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I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is useful. Anyway, considering all these things

I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. Image generation was fun for a few weeks. Speech recognition is useful. Anyway, considering all these things can be done on device, where is the long term business prospect of which you speak?

LtWorf 2y ago
> Speech recognition is useful. Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's being said from the automatic subtitles. If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best performing language and all others are even worse.
- KoolKat23 2y ago
  Just today, I received a note from a gas technician, part handwritten, for the life of me I couldn't make out what he was saying, I asked ChatGPT and it surprisingly understood, rereading the original note I'm very sure it was correct.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  Sometimes speech-to-text machine learning models give very good results, however I think the key is that: 1. It's overwhelmingly more useful than the [no text] it was replacing, particularly for the deaf or if you want to search for keywords in a video. 2. When it fails, it tends to do so in ways that trigger human suspicion and oversight. Those aren't necessarily true of some of the things people are shoehorning LLMs into these days, which is why I'm a lost more pessimistic about that technology.
- tkgally 2y ago
  For some reason, YouTube is not using a very good STT system now. The lack of sentence punctuation is particularly annoying. Transcriptions by Whisper and Gemini 1.5 Pro are much better. From a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41199567#41201773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41199567#41201773 I expect that YouTube will up their transcription game soon, too.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    I've tried whisper too. I made this: https://codeberg.org/ltworf/srtgen https://codeberg.org/ltworf/srtgen Basically it's kinda useful to put time tags, but I need to manually fix each and every sentence. Sometimes I need to fix the time tags as well. I just spoke about youtube because it's more popular and easy to test.
WalterSear 2y ago
> I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. I've come to notice a correlation between contemporary AI optimism and having effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants.
- crystal_revenge 2y ago
  > effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants I think this depend heavily on what type of coding your doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find coding assistants. For that past few years most of the code I've written has been solving fairly niche quantitative problems with novel approaches and I've found AI coding assistants to range from useless to harmful. But on a recent webdev project, they were much more useful. The vast majority of problems in webdev are fundamentally not unique so a searchable pattern library (which is what an LLM coding assistant basically is) should be pretty effective. For other areas of software, they're not nearly as useful.
  - mhuffman 2y ago
    >I think this depend heavily on what type of coding your doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find coding assistants. I think this is true and also why you see some "older devs just don't like AI" type comments. AI assistants seem to be great at simple webdev tasks, which also happens to be the type of work that more junior developers do day to day. I have also found them useful with that and I keep one active for those types of projects because of the speed up, although I still have to keep a close eye on what it wants to inject. They also seem to excel at generating tests if you have already developed the functions. Then there are more difficult (usually not webdev) projects. In those cases, it really only shines if I need to ask it a question that I would previously have searched on SO or some obscure board for an answer. And even then, it really has to be scrutinized, because if it was simple, I wouldn't be asking the question. There is def. something there for specific types of development, but it has not "changed my life" or anything like that. It might have if I was just starting out or if I only did webdev type projects.

LtWorf 2y ago

> Speech recognition is useful. Now try to mute a video on youtube and understand what's being said from the automatic subtitles. If you do it in english, be aware that it's the best performing language and all others are even worse.

KoolKat23 2y ago
Just today, I received a note from a gas technician, part handwritten, for the life of me I couldn't make out what he was saying, I asked ChatGPT and it surprisingly understood, rereading the original note I'm very sure it was correct.
Terr_ 2y ago
Sometimes speech-to-text machine learning models give very good results, however I think the key is that: 1. It's overwhelmingly more useful than the [no text] it was replacing, particularly for the deaf or if you want to search for keywords in a video. 2. When it fails, it tends to do so in ways that trigger human suspicion and oversight. Those aren't necessarily true of some of the things people are shoehorning LLMs into these days, which is why I'm a lost more pessimistic about that technology.
tkgally 2y ago
For some reason, YouTube is not using a very good STT system now. The lack of sentence punctuation is particularly annoying. Transcriptions by Whisper and Gemini 1.5 Pro are much better. From a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41199567#41201773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41199567#41201773 I expect that YouTube will up their transcription game soon, too.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  I've tried whisper too. I made this: https://codeberg.org/ltworf/srtgen https://codeberg.org/ltworf/srtgen Basically it's kinda useful to put time tags, but I need to manually fix each and every sentence. Sometimes I need to fix the time tags as well. I just spoke about youtube because it's more popular and easy to test.

WalterSear 2y ago

> I don't find coding assistants to be very useful. I've come to notice a correlation between contemporary AI optimism and having effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants.

crystal_revenge 2y ago
> effectively made the jump to coding with AI assistants I think this depend heavily on what type of coding your doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find coding assistants. For that past few years most of the code I've written has been solving fairly niche quantitative problems with novel approaches and I've found AI coding assistants to range from useless to harmful. But on a recent webdev project, they were much more useful. The vast majority of problems in webdev are fundamentally not unique so a searchable pattern library (which is what an LLM coding assistant basically is) should be pretty effective. For other areas of software, they're not nearly as useful.
- mhuffman 2y ago
  >I think this depend heavily on what type of coding your doing. The more your job could be replaced by copy/pasting from Stack Overflow, the more useful you find coding assistants. I think this is true and also why you see some "older devs just don't like AI" type comments. AI assistants seem to be great at simple webdev tasks, which also happens to be the type of work that more junior developers do day to day. I have also found them useful with that and I keep one active for those types of projects because of the speed up, although I still have to keep a close eye on what it wants to inject. They also seem to excel at generating tests if you have already developed the functions. Then there are more difficult (usually not webdev) projects. In those cases, it really only shines if I need to ask it a question that I would previously have searched on SO or some obscure board for an answer. And even then, it really has to be scrutinized, because if it was simple, I wouldn't be asking the question. There is def. something there for specific types of development, but it has not "changed my life" or anything like that. It might have if I was just starting out or if I only did webdev type projects.