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I would love to see someone on stream use AI really effectively. I really try, but for the life of me, I can’t get AI to generate anything useful beyond simple

by dartos 2y ago

I would love to see someone on stream use AI really effectively. I really try, but for the life of me, I can’t get AI to generate anything useful beyond simple tests. They’re still autocomplete++ for me.

jay377 2y ago
A good stream example might be this on a podcast, its got a few cuts but generally can get the point and its by a complete beginner, 1 month in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehK-QqPstJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehK-QqPstJ4
thejosh 2y ago
Autocomplete++ is the killer feature for me, especially for more tedious thingsike SQL column naming.
patcon 2y ago
Agreed! But also... Rather than your seeing someone stream "really effective 99th percentile AI coding", maybe it would be more illustrative for us all to see someone stream the "50th percentile developer unassisted" experience. I suspect that's the thing we're all missing to help us understand the potential value of AI coding: how slow and ineffectively the median software developer works, bc they just quietly slog away and don't talk much about how they work :) I humbly include myself on that thought btw
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  I also don’t understand the appeal. I never wrote boilerplate code in my life. I recently spent the whole day debugging open source third parties on multiple OSes while using Wireshark to understand how the whole thing worked. Then I typed 5 lines for a fix in less than 30 seconds. How would an LLM help me here?
  - dartos 2y ago
    > I never wrote boilerplate code in my life. You either have not written very much code, don’t know what boilerplate means, or are intentionally operating under an overly broad definition
    - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
      You’re right. I don’t write a lot of code. It’s always very specific C++ stuff that does not need to be repeated a hundred times, or if it is it can be a virtual method declaration that I copy in a subclass. No need for a LLM for that. I’ve only seen boilerplate used by web developers, but I’m not doing that.
      - dartos 2y ago
        You shouldn’t speak so confidently and condescendingly with so little experience. Graphics programming, data science, anything involving handling user input and probably many more classes of software require ceremony and boilerplate to get going. Vulkan famously takes 1000 lines of C++ boilerplate before you can draw a triangle. Look into writing a X or Wayland compositor and you’ll see a mountain of boilerplate involved in handling input loops, displays, and communicating with the kernel.
- dartos 2y ago
  Please don’t misquote me. I want to see how someone who’s confident in using these tools write code with them. I’m not as interested in the median developer’s coding practices.
rukuu001 2y ago
I find it effective to treat it like a junior, and provide detailed and specific tasks. Ie usual LLM usage. A recent e.g. "Use the Javascript module pattern to create a module that stores audio chunks, recording state, and exposes functions to start and stop recording, and to store audio data" It's a really simple task, but that prompt saved me 20 minutes of typing and futzing about. It also named the module sensibly, based on context from the rest of the code I guess. Then it prompted me on what to change in the calling code to use the new module (this wasn't 100% right, but still saved me a couple rounds of running the code and fixing problems). It's taken me a while to change my habit of working out how to do what I want to do and then editing code, to rather just saying what I want to do, and being specific about it.
- dartos 2y ago
  Even in cases like that, I find that it’s often wrong about whatever package I’m using, unless that package has had a stable long lived api. I can maybe pull snippets out of AI generated code, but more often than not I just ask it for quick examples. Like I would do for stack overflow.

by dartos 2y ago

jay377 2y ago

A good stream example might be this on a podcast, its got a few cuts but generally can get the point and its by a complete beginner, 1 month in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehK-QqPstJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehK-QqPstJ4

thejosh 2y ago

Autocomplete++ is the killer feature for me, especially for more tedious thingsike SQL column naming.

patcon 2y ago

Agreed! But also... Rather than your seeing someone stream "really effective 99th percentile AI coding", maybe it would be more illustrative for us all to see someone stream the "50th percentile developer unassisted" experience. I suspect that's the thing we're all missing to help us understand the potential value of AI coding: how slow and ineffectively the median software developer works, bc they just quietly slog away and don't talk much about how they work :) I humbly include myself on that thought btw

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
I also don’t understand the appeal. I never wrote boilerplate code in my life. I recently spent the whole day debugging open source third parties on multiple OSes while using Wireshark to understand how the whole thing worked. Then I typed 5 lines for a fix in less than 30 seconds. How would an LLM help me here?
- dartos 2y ago
  > I never wrote boilerplate code in my life. You either have not written very much code, don’t know what boilerplate means, or are intentionally operating under an overly broad definition
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    You’re right. I don’t write a lot of code. It’s always very specific C++ stuff that does not need to be repeated a hundred times, or if it is it can be a virtual method declaration that I copy in a subclass. No need for a LLM for that. I’ve only seen boilerplate used by web developers, but I’m not doing that.
    - dartos 2y ago
      You shouldn’t speak so confidently and condescendingly with so little experience. Graphics programming, data science, anything involving handling user input and probably many more classes of software require ceremony and boilerplate to get going. Vulkan famously takes 1000 lines of C++ boilerplate before you can draw a triangle. Look into writing a X or Wayland compositor and you’ll see a mountain of boilerplate involved in handling input loops, displays, and communicating with the kernel.
dartos 2y ago
Please don’t misquote me. I want to see how someone who’s confident in using these tools write code with them. I’m not as interested in the median developer’s coding practices.

rukuu001 2y ago

I find it effective to treat it like a junior, and provide detailed and specific tasks. Ie usual LLM usage. A recent e.g. "Use the Javascript module pattern to create a module that stores audio chunks, recording state, and exposes functions to start and stop recording, and to store audio data" It's a really simple task, but that prompt saved me 20 minutes of typing and futzing about. It also named the module sensibly, based on context from the rest of the code I guess. Then it prompted me on what to change in the calling code to use the new module (this wasn't 100% right, but still saved me a couple rounds of running the code and fixing problems). It's taken me a while to change my habit of working out how to do what I want to do and then editing code, to rather just saying what I want to do, and being specific about it.

dartos 2y ago
Even in cases like that, I find that it’s often wrong about whatever package I’m using, unless that package has had a stable long lived api. I can maybe pull snippets out of AI generated code, but more often than not I just ask it for quick examples. Like I would do for stack overflow.