5 ms·

Pretty weak analogy. Copilot can show you how to make either McDonalds or a Michelin starred restaurant meal. It is endlessly variable.

ehutch79 2y ago
I can do neither. McDonald’s is a system for delivering food fast and cheap at scale. It breaks down when making one burger. If you’re not a trained chef, you will not pump out Michelin star meals, even using the same recipe.
roncesvalles 2y ago
Asking the LLM for something is like doing an "Ask the Audience" in Who Wants to be a Millionaire. You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking.
- selcuka 2y ago
  > You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking. There is nothing wrong with going with the consensus answer. Sure, you can't invent an O(N) sorting algorithm with the consensus, but LLMs can definitely write good, maintainable code. Michelin star analogy might be an exaggeration, but it can help cook a good homemade meal, possibly even better than most wannabe home cooks.
  - alganet 2y ago
    Dude, ask ChatGPT to explain the analogy for you. It understood well enough. It will save both of us some time. Maybe AI is useful for some things after all.
    - selcuka 2y ago
      Not sure about the reason for the personal attack, but my comment wasn't a reply to you. Michelin star restaurant was not even your analogy. I guess you are right, though. AI is useful for some things. At least it reads the prompt before responding.
      - alganet 2y ago
        > Michelin star restaurant was not even your analogy Precisely.
  - roncesvalles 2y ago
    >There is nothing wrong with going with the consensus answer. For most things, yes. But you don't hire experts to tell you what everyone else knows. You hire experts to give you the angle. For example, an LLM trained on all AWS documentation wouldn't be super useful (possibly less useful than traditional full-text search), because what you really want to know is the things that AWS didn't write, the writing "between the lines", all the things that DynamoDB can't do.
- motorest 2y ago
  > You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking. That's perfectly fine, because that's what you expect from human work to begin with. From natural text like blog article or tecnical reports to software changes, all output is expected to comply with patterns we are already familiar with. Heck, look at pull requests, where you ask your audience to evaluate your work hoping to reach a consensus.
  - roncesvalles 2y ago
    You'd expect that from an average person, but not a genius in the subject. "Genius" is almost by definition a contrarian viewpoint or technique that happens to be better than the consensus or the best-known.
    - motorest 2y ago
      > You'd expect that from an average person, but not a genius in the subject. That's perfectly fine. It doesn't take a genius to write a webpage or a report.
alganet 2y ago
It's kind of true story actually. I found one of my license texts for a hobby project[0] in a Microsoft product[1]. I have no idea how they use it. Copilot is very poor at understanding how the DSL arrangement of the project works or how to assemble validator trees. Before Copilot many other "enterprise" stuff like JetBrains IDEs had problems auto-completing it. But it was always good enough for me, for my own things. It obviously have value. Maybe they're lazy and using it for something unrelated like the TLD list. I really don't know. What I know is that something of my amateur dish ended up being served in what I consider to be a fast food chain. No, copilot is not endlessly variable. It works best with typed languages and an enterprise mindset. That's exactly the point against "vibe coding" they push. MS seems to despise anything that doesn't follow that. Look, I love typescript and all that stuff. As I said, McDonalds meals are delicious. But I don't want that approach for everything I code. This project is not the only one with that issue. I noticed the same in a portable shell compatibility layer, it can only help if I make it to look like other script languages. "You're asking too much, how can copilot help with a language it was not trained on?" I am not asking it to be good at that. Just don't make asshole posts saying anything other than MS pasteurization is "vibes". If they paid me, then that would be another story. But they didn't, and used my "vibe" project anyways. I am not complaining about software I released for free, before anyone tries to go for that. I am making an observation about kinds of software that copilot can't help with. My kind of software development, in which I might take months to decide a name or redo everything several times just to try a new kind of sauce. [0]: https://github.com/Respect/Validation https://github.com/Respect/Validation [1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-teams-third-party-notice-for-windows-phone-5fd21fb8-601e-418c-adb1-d9f0f8dcceae https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-teams-t...
- motorest 2y ago
  > No, copilot is not endlessly variable. It works best with typed languages and an enterprise mindset. I don't think your assumption is true. The key factor is the corpus used to train it, and the context you fed it. I already experienced Copilot fumbling references to methods of a simple Java class, whereas it pulled off thinks like ARM templates flawlessly. You need to understand that internally LLMs do probability-based text completion. If you feed them enough context to maximize the probability they output things you expect, they do so.

ehutch79 2y ago

I can do neither. McDonald’s is a system for delivering food fast and cheap at scale. It breaks down when making one burger. If you’re not a trained chef, you will not pump out Michelin star meals, even using the same recipe.

roncesvalles 2y ago

Asking the LLM for something is like doing an "Ask the Audience" in Who Wants to be a Millionaire. You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking.

selcuka 2y ago
> You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking. There is nothing wrong with going with the consensus answer. Sure, you can't invent an O(N) sorting algorithm with the consensus, but LLMs can definitely write good, maintainable code. Michelin star analogy might be an exaggeration, but it can help cook a good homemade meal, possibly even better than most wannabe home cooks.
- alganet 2y ago
  Dude, ask ChatGPT to explain the analogy for you. It understood well enough. It will save both of us some time. Maybe AI is useful for some things after all.
  - selcuka 2y ago
    Not sure about the reason for the personal attack, but my comment wasn't a reply to you. Michelin star restaurant was not even your analogy. I guess you are right, though. AI is useful for some things. At least it reads the prompt before responding.
    - alganet 2y ago
      > Michelin star restaurant was not even your analogy Precisely.
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  >There is nothing wrong with going with the consensus answer. For most things, yes. But you don't hire experts to tell you what everyone else knows. You hire experts to give you the angle. For example, an LLM trained on all AWS documentation wouldn't be super useful (possibly less useful than traditional full-text search), because what you really want to know is the things that AWS didn't write, the writing "between the lines", all the things that DynamoDB can't do.
motorest 2y ago
> You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking. That's perfectly fine, because that's what you expect from human work to begin with. From natural text like blog article or tecnical reports to software changes, all output is expected to comply with patterns we are already familiar with. Heck, look at pull requests, where you ask your audience to evaluate your work hoping to reach a consensus.
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  You'd expect that from an average person, but not a genius in the subject. "Genius" is almost by definition a contrarian viewpoint or technique that happens to be better than the consensus or the best-known.
  - motorest 2y ago
    > You'd expect that from an average person, but not a genius in the subject. That's perfectly fine. It doesn't take a genius to write a webpage or a report.

alganet 2y ago

It's kind of true story actually. I found one of my license texts for a hobby project[0] in a Microsoft product[1]. I have no idea how they use it. Copilot is very poor at understanding how the DSL arrangement of the project works or how to assemble validator trees. Before Copilot many other "enterprise" stuff like JetBrains IDEs had problems auto-completing it. But it was always good enough for me, for my own things. It obviously have value. Maybe they're lazy and using it for something unrelated like the TLD list. I really don't know. What I know is that something of my amateur dish ended up being served in what I consider to be a fast food chain. No, copilot is not endlessly variable. It works best with typed languages and an enterprise mindset. That's exactly the point against "vibe coding" they push. MS seems to despise anything that doesn't follow that. Look, I love typescript and all that stuff. As I said, McDonalds meals are delicious. But I don't want that approach for everything I code. This project is not the only one with that issue. I noticed the same in a portable shell compatibility layer, it can only help if I make it to look like other script languages. "You're asking too much, how can copilot help with a language it was not trained on?" I am not asking it to be good at that. Just don't make asshole posts saying anything other than MS pasteurization is "vibes". If they paid me, then that would be another story. But they didn't, and used my "vibe" project anyways. I am not complaining about software I released for free, before anyone tries to go for that. I am making an observation about kinds of software that copilot can't help with. My kind of software development, in which I might take months to decide a name or redo everything several times just to try a new kind of sauce. [0]: https://github.com/Respect/Validation https://github.com/Respect/Validation [1]: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-teams-third-party-notice-for-windows-phone-5fd21fb8-601e-418c-adb1-d9f0f8dcceae https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-teams-t...

motorest 2y ago
> No, copilot is not endlessly variable. It works best with typed languages and an enterprise mindset. I don't think your assumption is true. The key factor is the corpus used to train it, and the context you fed it. I already experienced Copilot fumbling references to methods of a simple Java class, whereas it pulled off thinks like ARM templates flawlessly. You need to understand that internally LLMs do probability-based text completion. If you feed them enough context to maximize the probability they output things you expect, they do so.