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Karpathy on VS Code Cursor and Sonnet 3.5 vs. GitHub Copilot
- Kiro 2y agoRelated comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41337542
- Kiro 2y agoAnd just as the previous thread was nuked, so was this one. It's a shame but I guess people don't want to discuss this.
- moffkalast 2y agoThere is some hilarity in having Karpathy who's most likely had significant contributions to OpenAI's current offerings recommend that people ought to use Sonnet instead.
- jimsimmons 2y agoHe worked there for a year. He had minimal impact. Probably not even among the top 50 impactful people in OpenAI history
- nabla9 2y agoHe is co-founder and worked there 2015-2017 came back later for a year.
- kevinventullo 2y agoHe was one of the founding members: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ignoramous 2y agohttps://ghostarchive.org/archive/AuNTo https://ghostarchive.org/archive/AuNTo
- jimsimmons 2y ago[flagged]
- marviel 2y ago"vaporware"? You may not like cursor, but they have a product that I -- as a professional -- use every day. Vaporware isn't the word you're looking for
- jimsimmons 2y agoThis whole "I became 10x better" is vaporware. It can kinda sorta maybe help sometimes a little bit is not vaporware
- marviel 2y agoI would encourage you to learn how to use these systems rather than discounting their value.
- foobarqux 2y agoPlease record a screencast and educate everyone.
- nabla9 2y agoI agree with other commenter. You don't know how to use them. LLM's are not programmers.
- simonw 2y agoVaporware means something is a concept that hasn't actually shipped yet. You seem to be using "vaporware" to mean over-hyped.
- nyrulez 2y agoCurious to know why you think it's vaporware. Are the latest LLMs like 3.5 Sonnet bad at original programming based on your experience? It hasn't been the case for me when using it for real world projects lately.
- umbs 2y agoHe meant Cursor editor [1] and not VS Code Corsor. He corrected in the next X post [2] [1] https://www.cursor.com https://www.cursor.com [2] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1827148812168871986 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1827148812168871986
- _lvbh 2y agoCursor editor is a fork of VS Code, which was probably why he got it mixed up
- _lvbh 2y agoI think for people with fairly high experience, the current AI boom is definitely a win; improved productivity for simple tasks and responsive rubber duck to run your ideas by. However, for new grads, students, and even mid-level devs, whenever I see them with Copilot (and just today, Cursor) out, I cry a bit inside and lower my expectations. I’m not sure why but in my experience, juniors/students that use AI will generally struggle more to debug problems & give up earlier Edit: and if I sound arrogant, let it be known that I definitely dont have the experience/intelligence to use AI productively, and thus I’ve avoided it beyond experimenting with capabilities
- minkles 2y agoAs someone responsible for the fall out from these tools being used to cut corners, I doubt it. And I'm talking about senior developers here with 10y+ experience. People don't bother to understand problems now. Only the happy path is considered. It takes real intelligence to understand the side effects even a simple thing can have. What was a whiteboard session and a thinking process is now blindly trusted to some 3rd party agent. Consider reliably receiving a message from a queue and processing it at least once. So far I have encountered at least 0 times processing on two separate occasions. That is a big problem. Turns out the code was generated and no one even knows or cares enough including the people reviewing it because their magic friend wrote it and their other magic friend reviewed it and the management is happy that they were sold magic because some other magic thing wrote some marketing spiel that absolved them from any decision making responsibility. In some contexts a mistake like that has an actual tangible capital cost if it's a trade or a transaction in a regulated industry. It's not "just a mistake you can learn from" at that point. People tend to lazy, to steal a mathematical expression, and these tools bring the worst out in people.
- brailsafe 2y agoThat's partly why I've only been using these tools for inconsequential tasks who's primary time cost is typing. Like throwing together a primitive prototype or mock generator and using my brain to build on it or get the rough structure down. HTML/CSS templating for example is still easy to screw up if you actually care about quality, but if you don't then you may as well find the fastest path there. I agree that the more convenience people rely on though, they seem less willing to sit with a hard problem and learn it the hard way, which is required in so many areas of programming or w/e, or sit with it and just grind their brain for possible edge cases or robust ways to implement something.
- loandbehold 2y ago"Sometimes you get a 100-line diff to your code that nails it, which could have taken 10+ minutes before" so it only took him 10 mins to write correct 100 line block without LLM? I guess some people are really 10x.
- kristianp 2y agoDoes anyone have a write up of the response format the llm uses in these type of editors? I'm assuming the llm can't generate exact diff format without making errors.
- simonw 2y agoYeah, diffs are unreliable. A couple of interesting things to read: 1. This reverse-engineering of VS Code GitHub Copilot - it's a bit old but still very relevant to understanding what's going on under the hood: https://thakkarparth007.github.io/copilot-explorer/posts/copilot-internals.html https://thakkarparth007.github.io/copilot-explorer/posts/cop... 2. This post from Aider (a very sophisticated CLI-based coding assistant tool) talking about how the benchmarked different editing formats: https://aider.chat/2023/07/02/benchmarks.html#edit-formats https://aider.chat/2023/07/02/benchmarks.html#edit-formats - and this later post as well, about how diffs without line numbers can work well: https://aider.chat/2023/12/21/unified-diffs.html#unified-diff-editing-format https://aider.chat/2023/12/21/unified-diffs.html#unified-dif... This whole field is still very much under active development, so I'm sure there are lots of other interesting techniques out there.
- kristianp 2y agoThank you, I went looking for how the original copilot worked a few months ago, but didn't find it.
- aithrowaway1987 2y agoI am whiny about being anti-AI, but no doubt they are well-suited for English<->programming translation tasks, which along with a well-tuned bag of tricks is a useful tool. But two issues the tech community had not spent nearly enough effort discussing: 1) As a big fan of Idris, I am worried that these tools will strongly disincentivize language development: why design an elegant language if an LLM can write the boilerplate faster than you can write a cleaner implementation? 2) I still don't think these tools are even slightly ethical. In 2022 I kicked the tires on ChatGPT-3.5 for F# codegen, and got some truly terrible results. I copy-pasted some lines into GitHub and found the unique repositories which ChatGPT was obviously plagiarizing from, and with 15 seconds of prompt "engineering" I got it to spit out ~200 lines verbatim from my personal F# linear algebra library - the only thing that was changed was stripping out the comments and updating some syntax to F# 4.7. Pure plagiarism. It is especially frustrating that GPT is more likely to plagiarize that library precisely because there aren't very many similar repos on GitHub. Obviously the plagiarism problem can be fixed. (and it seemingly has been...for F#. Not sure about Idris!) However, it really seems like that sort of RLHF fine-tuning is about covering OpenAI's tracks, not "teaching" the AI how to "generalize." In particular I refuse to use the tool because now instead of reliably getting it to plagiarize from F# developers, I have no clue whatsoever if it's stealing or if it managed to truly autoregress its way into an ethical solution. So instead of rolling the dice on being a graceless scumbag, I'll just take my time writing out my code by hand. And it was striking that GPT-3.5 had read and memorized more F# than Don Syme has seen in his entire life, yet in response to simple questions it was a mindless plagiarist. It's a stark illustration why the legal argument that ANN learning = human learning is vacuous, and why OpenAI should lose most of the copyright lawsuits it's facing.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- OutOfHere 2y agoI don't know why it's worthwhile to pay Cursor when CoPilot is free for unlimited use for open source developers.
- burntalmonds 2y agoWhat he describes is why I have stayed away from using these tools so far. I don't want to be exposed to something that is just useful enough to feel indispensable, but still comes with so many drawbacks.
- throwaway71271 2y agoCant wait for Opus 3.5 or GPT5 and of course Copilot Honestly writing code is so much more fun (especially Go code, if err if err if err..) I just tried Cursor because of this tweet, and it is really nice, I did pay for it. I just turn all assistance off when I have to think, because it violently interrupts my thoughts with random suggestions, but turns out most of the time, I just have to spit out code.
- kristianp 2y agoSorry to go meta, but this post has been demoted to page 6 since I first read it about an hour ago, despite being 80 points, 3 hours ago. I think it's because people have flagged it. I'm frustrated at how powerful flagging is compared to up-votes for stories. Tiny rant over.
- pieter_mj 2y agoHere's a video from an 8 year old creating a chatbot with Cursor and Claude : https://x.com/rickyrobinett/status/1825581674870055189 https://x.com/rickyrobinett/status/1825581674870055189 Clearly she's learned a few tricks from her dad, but an impressive result none the less.