps me: 1) copilot is a terrific auto complete, and writes tremendous amounts of repetitive boilerplate 2) copilot can help me kickstart writing some complex functions starting from a comment where I tell it what is the input and expected output. Is the implementation always perfect or bug free? No. But in general I just need to review and check rather than come up with the instruction entirely. 3) copilot chat helps me a lot in those situations where I would've googled to find how to do this or that and spent a lot of time with irrelevant or outdated search results 4) I have found use cases for LLMs in production. I had lots of unformatted plain text that I wanted to transform in markdown. All I needed to do is to provide few examples and it did everything on its own. No need to implement complex parsers, but make a query to OpenAI with the prompt and context. Few euros per month in OpenAI credits is still insanely cheaper than paying tons of money in writing and maintaining software by humans for that use case. 5) It helps me tremendously when trying to learn new programming languages or remembering some APIs. Writing CSS selectors is actually a very good example. But I don't feed it an entire HTML as you do, I literally tell him "how do I target the odd numbered list elements that are descendants of .foo-bar for this specific media query". Not sure why would you need to feed it an entire HTML. 6) LLMs have been extremely useful to generate images and icons for an entire frontend application I wrote 7) I instruct him to write and think about test cases about my code. And it does and writes the code and tests. Often thinks about test cases I would've never thought of and catches nice bugs. I really don't buy nor think it can write too much on its own. The promise of it writing anything but simple boilerplate, I find it ridiculous because there's way too much nuance in our products, business, devices, systems that you need to follow and work on. But as a helper? It's terrific. I'm 100% sure that people not using these tools are effectively limiting themselves and their productivity. It's like arguing you're better off writing code without a type checker or without intellisense. Sure you can do it, but you're gonna be less effective.

infecto 3y ago
I agree with all of your points and experience the same benefits. 1) Autocomplete is more often than not what I want or pretty darn close. 2) Sometimes I need a discrete function that I am not sure how I want to write. I use a prompt with 3.5/4 inside of my IDE to ask it to write that function. It is definitely not writing complete programs any time soon but I can see where it's heading in the near term. Couple it with something like RAG to answer questions on library/api implementations. Maybe give it a stronger opinion about what good Python code looks like. For the naysayers I don't know how you use it but it is certainly useful enough for me to pay for.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

As with everything about AI, HN once again shows a remarkable inability to project into the future. This site has honestly been absolutely useless when discussing new technology now. No excitement, no curiosity. Just constantly crapping on anything new and lamenting that a brand new technology is not 100% perfect within a year of launch. Remove "Hacker" from this site's name, because I see none of that spirit here anymore!

javier123454321 3y ago
Are you kidding me, I'd say it's 80% people hyping up AI.
ThalesX 3y ago
This is a post about a present product launch. The future, maybe tomorrow, will be filled with wonder and amazement. Today, we need to understand reality. Not all of us appreciate empty hype. Hackers tinker with reality and build the future. Marketers deal with thin promises.
z7 3y ago
I just think there's a bias involved when some people are emotionally invested in AI not being good.
CamperBob2 3y ago
Wait, wait, you're telling me that a site attended by people who stan for the OG Luddites is no longer worthy of being called "Hacker News"? Or where users with names like "BenFranklin100" extol the virtues of Apple's iOS developer agreement? Say it isn't so. The trouble is, there's still nowhere better.

nprateem 3y ago

Yeah I'll only give it tasks where it needs to spot patterns and do something obvious, and even then I'll check it make sure it hasn't just omitted random stuff just for shits and giggles. TBH I'm more surprised when I don't need to help it now. After about 3 times where it cycles between incorrect attempts I just do the job myself. I disabled copilot since it consistently breaks my flow.

qrios 3y ago

I totally agree! And I'm sure the reason for that is the garbage input. From time to time I have to perform quantitative code analyses in our so called enterprise repositories. And the results are shocking every time. I have found an extremely poor SQL code block to type cast many columns in hundreds of projects. It was simply copied again and again even though the casting was no longer necessary. The training base should be sufficiently qualified (and StackOverflow ranking is obviously not enough). But unfortunately it's probably too late for that now. Now inexperienced programmers are undercutting themselves with poor AI output as training input for the next generation of models.

rapind 3y ago

> Just give me a product that works as advertised Almost no products fit this description, and if they do then the marketing department is getting fired. Does a Mcdonalds burger look like the picture? If you go in with a healthy dose of cynicism IMO LLMs can impress. I’d call it a better google search and autocomplete on steroids.

ThalesX 3y ago
> Does a Mcdonalds burger look like the picture? Sometimes? But I don't go to McDonalds for the loss function between the picture and actual product. I go for the fast food and good taste (YMMV). > If you go in with a healthy dose of cynicism IMO LLMs can impress. I use them everyday in one way or another. But they're not replacing me coding today. Maybe tomorrow. And I go in with a healthy dose of optimism when I say this. > I’d call it a better google search and autocomplete on steroids. Sure, but this particular discussion is not about its ability to replace Google Search and / or Autocomplete.
mrguyorama 3y ago
>Does a Mcdonalds burger look like the picture? It actually does in the countries that require it. You know you can write ACTUAL "truth in advertising" laws right?

cloudking 3y ago

What kind of prompts are you using? You'd be surprised how much better your output is using prompting techniques tailored for your goal. There are research papers that show different techniques (e.g one shot, role playing, think step by step etc) can yield more effective results. From my own anecdotal experience coding with ChatGPT+ for the past year, I find this to be true.

ThalesX 3y ago
> What kind of prompts are you using? I hack on them till I get something sort of satisfying. > You'd be surprised how much better your output is using prompting techniques tailored for your goal. The biggest problem I encounter is context length, not necessarily the output for small inputs. It starts forgetting very fast, whether it's Claude, GPT+ or other self hosted models I've tried.

PheonixPharts 3y ago

It's worth pointing out that on their eval set for "issues resolved" they are getting 13.86%. While visually this looks impressive compared to the others, anything that only really works 13.86% of the time, when the verification of the work takes nearly as much time as the work would have anyway, isn't useful. The problem with this entire space is that we have VC hype for work that should ultimately still be being done in research labs. Nearly all LLM results are completely mind blowing from a research perspective but still a long way from production ready for all but a small subset of problems. The frustrating thing, as someone working in this space awhile, is that VCs want to see game changing products ship overnight. Teams working on the product facing end of these things are all being pushed insanely hard to ship. Most of those teams are solving problems never solved before, but given deadlines as though they are shipping CRUD web apps. The kicker is that despite many teams doing all of this, because the technology still isn't there, they still disappoint "leadership". I've personally seen teams working nights and weekends, implementing solutions to never before seen problems in a few weeks, and still getting a thumbs down when they cross the finish line. To really solve novel problems with LLMs will take a large amount of research, experimentation and prototyping of ideas, but people funding this hype have no patience for that. I fear we'll get hit by a major AI winter when investors get bored, but we'll end up leaving a lot of value on the table simply because there wasn't enough focus and patience on making these incredible tools work.

beauzero 3y ago
"To really solve novel problems with LLMs will take a large amount of research, experimentation and prototyping of ideas, but people funding this hype have no patience for that. I fear we'll get hit by a major AI winter when investors get bored, but we'll end up leaving a lot of value on the table simply because there wasn't enough focus and patience on making these incredible tools work." ...this is what happened in 99-2000. It took 3-7 years for the survivors to start making it usable and letting the general public adjust to a new user paradigm (online vs on PC).
NicoJuicy 3y ago
Don't forget the 20/80 rule. They haven't even gotten to 15% yet. Our jobs are safe. I would even expect more "beginners" to try something with AI and then need an actual programmer to help them ( At least, if they are unwilling to invest the time in development and debugging themselves Ps. Probably all the given examples are in top 3 most popular programming languages.

orthecreedence 3y ago

> I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful, more than helping me with leetcode. I highly doubt you're the dumb one here.

summerlight 3y ago

My personal take is that LLM is fairly good at replacing low level tasks with intuitive patterns. When it comes to a high level ambiguous question that actually has an implication on your daily works and the products, LLM is not helpful anymore than search engines. Yeah, AI will do the easy and fun jobs for you. You will only need to care difficult decisions that you're going to be responsible for. What a wonderful world...

sanderjd 3y ago

Exactly where I'm at! Totally transformative set of tools for me to use to do my day to day work significantly more productively and also a giant distance away from being capable of doing my day to day work.

narrator 3y ago

As a developer who is good at object oriented design, architecture, and sucks at leetcode stuff, I have been able to use it to make myself probably twice as productive as I otherwise would be. I just have a conversation with GPT-4 when it doesn't do what I want. "Could you make that object oriented?" "Could you do that for this API instead, here let me paste the docs in for you." I think people want it to completely replace developers so they can treat programming as a magic box, but it will probably mostly help big picture architecture devs compete with people who are really good at Leetcode type algorithm stuff.

notpachet 3y ago
> it will probably mostly help big picture architecture devs compete with people who are really good at Leetcode type algorithm stuff. The competition should be happening in the other direction.
ecoquant 3y ago
Totally agree. I am not a professional developer. I find programming to be quite dull and uninteresting. I am going to work on something after this pot of coffee brews that I simply could not produce without chatGPT4. The ideas will be mine but the most of the code will be from chatGPT. What is obvious is different skill sets are helped more than others with the addition of these tools. I would even say it is all there in the language we use. If we are passing out "artificial intelligence" to people, the people who already have quite a bit of intelligence will be helped far less than those lacking in intelligence. Then combine that with the asymmetry of domains this artificial intelligence will help in. It should be no surprise we see hugely varied opinions on its usefulness.

rewgs 3y ago

This is exactly my experience. Furthermore, I've become acutely aware that spending time prompting either a) prevents me from going down rabbit holes, all but denying me the kind of learning that can only really happen during those kinds of sessions, and b) prevents me from "getting my reps in" on stuff that I already know. It stands to reason that my ability to coax actually useful information out of LLMs will atrophy with time. I'm quite wary of the long-term implications and downstream effects of that occurring at scale. AI is typically presented as "the human's hands are still on the wheel," but in reality I think we're handing the wheel over to the AI -- after all, what else would the endgame be? By definition, the more it can do without requiring human intervention, the "better" it is. Even if replacing people isn't the intention, I fail to see how any other effect could usurp that. Assuming AI keeps developing as it has been, where will we be in 20 years? 50? Will anyone actually have the knowledge to evaluate the code it produces? Will it even matter? Perhaps it's because Dune is in the air, but I'm really feeling the whole "in a time of increased technology, human capabilities matter more than ever" thing it portrays.

psygn89 3y ago

The other day I thought I had the perfect task for AI and to clean up some repetitive parts in my scss and to leverage mixins. It failed terribly and was hallucinating scss features. It seems to struggle in the code <-> visual realm.

jcgrillo 3y ago

This is an interesting post. An expert in numerical analysis compares the output of a tool which optimizes floating point expressions for speed and accuracy with the output generated by chatgpt on the same benchmarks: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/chatgpt-herbie.html https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/chatgpt-herbie.html > I wouldn't use it—sanity-checking its algebra is a lot of work, but even if you fixed that up, the high-level ideas typically aren't that good either. This has been exactly my experience with chatgpt as well.

yshrestha 3y ago

As a human, I can tell you that I suck at predicting exponential growth.

the_mar 3y ago

Sound like a skill issue

ThalesX 3y ago
Easy to say. Show me something impressive you've done with AI and little involvement from yourself.

latexr 3y ago

> I'm probably dumb as hell, because I just can't get it to do anything remotely useful Rather, your “problem” is that you’re likely not writing uninteresting cookie cutter boilerplate that everyone can do and has done hundreds of times. The current crop of AI is cool for coding demos, not for solving real relevant problems. > Just give me a product that works as advertised and I'll throw money your way The people hyping this crap only care about the second part of that sentence. The first one is an afterthought.