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> LLMs still seem as terrible at this as they'd been in the GPT-3.5 age. Software agents break down once the codebase becomes complex enough, game-playing agent

• kiratp 2y ago
  You’re not using the best tools. Claude Code, Cline, Cursor… all of them with Claude 3.7.
  • csomar 2y ago
    Nope. I try the latest models as they come and I have a self-made custom setup (as in a custom lua plugin) in Neovim. What I am not, is selling AI or AI-driven solutions.
    • hattmall 2y ago
      Similar experience, I try so hard to make AI useful, and there are some decent spots here and there. Overall though I see the fundamental problem being that people need information. Language isn't strictly information, and the LLMs are very good at language, but they aren't great at information. I think anything more than the novelty of "talking" to the AI is very over hyped. There is some usefulness to be had for sure, but I don't know if the usefulness is there with the non-subsidized models.
      • fragmede 2y ago
        what does subsidization have to do with your use of a thing?
        • hattmall 2y ago
          I don't think I would use it if I were paying the real costs, and not a ~90% VC funded mark down.
          • fragmede 2y ago
            yeah, but why does the fact that it's vc subsidized matter to you? the price is the price. I don't go to the store and look at eggs and lettuce and consider how much of my tax money goes into subsiding farmers before buying their products. maybe the prices will go up, maybe they'll go down due to competition. Thai doesn't stop me from using them though.
            • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
              Because if they're not covering their costs now, then eventually they will which either means service degradation (cough ads cough) or price increases. I applaud the GP for thinking about this before it becomes an issue.
              • fragmede 2y ago
                Which, as we know, is what killed YouTube and no one uses that anymore.
                • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
                  Youtube has billions of dollars in ads revenue, and the word on the street is that just covers their costs.
    • cheevly 2y ago
      Perhaps we could help if you shared some real examples of what walls you’re hitting. But it sounds like you’ve already made up your mind.
    • RamtinJ95 2y ago
      Do you mean that you have successfully managed to get the same experience in cursor but in neovim? I have been looking for something like that to move back to my neovim setup instead of using cursor. Any hints would be greatly appreciated!
      • csomar 2y ago
        Start with Avante or CopilotChat. Create your own Lua config/plugin (easy with Claude 3.5 ;) ) and then use their chat window to run copilot/models. Most of my custom config was built with Claude 3.5 and some trial/error/success.
    • demosthanos 2y ago
      It's worth actually trying Cursor, because it is a valuable step change over previous products and you might find it's better in some ways than your custom setup. The processes they use for creating the context seems to be really good. And their autocomplete is far better than Copilot's in ways that could provide inspiration. That said, you're right that it's not as overwhelmingly revolutionary as the internet would lead you to believe. It's a step change over Copilot.
    • kiratp 2y ago
      The entire wrapped package of tested prompts, context management etc. is a whole step change from what you can build yourself. There is a reason Cursor is the fastest startup to $100M in revenue, ever.
• roncesvalles 2y ago
  The last line has been my experience as well. I only trust what I've verified firsthand now because the Internet is just so rife with people trying to influence your thoughts in a way that benefits them, over a good faith sharing of the truth. I just recently heard this quote from a clip of Jeff Bezos: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.", and I was like... wow. That quote is the zeitgeist. If it's so revolutionary, it should be immediately obvious to me. I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them. With LLMs for coding, it's like I'm groping in the dark trying to find what others are seeing, and it's just not there.
  • roenxi 2y ago
    > I knew Uber, Netflix, Spotify were revolutionary the first time I used them. Maybe re-tune your revolution sensor. None of those are revolutionary companies. Profitable and well executed, sure, but those turn up all the time. Uber's entire business model was running over the legal system so quickly that taxi licenses didn't have time to catch up. Other than that it was a pretty obvious idea. It is a taxi service. The innovations they made were almost completely legal ones; figuring out how to skirt employment and taxi law. Netflix was anticipated online by and is probably inferior to YouTube except for the fact that they have a pretty traditional content creator lab tacked on the side to do their own programs. And torrenting had been a thing for a long time already showing how to do online distribution of video content.
    • roncesvalles 2y ago
      They were revolutionary as product genres, not necessary individual companies. Ordering a cab without making a phone call was revolutionary. Netflix at least with its initial promise of having all the world's movies and TV was revolutionary, but it didn't live up to that. Spotify because of how cheap and easy it was to have access to all the music, this was the era when people were paying 99c per song on iTunes. I've tried some AI code completion tools and none of them hit me that way. My first reaction was "nobody is actually going to use this stuff" and that opinion hasn't really changed. And if you think those 3 companies weren't revolutionary then AI code completion is even less than that.
• grumbel 2y ago
  While I don't disagree with that observation, it falls into the "well, duh!"-category for me. The models are build with no mechanism for long term memory and thus suck at tasks that require long term memory. There is nothing surprising here. There was never any expectation that LLMs magically develop long term memory, as that's impossible given the architecture. They predict the next word and once the old text moves out of the context window, it's gone. The models neither learn as they work nor can they remember the past. It's not even like humans are all that different here. Strip a human of their tools (pen&paper, keyboard, monitor, etc.) and have them try solving problems with nothing but the power of their brain and they'll struggle a hell of a lot too, since our memory ain't exactly perfect either. We don't have perfect recall, we look things up when we need to, a large part of our "memory" is out there in the world around us, not in our head. The open question is how to move forward. But calling AI progress a dead end before we even started exploring long term memory, tool use and on-the-fly learning is a tad little premature. It's like calling quits on the development of the car before you put the wheels on.
• _huayra_ 2y ago
  Ultimately, every AI thing I've tried in this era seems to want to make me happy, even if it's wrong, instead of helping me. I describe it like "an eager intern who can summarize a 20-min web search session instantly, but ultimately has insufficient insight to actually help you". (Note to current interns: I'm mostly describing myself some years ago; you may be fantastic so don't take it personally!) Most of my interactions with it via text prompt or builtin code suggestions go like this: 1. Me: I want to do X in C++. Show me how to do it only using stdlib components (no external libraries). 2. LLM: Gladly! Here is solution X 3. Me: Remove the undefined behavior from foo() and fix the methods that call it 4. LLM: Sure! Here it is (produces solution X again) 5. Me: No you need to remove the use of uninitialized variables as the out parameters. 6. LLM: Oh certainly! Here is the correct solution (produces a completely different solution that also has issues) 7. Me: No go back to the first one etc For the ones that suggest code, it can at least suggest some very simple boilerplate very easily (e.g. gtest and gmock stuff for C++), but asking it to do anything more significant is a real gamble. Often I end up spending more time scrutinizing the suggested code than writing a version of it myself.
  • rchaud 2y ago
    The difference is that interns can learn, and can benefit from reference items like a prior report, whose format and structure they can follow when working on the revisions. AI is just AI. You can upload a reference file for it to summarize, but it's not going to be able to look at the structure of the file and use that as a template for future reports. You'll still have to spoon-feed it constantly.
  • red-iron-pine 2y ago
    interns can generally also tell me "tbh i have no damn idea", while AI just talks out it's virtual ass, and I can't read from it's voice or behavior that maybe it's not sure. interns can also be clever and think outside the box. this is mostly not good, but sometimes they will surprise you in a good way. the AI by definition can only copy what someone else has done.
  • yifanl 2y ago
    7 is the worst part about trying to review my coworker's code that I'm 99% confident is copilot output - and to be clear, I don't really care how someone chooses to write their code, I'll still review it as evenly as I can. I'll very rarely ask someone to completely rewrite a patch, but so often a few minor comments get addressed with an entire new block of code that forces me to do a full re-review, and I can't get it across to him that that's not what I'm asking for.
• kledru 2y ago
  github copilot is a bit outdated technology to be fair...
• edanm 2y ago
  > If you have a revolutionary intelligence product, why is it not working for me? Is programming itself revolutionary? Yes. Does it work for most people? I don't even know how to parse that question, most people aren't programmers and need to spend a lot of effort to be able to harness a tool like programming. Especially in the early days of software dev, when programming was much harder. Your position of "I'll only trust things I see with my own eyes" is not a very good one, IMO. I mean, for sure the internet is full of hype and tricksters, but your comment yesterday was on a Tweet by Steve Yegge, a famous and influential software developer and software blogger, who some of us have been reading for twenty years and has taught us tons. He's not a trickster, not a fraud, and if he says "this technology is actually useful for me, in practice" then I believe he has definitely found an actual use of the technology. Whether I can find a similar use for that technology is a question - it's not always immediate. He might be working in a different field, with different constraints, etc. But most likely, he's just doing something he's learned how to do and I don't, meaning I want to learn it.
• bdangubic 2y ago
  If you have a revolutionary intelligence product, why is it not working for me? This is kind of like if I said when the first dumbbell was invented “why don’t I look like arnold schwarzenegger…