8 ms·

AI programming tools should be added to the Joel Test

21 points by jtwaleson 3y ago

2genders3614 3y ago
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SEXMCNIGGA6113 3y ago
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2genders41109 3y ago
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eternityforest 3y ago
Trying Codeium was like the difference between notepad and an IDE. Unfortunately, it overheats my laptop so I can't actually use it, and I primarily do support, I don't program enough at my job to justify paying for copilot. If the CPU use was lower, I don't see why I'd ever go without.
- weikju 3y ago
  I haven't used Codeium in a while, but I remember at some point in VSCodium it would also spike CPU usage until I turned off some features (was it Chat, or Search? something like that).
  - eternityforest 3y ago
    I'm surprised Codeium actually runs on VSCodium! I should definitely try disabling chat
    - weikju 3y ago
      in fact, functions that are disabled on VSCode (chat for example) if you turn off VSCode telemetry, work just fine on VSCodium even with all telemetry set to off. So I'd say it works better haha
xiwenc 3y ago
> Note that this is often not the same as "#9 - Do you use the best tools money can buy?" as blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. I do think AI fits #9. The fact that current AI tools are not meeting data security requirements are due to the market demands and maturity: - price needs to be low to attract adopters. - low price? These service providers will hoard data - data needs to be collected for training So i think long term, there will be more premium AI tools that “promise” to not collect your data. Perhaps self-hosted? Self hosting with AI is not attractive, at least not for consumers or small businesses.
- jtwaleson 3y ago
  Self-hosted is becoming more and more possible. For the first time in forever I think it makes sense to buy a beefy personal computer.
- simonw 3y ago
  OpenAI have paid plans that promise not to collect your data already. I think Anthropic do as well. People seem not to trust companies which make these promises, which is unfortunate for the industry.
anothernewdude 3y ago
I agree, but they should count negatively.
- deleted 3y ago
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jasonpeacock 3y ago
> There's plenty of things wrong with these tools: they are often wrong, are slow and the GPT4 ones are really expensive. So...why should they be included? I really worry about this "often wrong" part - you only know they are wrong if you already know what you're doing. Otherwise you end up trying to use hallucinated APIs & libraries, or produce code not better than copy & pasting StackOverflow answers (which is what the AI was trained on anyway).
- lukewilliams 2y ago
  Over reliance is a major part of the issues. LLMs in other contexts help bottom performers a lot, but top performers get worse because they are lulled into trusting the AI's judgment. I've worked a good number of hours with Claude Opus and it has never produced non-compiling code (ChatGPT 4 does that for me), but it can create quite subtle bugs, which is missed by the "just make sure it compiles"-type comments in this thread.
- simonw 3y ago
  If an LLM hallucinates a method name you'll find out the moment you try and run the code. Code has a built-in form of easy fact checking, which makes it one of the most appropriate applications for LLMs. It's much harder to spot a hallucinated fact in a paragraph of prose than it is to spot a hallucinated API method. The skills you most need to develop in order to take advantage of LLM assisted programming are code reading, code review, manual and automated testing and being really good at thinking of edge-cases that might not be covered. It turns out these are important skills for being a great developer already - LLMs just force the issue on them a little more.
  - lambda 3y ago
    If the LLM hallucinates a Python package, someone else might notice that and sneak in a malicious version of that hallucinated package. Or if it hallucinates a method name, it might be in a code path that goes untested. How often are people using these tools to also write comprehensive test suites?
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
> blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. Why is AI treated very different than say cloud? Most companies don't have problem with putting all data in Github or AWS or Office 365, but lot of them freaks out if any AI can access the data. I don't think OpenAI/copilot enterprise plan T&C/privacy policy is very different than Github or AWS.
- centur 3y ago
  I think it has less to do with the fact of putting data somewhere, but with the way data is accessed. When you store something in S3 - you can encrypt it, in addition to built-in encryption. You have control (more or less) over your data in your cloud tenants and databases. Not with AI models trained on your data. You can't even extract\remove it or see how it's used. Literally - zero traceability and transparency. This is the problem, not the fact that it's not stored on your physical hardware. I suspect when any AI model will start using patents databases for training - it will be a watershed moment for what one can do with open data. Old regulations simply would not put up any meaningful fight against volume and quality of model hallucinations, that may become valuable and patentable inventions and improvements according to the same regulations.
- esafak 3y ago
  People freak out when their data is used to train AI models, leaking their private data. AI data is regularly mined, whereas cloud data is usually encrypted in transit and at rest.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    If companies are willing to break privacy policies for AI training, why not use cloud data for AI training. Sure office all 365 data would be great for building AI. Most encryption is either provider managed where they can easily look into data, or the customer also shares key with them(e.g. EC2 instance getting encrypted S3 data with key in EC2). I have never seen someone using AWS treating amazon as a threat.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
mellosouls 3y ago
Yeah I've thought this myself for a while; GPT-4 class assistance is now a standard tool for me. If a prospect client or company bans it, it's a hard no from me. I understand that might be too extreme a red line for some, but for me, life's too short to wait for laggards to catch up with the inevitable.
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JohnMakin 3y ago
Bing with Copilot is insanely good and initially I was having a tough time getting my slower teammates to adopt it for the more tedious tasks. I don’t really use it to do anything but tedious stuff and for searching for documentation that google will refuse to show anymore. and it provides sources so you can verify. It really does feel (to me) like the magic of google search’s majestic era, like 2010-2015. It just tends to give the correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate and can be poked and prodded in the right direction without a lot of work.
- laborcontract 3y ago
  Google getting rid of verbatim searches is an all time fumble for me. Prompt engineering a Google search to get it to find what you want is harder than getting gpt4 to talk about mature content.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    I'm still kinda pissed about that, personally. I wouldn't object to it doing fuzzy "Google Knows Best" searches for normies, but I really wish verbatim was still an option. On the other hand, I rarely use Google these days anyway.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    using " " to force the query still works, last I checked
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I'm not seeing correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate, myself. For engineering and physics questions I get confident answers that are off by several orders of magnitude, and the sources cited tend to be only tangentially related to the query and don't answer the question themselves. What kinds of questions are you asking?
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    Like the original author of this post sorta alluded to, treating it like a very junior assistant or pair programmer. Those kinds of questions. Questions I do not have time to trawl google for that are easily available knowledge. I don't expect it to be an expert - I want it to eliminate toil. It does do that.
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vbezhenar 3y ago
I must admit that Copilot usefulness for me is on the level of IDE autocomplete. I can write code in notepad.exe if necessary, but that's not productive and getting productivity hit is not nice for wellness. So if company will not allow me to use Copilot, that would be a negative factor from me.
SEXMCNIGGA6844 3y ago
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nicklecompte 3y ago
One quibble I have with this: the items on the Joel Test are all language-independent, even if you're using a minor language with poor presence on GitHub. But that's not the case with AI codegen. GPT-3.5 was downright terrible at F#, and though Bing+GPT-4 does seem a lot better I'm not sure it's actually good enough for professional F#. I also doubt AI codegen is useful for Scheme/Racket developers who create DSLs (and of course it's totally useless for proprietary languages). So I am not sure AI codegen fits with the other items on the test. In general I am concerned that LLMs will discourage innovation in programming language design - why write a better Python if GPT can just automate the tedium away?
- greggyb 3y ago
  There is a code-gen feature in a product I know of. The product has a proprietary language and the user base clamors for AI generation. Part of the suggestion process in the tool is to feed generated suggestions through the parser and a basic semantic validation before putting the suggestion in front of users. There is still no guarantee of correctness, but the code will parse and run thanks to this. They have to implement some limitations, because it becomes expensive to re-generate repeatedly. I believe the knowledge I gained was NDA, so I'm keeping it generic.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > I am concerned that LLMs will discourage innovation in programming language design - why write a better Python if GPT can just automate the tedium away? I don't think so negatively. My bet: innovation in programming language design will emerge that will make it a lot "less necessary/helpful" to use AIs. Just one example: Quite some programmers claim that AI take a lot of "tedium" from the programming away. But what if we could create programming languages that mostly get rid of this "tedium" (e.g. by using higher-level abstractions to abstract away the tedious, repetitive tasks)?
SEXMCNIGGA37105 3y ago
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MPSimmons 3y ago
One of the first things we did when GPT-4 became available was talk to our Azure rep and get access to the OpenAI models that they'd partnered with Microsoft to host in Azure. Now, we have our own private, not-datamined (so they claim, contractually) API endpoint and we use an OpenAI integration in VS Code[1] to connect to, allowing anyone in the company to use it to help them code. I also spun up an internal chat UI[2] to replace ChatGPT so people can feel comfortable discussing proprietary data with the LLM endpoint. The only thing that would make it more secure would be running inference engines internally, but I wouldn't have access to as good of models, and I'd need a _lot_ of hardware to match the speeds. [1] - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AndrewButson.vscode-openai https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AndrewBu... [2] - https://github.com/mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui https://github.com/mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui (legacy branch)
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coldtea 3y ago
I don't remember the Joel test being about "add the latest hype to your dev environment"
deleted 3y ago
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danjl 3y ago
The problem is not writing code. The problem is writing the right code and supporting it as the product evolves. AI tools result in programmers that know less about their code and therefore less able to support and less able to contribute to the direction of the product. Notice that almost all of the Joel test is about how to support code over time, not which editor to use.

21 points by jtwaleson 3y ago

2genders3614 3y ago

[flagged]

SEXMCNIGGA6113 3y ago

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2genders41109 3y ago

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eternityforest 3y ago

Trying Codeium was like the difference between notepad and an IDE. Unfortunately, it overheats my laptop so I can't actually use it, and I primarily do support, I don't program enough at my job to justify paying for copilot. If the CPU use was lower, I don't see why I'd ever go without.

weikju 3y ago
I haven't used Codeium in a while, but I remember at some point in VSCodium it would also spike CPU usage until I turned off some features (was it Chat, or Search? something like that).
- eternityforest 3y ago
  I'm surprised Codeium actually runs on VSCodium! I should definitely try disabling chat
  - weikju 3y ago
    in fact, functions that are disabled on VSCode (chat for example) if you turn off VSCode telemetry, work just fine on VSCodium even with all telemetry set to off. So I'd say it works better haha

xiwenc 3y ago

> Note that this is often not the same as "#9 - Do you use the best tools money can buy?" as blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. I do think AI fits #9. The fact that current AI tools are not meeting data security requirements are due to the market demands and maturity: - price needs to be low to attract adopters. - low price? These service providers will hoard data - data needs to be collected for training So i think long term, there will be more premium AI tools that “promise” to not collect your data. Perhaps self-hosted? Self hosting with AI is not attractive, at least not for consumers or small businesses.

jtwaleson 3y ago
Self-hosted is becoming more and more possible. For the first time in forever I think it makes sense to buy a beefy personal computer.
simonw 3y ago
OpenAI have paid plans that promise not to collect your data already. I think Anthropic do as well. People seem not to trust companies which make these promises, which is unfortunate for the industry.

anothernewdude 3y ago

I agree, but they should count negatively.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jasonpeacock 3y ago

> There's plenty of things wrong with these tools: they are often wrong, are slow and the GPT4 ones are really expensive. So...why should they be included? I really worry about this "often wrong" part - you only know they are wrong if you already know what you're doing. Otherwise you end up trying to use hallucinated APIs & libraries, or produce code not better than copy & pasting StackOverflow answers (which is what the AI was trained on anyway).

lukewilliams 2y ago
Over reliance is a major part of the issues. LLMs in other contexts help bottom performers a lot, but top performers get worse because they are lulled into trusting the AI's judgment. I've worked a good number of hours with Claude Opus and it has never produced non-compiling code (ChatGPT 4 does that for me), but it can create quite subtle bugs, which is missed by the "just make sure it compiles"-type comments in this thread.
simonw 3y ago
If an LLM hallucinates a method name you'll find out the moment you try and run the code. Code has a built-in form of easy fact checking, which makes it one of the most appropriate applications for LLMs. It's much harder to spot a hallucinated fact in a paragraph of prose than it is to spot a hallucinated API method. The skills you most need to develop in order to take advantage of LLM assisted programming are code reading, code review, manual and automated testing and being really good at thinking of edge-cases that might not be covered. It turns out these are important skills for being a great developer already - LLMs just force the issue on them a little more.
- lambda 3y ago
  If the LLM hallucinates a Python package, someone else might notice that and sneak in a malicious version of that hallucinated package. Or if it hallucinates a method name, it might be in a code path that goes untested. How often are people using these tools to also write comprehensive test suites?

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

> blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. Why is AI treated very different than say cloud? Most companies don't have problem with putting all data in Github or AWS or Office 365, but lot of them freaks out if any AI can access the data. I don't think OpenAI/copilot enterprise plan T&C/privacy policy is very different than Github or AWS.

centur 3y ago
I think it has less to do with the fact of putting data somewhere, but with the way data is accessed. When you store something in S3 - you can encrypt it, in addition to built-in encryption. You have control (more or less) over your data in your cloud tenants and databases. Not with AI models trained on your data. You can't even extract\remove it or see how it's used. Literally - zero traceability and transparency. This is the problem, not the fact that it's not stored on your physical hardware. I suspect when any AI model will start using patents databases for training - it will be a watershed moment for what one can do with open data. Old regulations simply would not put up any meaningful fight against volume and quality of model hallucinations, that may become valuable and patentable inventions and improvements according to the same regulations.
esafak 3y ago
People freak out when their data is used to train AI models, leaking their private data. AI data is regularly mined, whereas cloud data is usually encrypted in transit and at rest.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  If companies are willing to break privacy policies for AI training, why not use cloud data for AI training. Sure office all 365 data would be great for building AI. Most encryption is either provider managed where they can easily look into data, or the customer also shares key with them(e.g. EC2 instance getting encrypted S3 data with key in EC2). I have never seen someone using AWS treating amazon as a threat.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago

mellosouls 3y ago

Yeah I've thought this myself for a while; GPT-4 class assistance is now a standard tool for me. If a prospect client or company bans it, it's a hard no from me. I understand that might be too extreme a red line for some, but for me, life's too short to wait for laggards to catch up with the inevitable.

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JohnMakin 3y ago

Bing with Copilot is insanely good and initially I was having a tough time getting my slower teammates to adopt it for the more tedious tasks. I don’t really use it to do anything but tedious stuff and for searching for documentation that google will refuse to show anymore. and it provides sources so you can verify. It really does feel (to me) like the magic of google search’s majestic era, like 2010-2015. It just tends to give the correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate and can be poked and prodded in the right direction without a lot of work.

laborcontract 3y ago
Google getting rid of verbatim searches is an all time fumble for me. Prompt engineering a Google search to get it to find what you want is harder than getting gpt4 to talk about mature content.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  I'm still kinda pissed about that, personally. I wouldn't object to it doing fuzzy "Google Knows Best" searches for normies, but I really wish verbatim was still an option. On the other hand, I rarely use Google these days anyway.
- fragmede 3y ago
  using " " to force the query still works, last I checked
mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I'm not seeing correct answers at an extraordinarily high rate, myself. For engineering and physics questions I get confident answers that are off by several orders of magnitude, and the sources cited tend to be only tangentially related to the query and don't answer the question themselves. What kinds of questions are you asking?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  Like the original author of this post sorta alluded to, treating it like a very junior assistant or pair programmer. Those kinds of questions. Questions I do not have time to trawl google for that are easily available knowledge. I don't expect it to be an expert - I want it to eliminate toil. It does do that.

2genders17675 3y ago

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2genders13469 3y ago

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2genders3614 3y ago

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vbezhenar 3y ago

I must admit that Copilot usefulness for me is on the level of IDE autocomplete. I can write code in notepad.exe if necessary, but that's not productive and getting productivity hit is not nice for wellness. So if company will not allow me to use Copilot, that would be a negative factor from me.

SEXMCNIGGA6844 3y ago

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nicklecompte 3y ago

One quibble I have with this: the items on the Joel Test are all language-independent, even if you're using a minor language with poor presence on GitHub. But that's not the case with AI codegen. GPT-3.5 was downright terrible at F#, and though Bing+GPT-4 does seem a lot better I'm not sure it's actually good enough for professional F#. I also doubt AI codegen is useful for Scheme/Racket developers who create DSLs (and of course it's totally useless for proprietary languages). So I am not sure AI codegen fits with the other items on the test. In general I am concerned that LLMs will discourage innovation in programming language design - why write a better Python if GPT can just automate the tedium away?

greggyb 3y ago
There is a code-gen feature in a product I know of. The product has a proprietary language and the user base clamors for AI generation. Part of the suggestion process in the tool is to feed generated suggestions through the parser and a basic semantic validation before putting the suggestion in front of users. There is still no guarantee of correctness, but the code will parse and run thanks to this. They have to implement some limitations, because it becomes expensive to re-generate repeatedly. I believe the knowledge I gained was NDA, so I'm keeping it generic.
aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> I am concerned that LLMs will discourage innovation in programming language design - why write a better Python if GPT can just automate the tedium away? I don't think so negatively. My bet: innovation in programming language design will emerge that will make it a lot "less necessary/helpful" to use AIs. Just one example: Quite some programmers claim that AI take a lot of "tedium" from the programming away. But what if we could create programming languages that mostly get rid of this "tedium" (e.g. by using higher-level abstractions to abstract away the tedious, repetitive tasks)?

SEXMCNIGGA37105 3y ago

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MPSimmons 3y ago

One of the first things we did when GPT-4 became available was talk to our Azure rep and get access to the OpenAI models that they'd partnered with Microsoft to host in Azure. Now, we have our own private, not-datamined (so they claim, contractually) API endpoint and we use an OpenAI integration in VS Code[1] to connect to, allowing anyone in the company to use it to help them code. I also spun up an internal chat UI[2] to replace ChatGPT so people can feel comfortable discussing proprietary data with the LLM endpoint. The only thing that would make it more secure would be running inference engines internally, but I wouldn't have access to as good of models, and I'd need a _lot_ of hardware to match the speeds. [1] - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AndrewButson.vscode-openai https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AndrewBu... [2] - https://github.com/mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui https://github.com/mckaywrigley/chatbot-ui (legacy branch)

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coldtea 3y ago

I don't remember the Joel test being about "add the latest hype to your dev environment"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

danjl 3y ago

The problem is not writing code. The problem is writing the right code and supporting it as the product evolves. AI tools result in programmers that know less about their code and therefore less able to support and less able to contribute to the direction of the product. Notice that almost all of the Joel test is about how to support code over time, not which editor to use.