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Google gifts a Free AI Coding Assistant to the developer community

41 points by sachinjain 2y ago

_mitterpach 2y ago
If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practices, be curious.
- torben-friis 2y ago
  I think there is a lot of room to leverage it, though resisting the temptation to have it do your work. You can get it to provide feedback on code quality, suggest refractors and its reasoning (with the explanation rather than the full solution), basically treating it as an always available study group. There is probably room for a course or book on a methodology that allows students to engage in this practice, or models with prompts that forbid straight completion and just provide help aimed at students.
- BLubliulu 2y ago
  I think this is not a good idea or suggestion at all. If i use google maps to find my way around, i'm faster by a lot. I also do remember things despite google maps doing the work for me. Use Code assistent as much as possible but make sure to read and understand what you get and try to write it yourself even if you just write it from a second window. In this age and pace, writing code will change relevant in the next few years anyway
  - pinoy420 2y ago
    [dead]
  - Rebuff5007 2y ago
    You (a SWE) using google maps is a bit different than a cab driving relying on google maps. The former is fine, the latter could be concerning. I'd argue that coding assistants for a SWE hinders their ability to build subject matter expertise.
- keyle 2y ago
  It's interesting you write this. I have a long experience and I use these auto complete on drugs now... I can't see myself writing all the damn code myself anymore. I remember the days of using books, having to follow the code bits in the book as I typed them. I don't remember diddly squat about it. Same from years of stack overflow. I'd just alt-tab 12 times, read the comments, then read another answer, assess the best answer. Massive waste of time. Use all the technology you have at your hands I say. But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    > But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn. But that's IMO exactly what your parent commenter says. Use LLMs only after you actually have a clue what are they producing. So if you are a beginner, basically don't because you'll not have any understanding.
    - infecto 2y ago
      Nope, the theme of the parent was... >Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. I totally disagree with it too and think its no different than using a book or SO from the past. As a Junior you copy paste many more lines of codes that you don't full appreciate and sometimes it simply just takes time of doing that to absorb the knowledge.
      - pdimitar 2y ago
        I don't think we disagree at all btw. IMO we all agree understanding of what the spat-out code actually does is mandatory and absolutely is NOT optional. The rest are really just details. I agree that nowadays LLMs can fill in for SO and Reddit.
        infecto 2y ago
        Definitely we agree. I was only stating that the OP's opinion of don't use any LLM for the first 3 years could be disastrous.
- Drakim 2y ago
  I agree, but I'll add that you can still use a standalone LLM window as a "teacher". If you don't know how to do something, ask it how to do it, and make it explain every piece of what's going on so you truly absorb it. But don't let it write the code FOR you, you should implement it yourself.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Ye you probably want to get grip on the fundamentals. My old college still have the students write some programs by hand with paper and pencil on exams to enforce this. But, exercise pressure in courses will probably increase to recalibrate for the difficulty level. I feel LLMs would make you make assignments so much faster I don't think you can not use it.
  - icepat 2y ago
    Pen and paper in my opinion is absurd. You will never write code by hand. Ever. Writing things by hand teaches you how to do something in a way you will never use, so the memories being developed are going to be attached to a context that is alien to the reality of what your end goal is.
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      The programs written by hand where really simple and like a third of the exam. (Edit: Programming assignments were done on computers of course.) Fizzbuzz to bubblesort level and a hard one we hadn't been exposed to that I failed. Required knowing the hare and turtle pointer walk thing. I think it is good as an exercise. Just like manual assembler to machine code transcription is good to have part of a course in computer architecture, like a small part. I regret doing so much of my studies with the least effort approach. In the end I would probably have saved time if I tried to learn like the teachers tried to force me to. Study during the whole course and not just the last week. Try to understand the concept instead of studying for the exam. Etc.
- ndr 2y ago
  This is bad advice to people with the correct posture. If you want to learn: don't use these models to do the things for you. Do use these models to learn. LLMs might not the best teachers in the world but they're available right there and then when you have a question. Don't take their answers for granted and test them. Ask to teach you the correct terms for things you don't know yet, so you can ask better questions. There has never been a better time to learn. You don't have to learn in the same way your predecessors did. You can learn faster and better, but must be vigilant you're not fooling yourself.
  - jonplackett 2y ago
    I feel bad for anyone learning to code now. The temptation to just LLM it must be sooooo high. But at the same time, having personalised StackOverflow without the negative attitude at your fingertips is super helpful, provided you also do the work of learning.
    - ndr 2y ago
      The non-curious/non-skeptics people might have better luck learning by staying with books and coding offline. For the curious/skeptics there's never been a better moment to pick anything up. I don't know how we make more people more curious and skeptic.
    - gvurrdon 2y ago
      > personalised StackOverflow without the negative attitude Phrased in that way, it does sound very tempting. Over the past few years it's become pretty much a waste of time to post on SO (well, in my experience, anyway).
    - soco 2y ago
      But wouldn't you learn if you actually have to enter and test that code, even if it's LLM generated, every day? Maybe you learn bad models, which can happen from SO as well, but you do learn. I'm more worried that the juniors won't have this opportunity anymore, or rather, they won't be needed anymore. So when I retire, what? Unless AI gets better and replaces everybody, then it won't matter at all what and how you learned.
- icepat 2y ago
  I tend to agree. But will extend beyond computer science students and say especially people who are self-learning. When I was getting started, I actively tried to minimize the number of packages, and abstraction tools I used. Consequentially, I was able to properly and deeply understand how things worked. Only once I was able to really explain, and use a tool, would I accept an automated solution for it. On the flip side, I've now found that getting AI to kick the tires on something I'm not super well versed in, helps me figure out how it works. But that's only because I understand how other things work. If you're going to use AI in your learning, I think the best way you can do that is ask it to give you an example, or an incomplete implementation. Then you can learn in bits while still getting things done.
- closewith 2y ago
  If your goal is to become a fundamentally sound computer scientist, this may be good advice. However, if - like 99% of software developers in the workforce - your goal is to work on software until you earn enough that you no longer have to, then ignore this awful advice and focus on learning the tools that are becoming ubiquitous and mandatory is most roles. Otherwise you are pre-assigning yourself to irrelevance, equivalent to programmers refusing to use operating systems, compilers, runtimes, etc.
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - closewith 2y ago
      > Do you not understand that, at the end of the day, you'll also still stuck living in the nightmarish hellscape you spend your days trying to usher in? I live by the sea and spend most of my time with family or working in healthcare. Software for me pays the bills and the less time I spend on it, the better. LLMs allow me to spend ~1/3rd the time I used to without impacting my remuneration. Of course I use them, in the same way I use email rather than snail, machine language rather than soldering, python rather assembly, git rather than _v244_FINAL, and any number of other abstractions and tools that separate me from the actual bits.
      - Nullabillity 2y ago
        Healthcare workers aren't negatively affected by having to put up with shitty software that doesn't actually work? That's news to me.
        closewith 2y ago
        > Healthcare workers aren't negatively affected by having to put up with shitty software that doesn't actually work? Is your position that code produced with LLMs is _worse_ than the average human developer working alone? I would be far happier if the software I am forced to use professionally had been produced by developers guided by LLMs. But even if you are right, most software developers don't work on anything important and most don't care about the software they output. You're an enthusiast, which is very much an outlier in software development, and so maybe learning the fundamentals from logic gates is worth it to you (it was to me). LLMs can accelerate that learning immensely. For the vast majority of people employed writing software, that's not true and forgoing LLMs will permanently stifle their employment prospects.
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  Don't use garbage collection or high level dynamic typing when building web servers. It's important to understand what the machine is actually doing at a low-level. Implementing REST API's in C++ will write code slower than others, sure, but you'll gain so much in your fundamentals of how memory management and OS processes work.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    The more direct comparison might be "don't use compilers for the first few years; learn assembly directly instead". LLMs aren't going away, it doesn't make sense to learn how to do things LLMs already do now and are only going to get better at.
- pinoy420 2y ago
  [dead]
- DrScientist 2y ago
  Same sort of advice as don't copy verbatim to write your essays - ie for you to learn it has to flow through your brain. However the above advice for essays doesn't include not looking at textbooks or papers - just not to blindly copy. So perhaps you should use coding assistents - but always in a mode where you use as a source to write yourself rather than cut and paste/direct editing.
- prismatix 2y ago
  I just interviewed someone for a Senior position who's been using these AI copilots for 1.5 years as a contractor. In the interview I politely said I wanted to evaluate their skills without AI, so no Cursor/Copilots allowed. They did not remember how to map through an array, define a function, add click/change handlers to input, etc.
  - lsaferite 2y ago
    It's an interesting space for discussion. What I've found after developing software for many decades and learning many languages is that the concepts and core logical thinking are what is most important in most cases. Before the current AI boom I would still have had a problem doing some tasks in a vacuum as well. Not because I was incapable, but because I had so much other relevant information in my head that the minutia of some tasks was irrelevant when I had immediate access to the needed information via auto-complete in an IDE and language documentation. I know what I needed to look up because of all that other knowledge in my head though. I knew things were possible. And in cases where I didn't _know_ something was possible, I had an inkling that something might be possible because I could do it in another language or it was a logical extension of some other concept. With the current rage of AI Coding Copilots I personally feel like many people are going down a path that degrades that corpus of general knowledge that drives the ability to solve problems quickly. Instead they lean on the coding assistant to have that knowledge and simple direct it to do the tasks at a macro level. On the surface this may seem like a universal boon, but the reality is they are giving up that intrinsic domain knowledge that is needed to be functional at understanding what software is doing and how to solve the problems that will crop up. If those two paragraphs seem contradictory in some manner, I agree. You can argue that leaning on IDE syntax autocomplete and looking up documentation not foundationally different than leaning on a coding assistant. I can only say that they don't _feel_ the same to me. Maybe what I mean is, if the assistant is writing code and you are directly using it, then you never gain knowledge. If you are looking things up in documentation or using auto-complete for function names or arguments, you are learning about the code and how to solve a problem. So maybe it's just, what abstraction level are we, as a profession, comfortable with? To close out this oddly long comment, I personally use LLMs and other ML models frequently. I have found that they are excellent at helping me formulate my thoughts on a problem that needs to be solved and to surface information across a lot of sources into a coherent understanding of an issue. Sure, it's possible that it's wrong, but I just use it to help steer me towards the real information I need. If I ask for or it provides code, that's used as a reference implementation for the actual implementation I write. And my IDE auto-complete has gotten a boost as well. It's much better at understanding the context of what I'm writing and providing guesses as to what I'm about to type. It's quite good. Most of the time. But it's also wrong in very subtle ways that require careful reading to notice. And I'll sum this paragraph up with the fact that I'm turning to an LLM more and more as a first search before I hit a search engine (yet I hate Google's AI search results).
- xnx 2y ago
  If you're a student who is thinking of not using LLM's, don't. You put yourself at a significant disadvantage by not availing yourself of an infinitely patient, non-judgemental, and thoroughly well read tutor/coach.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- karmakaze 2y ago
  I made my career investing in fundamentals, but started many decades ago. I can't in good conscience recommend it today. We will still be need some to do fundamental things (and they will be self-motivated and know who they are), but I don't think that's where most of humans will be in the stack. We should be at the top directing the machines, not competing with them.
tokai 2y ago
Free like Google Search is free, I presume?
terminalbraid 2y ago
Apropos nothing, Annatar was a very good disguise for Sauron to use to gain the elves' trust but secretly have them forge something for himself.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  Unrelatedly, Google uses which completions users accept to train their AI further.
pdimitar 2y ago
Curious to try this as most other tools have fairly stingy free tiers where you basically have one good interaction and boom, now you have to pay. (Zero analogies to drug dealers. Wink wink.) So can this be used standalone or must you use JetBrains / VSCode / Firebase / GitHub with no other option? I am not seeing any.
- FergusArgyll 2y ago
  I think only for those editors. Google does also give a free API Key (aistudio.google.com) for the underlying models (though not the coding fine-tuned one) But IMO the free tier is rate limited a bit too much to build your own extension out of it for free.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago
  Codeium free autocomplete is free
croes 2y ago
Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs.
- MonkeyClub 2y ago
  Well said. Particularly, "Data excluded from training by default" is not available in the free and first paid tier. Google was obviously irked that Microsoft got all this juicy training data since everyone is on their walled git garden, and tried to come up with a way to also dip some fingers into said data. You should see the reviews in the JetBrains plugin page: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/24198-gemini-code-assist/reviews https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/24198-gemini-code-assis... People are all so "shut up and take my money", but the bloody thing won't even sign them in. But it's still in beta, right? Perhaps it'll start working in a couple more months.
xnx 2y ago
I thought it used to be courtesy for blogs to link to the source? https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-code-assist-free/ https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-code-assist...
JoshTriplett 2y ago
"Free as in puppy"
mrtksn 2y ago
I don't believe that this is the future of computer programming, all those coding assistants feel like companies trying to make mechanical horses and caravans when the combustion engine was invented. IMHO they should be inventing cars, planes and trains. Why? Because they write code using tools made to accommodate people and when you are taking out people from the loop keeping those is useless. It's especially evident when those AI tools import bazillion of libraries that exist only to help humans tot reinventing and spending time solved problems and provide comfort when coding. The AI programming tools are not like humans, they shouldn't be using tools made for humans and instead solve the tasks directly. IE, if you are making a web UI the AI tool doesn't have to import tons of libraries to center a div and make it pretty. It should be able to directly write the code that centers that and humans probably shouldn't be looking at the code at all.
- darkerside 2y ago
  That would be the case of this were actually AI. But LLMs actually do procedurally generate language in a fairly human way, so using human languages makes sense to me.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    The problem with this is that we can't get rid of the baggage of higher and higher level of libraries and languages that exist to accommodate humans. I agree that it makes sense to use these currently but IMHO the ultimate programming will be human readable code-free, instead the AI will create a representation of the algorithm we need and will execute around it. Like having an idea, for example if you need to program a robot vacuum cleaner you should be able to describe how you describe it to behave and the AI will create an algorithm(an idea, like "let's turn when bump into a wall then try again") and constantly tweak it and tend it. We wouldn't be directly looking at the code the AI wrote, instead we can test it and find edge cases that a machine maybe wouldn't predict(i.e. the cat sits on the robot and blocking the sensors).
    - darkerside 2y ago
      What makes the AI context window immune to the same issues that plague us humans? I think they will still benefit from high level languages and libraries. AIs that can use them will be able to manage larger and more complex systems than the ones that only use low level languages.
smallerfish 2y ago
Here's the terms of service for the plugin: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/plugin-license https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p... This says nothing about Google's use of the data. Anybody have a better link?
- graphGL 2y ago
  https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/privacy-notice-gemini-code-assist-individuals https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p... Data included in their training by default. You’ll need to opt-out.
barotalomey 2y ago
No thanks!
skerit 2y ago
As usual for Google services, where other providers just make you sign in & you're set, Google requires you to create a specific "Cloud project" and then makes you look through the menus to specifically enable the "Gemini Code Assist" feature.
- hahn-kev 2y ago
  Not for the free tier. I set it up today and didn't have to do anything.
- infecto 2y ago
  Look no further than the two different SDKs and APIs to access all the LLM tools.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Previously on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170626
sachinjain 2y ago
This weekend, I tried out Gemini Code Assist and compared it to my usual AI assistant, Cursor IDE. Shared my findings here [0] [0]: https://sachinjain.substack.com/p/ai-coding-assistant-gemini-code-assist https://sachinjain.substack.com/p/ai-coding-assistant-gemini...

41 points by sachinjain 2y ago

If you're a computer science student who is thinking of using this, don't. Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. You will write code slower than others, sure, but what you'll learn and what you build will be a hundred times more useful for you than when you just copy and paste 'stuff' from AI. Invest in fundamentals, learn best practices, be curious.

torben-friis 2y ago
I think there is a lot of room to leverage it, though resisting the temptation to have it do your work. You can get it to provide feedback on code quality, suggest refractors and its reasoning (with the explanation rather than the full solution), basically treating it as an always available study group. There is probably room for a course or book on a methodology that allows students to engage in this practice, or models with prompts that forbid straight completion and just provide help aimed at students.
BLubliulu 2y ago
I think this is not a good idea or suggestion at all. If i use google maps to find my way around, i'm faster by a lot. I also do remember things despite google maps doing the work for me. Use Code assistent as much as possible but make sure to read and understand what you get and try to write it yourself even if you just write it from a second window. In this age and pace, writing code will change relevant in the next few years anyway
- pinoy420 2y ago
  [dead]
- Rebuff5007 2y ago
  You (a SWE) using google maps is a bit different than a cab driving relying on google maps. The former is fine, the latter could be concerning. I'd argue that coding assistants for a SWE hinders their ability to build subject matter expertise.
keyle 2y ago
It's interesting you write this. I have a long experience and I use these auto complete on drugs now... I can't see myself writing all the damn code myself anymore. I remember the days of using books, having to follow the code bits in the book as I typed them. I don't remember diddly squat about it. Same from years of stack overflow. I'd just alt-tab 12 times, read the comments, then read another answer, assess the best answer. Massive waste of time. Use all the technology you have at your hands I say. But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  > But be sure to understand what you auto-completed. If not, stop and learn. But that's IMO exactly what your parent commenter says. Use LLMs only after you actually have a clue what are they producing. So if you are a beginner, basically don't because you'll not have any understanding.
  - infecto 2y ago
    Nope, the theme of the parent was... >Don't use Copilot, Gemini, Cursor or any other code assisting tool for the several first years of your study or career. I totally disagree with it too and think its no different than using a book or SO from the past. As a Junior you copy paste many more lines of codes that you don't full appreciate and sometimes it simply just takes time of doing that to absorb the knowledge.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      I don't think we disagree at all btw. IMO we all agree understanding of what the spat-out code actually does is mandatory and absolutely is NOT optional. The rest are really just details. I agree that nowadays LLMs can fill in for SO and Reddit.
      - infecto 2y ago
        Definitely we agree. I was only stating that the OP's opinion of don't use any LLM for the first 3 years could be disastrous.
Drakim 2y ago
I agree, but I'll add that you can still use a standalone LLM window as a "teacher". If you don't know how to do something, ask it how to do it, and make it explain every piece of what's going on so you truly absorb it. But don't let it write the code FOR you, you should implement it yourself.
rightbyte 2y ago
Ye you probably want to get grip on the fundamentals. My old college still have the students write some programs by hand with paper and pencil on exams to enforce this. But, exercise pressure in courses will probably increase to recalibrate for the difficulty level. I feel LLMs would make you make assignments so much faster I don't think you can not use it.
- icepat 2y ago
  Pen and paper in my opinion is absurd. You will never write code by hand. Ever. Writing things by hand teaches you how to do something in a way you will never use, so the memories being developed are going to be attached to a context that is alien to the reality of what your end goal is.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    The programs written by hand where really simple and like a third of the exam. (Edit: Programming assignments were done on computers of course.) Fizzbuzz to bubblesort level and a hard one we hadn't been exposed to that I failed. Required knowing the hare and turtle pointer walk thing. I think it is good as an exercise. Just like manual assembler to machine code transcription is good to have part of a course in computer architecture, like a small part. I regret doing so much of my studies with the least effort approach. In the end I would probably have saved time if I tried to learn like the teachers tried to force me to. Study during the whole course and not just the last week. Try to understand the concept instead of studying for the exam. Etc.
ndr 2y ago
This is bad advice to people with the correct posture. If you want to learn: don't use these models to do the things for you. Do use these models to learn. LLMs might not the best teachers in the world but they're available right there and then when you have a question. Don't take their answers for granted and test them. Ask to teach you the correct terms for things you don't know yet, so you can ask better questions. There has never been a better time to learn. You don't have to learn in the same way your predecessors did. You can learn faster and better, but must be vigilant you're not fooling yourself.
- jonplackett 2y ago
  I feel bad for anyone learning to code now. The temptation to just LLM it must be sooooo high. But at the same time, having personalised StackOverflow without the negative attitude at your fingertips is super helpful, provided you also do the work of learning.
  - ndr 2y ago
    The non-curious/non-skeptics people might have better luck learning by staying with books and coding offline. For the curious/skeptics there's never been a better moment to pick anything up. I don't know how we make more people more curious and skeptic.
  - gvurrdon 2y ago
    > personalised StackOverflow without the negative attitude Phrased in that way, it does sound very tempting. Over the past few years it's become pretty much a waste of time to post on SO (well, in my experience, anyway).
  - soco 2y ago
    But wouldn't you learn if you actually have to enter and test that code, even if it's LLM generated, every day? Maybe you learn bad models, which can happen from SO as well, but you do learn. I'm more worried that the juniors won't have this opportunity anymore, or rather, they won't be needed anymore. So when I retire, what? Unless AI gets better and replaces everybody, then it won't matter at all what and how you learned.
icepat 2y ago
I tend to agree. But will extend beyond computer science students and say especially people who are self-learning. When I was getting started, I actively tried to minimize the number of packages, and abstraction tools I used. Consequentially, I was able to properly and deeply understand how things worked. Only once I was able to really explain, and use a tool, would I accept an automated solution for it. On the flip side, I've now found that getting AI to kick the tires on something I'm not super well versed in, helps me figure out how it works. But that's only because I understand how other things work. If you're going to use AI in your learning, I think the best way you can do that is ask it to give you an example, or an incomplete implementation. Then you can learn in bits while still getting things done.
closewith 2y ago
If your goal is to become a fundamentally sound computer scientist, this may be good advice. However, if - like 99% of software developers in the workforce - your goal is to work on software until you earn enough that you no longer have to, then ignore this awful advice and focus on learning the tools that are becoming ubiquitous and mandatory is most roles. Otherwise you are pre-assigning yourself to irrelevance, equivalent to programmers refusing to use operating systems, compilers, runtimes, etc.
- Nullabillity 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - closewith 2y ago
    > Do you not understand that, at the end of the day, you'll also still stuck living in the nightmarish hellscape you spend your days trying to usher in? I live by the sea and spend most of my time with family or working in healthcare. Software for me pays the bills and the less time I spend on it, the better. LLMs allow me to spend ~1/3rd the time I used to without impacting my remuneration. Of course I use them, in the same way I use email rather than snail, machine language rather than soldering, python rather assembly, git rather than _v244_FINAL, and any number of other abstractions and tools that separate me from the actual bits.
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      Healthcare workers aren't negatively affected by having to put up with shitty software that doesn't actually work? That's news to me.
      - closewith 2y ago
        > Healthcare workers aren't negatively affected by having to put up with shitty software that doesn't actually work? Is your position that code produced with LLMs is _worse_ than the average human developer working alone? I would be far happier if the software I am forced to use professionally had been produced by developers guided by LLMs. But even if you are right, most software developers don't work on anything important and most don't care about the software they output. You're an enthusiast, which is very much an outlier in software development, and so maybe learning the fundamentals from logic gates is worth it to you (it was to me). LLMs can accelerate that learning immensely. For the vast majority of people employed writing software, that's not true and forgoing LLMs will permanently stifle their employment prospects.
reducesuffering 2y ago
Don't use garbage collection or high level dynamic typing when building web servers. It's important to understand what the machine is actually doing at a low-level. Implementing REST API's in C++ will write code slower than others, sure, but you'll gain so much in your fundamentals of how memory management and OS processes work.
- roenxi 2y ago
  The more direct comparison might be "don't use compilers for the first few years; learn assembly directly instead". LLMs aren't going away, it doesn't make sense to learn how to do things LLMs already do now and are only going to get better at.
pinoy420 2y ago
[dead]
DrScientist 2y ago
Same sort of advice as don't copy verbatim to write your essays - ie for you to learn it has to flow through your brain. However the above advice for essays doesn't include not looking at textbooks or papers - just not to blindly copy. So perhaps you should use coding assistents - but always in a mode where you use as a source to write yourself rather than cut and paste/direct editing.
prismatix 2y ago
I just interviewed someone for a Senior position who's been using these AI copilots for 1.5 years as a contractor. In the interview I politely said I wanted to evaluate their skills without AI, so no Cursor/Copilots allowed. They did not remember how to map through an array, define a function, add click/change handlers to input, etc.
- lsaferite 2y ago
  It's an interesting space for discussion. What I've found after developing software for many decades and learning many languages is that the concepts and core logical thinking are what is most important in most cases. Before the current AI boom I would still have had a problem doing some tasks in a vacuum as well. Not because I was incapable, but because I had so much other relevant information in my head that the minutia of some tasks was irrelevant when I had immediate access to the needed information via auto-complete in an IDE and language documentation. I know what I needed to look up because of all that other knowledge in my head though. I knew things were possible. And in cases where I didn't _know_ something was possible, I had an inkling that something might be possible because I could do it in another language or it was a logical extension of some other concept. With the current rage of AI Coding Copilots I personally feel like many people are going down a path that degrades that corpus of general knowledge that drives the ability to solve problems quickly. Instead they lean on the coding assistant to have that knowledge and simple direct it to do the tasks at a macro level. On the surface this may seem like a universal boon, but the reality is they are giving up that intrinsic domain knowledge that is needed to be functional at understanding what software is doing and how to solve the problems that will crop up. If those two paragraphs seem contradictory in some manner, I agree. You can argue that leaning on IDE syntax autocomplete and looking up documentation not foundationally different than leaning on a coding assistant. I can only say that they don't _feel_ the same to me. Maybe what I mean is, if the assistant is writing code and you are directly using it, then you never gain knowledge. If you are looking things up in documentation or using auto-complete for function names or arguments, you are learning about the code and how to solve a problem. So maybe it's just, what abstraction level are we, as a profession, comfortable with? To close out this oddly long comment, I personally use LLMs and other ML models frequently. I have found that they are excellent at helping me formulate my thoughts on a problem that needs to be solved and to surface information across a lot of sources into a coherent understanding of an issue. Sure, it's possible that it's wrong, but I just use it to help steer me towards the real information I need. If I ask for or it provides code, that's used as a reference implementation for the actual implementation I write. And my IDE auto-complete has gotten a boost as well. It's much better at understanding the context of what I'm writing and providing guesses as to what I'm about to type. It's quite good. Most of the time. But it's also wrong in very subtle ways that require careful reading to notice. And I'll sum this paragraph up with the fact that I'm turning to an LLM more and more as a first search before I hit a search engine (yet I hate Google's AI search results).
xnx 2y ago
If you're a student who is thinking of not using LLM's, don't. You put yourself at a significant disadvantage by not availing yourself of an infinitely patient, non-judgemental, and thoroughly well read tutor/coach.
deleted 2y ago
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karmakaze 2y ago
I made my career investing in fundamentals, but started many decades ago. I can't in good conscience recommend it today. We will still be need some to do fundamental things (and they will be self-motivated and know who they are), but I don't think that's where most of humans will be in the stack. We should be at the top directing the machines, not competing with them.

tokai 2y ago

Free like Google Search is free, I presume?

terminalbraid 2y ago

Apropos nothing, Annatar was a very good disguise for Sauron to use to gain the elves' trust but secretly have them forge something for himself.

WithinReason 2y ago
Unrelatedly, Google uses which completions users accept to train their AI further.

pdimitar 2y ago

Curious to try this as most other tools have fairly stingy free tiers where you basically have one good interaction and boom, now you have to pay. (Zero analogies to drug dealers. Wink wink.) So can this be used standalone or must you use JetBrains / VSCode / Firebase / GitHub with no other option? I am not seeing any.

FergusArgyll 2y ago
I think only for those editors. Google does also give a free API Key (aistudio.google.com) for the underlying models (though not the coding fine-tuned one) But IMO the free tier is rate limited a bit too much to build your own extension out of it for free.
TiredOfLife 2y ago
Codeium free autocomplete is free

croes 2y ago

Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs.

MonkeyClub 2y ago
Well said. Particularly, "Data excluded from training by default" is not available in the free and first paid tier. Google was obviously irked that Microsoft got all this juicy training data since everyone is on their walled git garden, and tried to come up with a way to also dip some fingers into said data. You should see the reviews in the JetBrains plugin page: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/24198-gemini-code-assist/reviews https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/24198-gemini-code-assis... People are all so "shut up and take my money", but the bloody thing won't even sign them in. But it's still in beta, right? Perhaps it'll start working in a couple more months.

xnx 2y ago

I thought it used to be courtesy for blogs to link to the source? https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-code-assist-free/ https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-code-assist...

JoshTriplett 2y ago

"Free as in puppy"

mrtksn 2y ago

I don't believe that this is the future of computer programming, all those coding assistants feel like companies trying to make mechanical horses and caravans when the combustion engine was invented. IMHO they should be inventing cars, planes and trains. Why? Because they write code using tools made to accommodate people and when you are taking out people from the loop keeping those is useless. It's especially evident when those AI tools import bazillion of libraries that exist only to help humans tot reinventing and spending time solved problems and provide comfort when coding. The AI programming tools are not like humans, they shouldn't be using tools made for humans and instead solve the tasks directly. IE, if you are making a web UI the AI tool doesn't have to import tons of libraries to center a div and make it pretty. It should be able to directly write the code that centers that and humans probably shouldn't be looking at the code at all.

darkerside 2y ago
That would be the case of this were actually AI. But LLMs actually do procedurally generate language in a fairly human way, so using human languages makes sense to me.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  The problem with this is that we can't get rid of the baggage of higher and higher level of libraries and languages that exist to accommodate humans. I agree that it makes sense to use these currently but IMHO the ultimate programming will be human readable code-free, instead the AI will create a representation of the algorithm we need and will execute around it. Like having an idea, for example if you need to program a robot vacuum cleaner you should be able to describe how you describe it to behave and the AI will create an algorithm(an idea, like "let's turn when bump into a wall then try again") and constantly tweak it and tend it. We wouldn't be directly looking at the code the AI wrote, instead we can test it and find edge cases that a machine maybe wouldn't predict(i.e. the cat sits on the robot and blocking the sensors).
  - darkerside 2y ago
    What makes the AI context window immune to the same issues that plague us humans? I think they will still benefit from high level languages and libraries. AIs that can use them will be able to manage larger and more complex systems than the ones that only use low level languages.

smallerfish 2y ago

Here's the terms of service for the plugin: https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/plugin-license https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p... This says nothing about Google's use of the data. Anybody have a better link?

graphGL 2y ago
https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/privacy-notice-gemini-code-assist-individuals https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/resources/p... Data included in their training by default. You’ll need to opt-out.

barotalomey 2y ago

No thanks!

skerit 2y ago

As usual for Google services, where other providers just make you sign in & you're set, Google requires you to create a specific "Cloud project" and then makes you look through the menus to specifically enable the "Gemini Code Assist" feature.

hahn-kev 2y ago
Not for the free tier. I set it up today and didn't have to do anything.
infecto 2y ago
Look no further than the two different SDKs and APIs to access all the LLM tools.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Previously on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170626

sachinjain 2y ago

This weekend, I tried out Gemini Code Assist and compared it to my usual AI assistant, Cursor IDE. Shared my findings here [0] [0]: https://sachinjain.substack.com/p/ai-coding-assistant-gemini-code-assist https://sachinjain.substack.com/p/ai-coding-assistant-gemini...