Honestly, the best use for AI in coding thus far is to point you in the right direction as to what to look up, not how to actually do it.
That’s how I use Chat GPT. Not for coding, but for help on how to get Excel to do things. I guess some of what I want to do are fairly esoteric, so just searching for help doesn’t really turn up anything useful. If I explain to GPT what I’ll trying to do, it’ll give me avenues to explore.
Can you give an example? This sounds like exactly what I’ve always wanted.
I have a spreadsheet with items with their price and quantity bought. I want to include a discount with multiple tiers, based on how much items have been bought, and have a small table where I can define quantity and a discount that applies to that quantity. Which Excel functions should I use?
Response:
You can achieve this in Excel using the VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH functions along with the IF function.
Create a table with quantity and corresponding discounts.
Use VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH to find the discount based on the quantity in your main table.
Use IF to apply different discounts based on quantity tiers.
Using AI in this way is what finally pushed me to learn databases instead of trying to make excel do tricks it’s not optimal for anyways.
I tried a bunch of iterations of various AI resources and even stuff like the Google Sheets integration and most of them just annoyed me into finding better ways to search for what I was trying to do. Eventually I had to stop ignoring the real problem and pivot to software better optimized for the work I was trying to do with it.
Yeah, that’s about it. I’ve trown buggy code at it, tell it to check it, says it’ll work just fine… scripts as well. You really can’t trust anything that that thing outputs and it’s more than 1 or 2 lines long (hello world examples excluded, they work just fine in most cases).
Have you looked at the project that spins up multiple LLM “identities” where they are “told” the issue to solve, one is asked to generate code for it, the others “critique” it, it generates new code based on the feedback, then it can automatically run it, if it fails it gets the error message so it can fix the issues, and only once it has generated code that works and is “accepted” by the other identities, it is given back to you
It sounds a bit silly, but it turns out to work quite well apparently, critiquing code is apparently easier than generating it, and iterating on code based on critiques and runtime feedback is much easier than producing correct code in one go
The software that implements multi agents called ChatDev, it’s significant more capable than one agent working alone. The ability to critique and fix bugs in the code in an iterative process gives a massive step up to the ability of the AI to program.
Granted it might still get in a loop between the programing and testing departments, but it’s a solid step in the right direction.
There is a (non-meme) reason why Prompt Engineer is a real title these days. It takes a measure of skill to get the model to focus on and attempt to solve the right question. This becomes even more apparent if you try to generate a product description where a newb will get something filled with superlative lies and a pro will get something better than most human writers in the field can muster for a much lower cost per text (compared to professional writers, often on par or more expensive than content farms). AI is a great tool, but it’s neither the only tool (don’t hammer in screws) nor is it perfect. The best approach is to let the AI do the easy boiler plate 80% then add that human touch to the hard 20% and at most have the AI prepare the structure / stubs.
I’m totally willing to accept “the world is changing and new skills are necessary” but at the same time, are a prompt engineer’s skills transferrable across subject domains?
It feels to me like “prompt engineering” skills are just skills to compliment the expertise you already have. Like the skill of Google searching. Or learning to use a word processor. These are skills necessary in the world today, but almost nobody’s job is exclusively to Google, or use a word processor. In reality, you need to get something done with your tool, and you need to know shit about the domain you’re applying that tool to. You can be an excellent prompt engineer, and I guess an LLM will allow you to BS really well, but subject matter experts will see through the BS.
I know I’m not really strongly disagreeing, but I’m just pushing back on the idea of prompt engineer as a job (without any other expertise).
Yeah, I find it works really well for brainstorming and “rubber-ducking” when I’m thinking about approaches to something. Things I’d normally do in a conversation with a coworker when I really am looking more for a listener than for actual feedback.
I can also usually get useful code out of it that would otherwise be tedious or fiddly to write myself. Things like “take this big enum and write a function that converts the members to human-friendly strings.”
All the hype are grifters and Google trying to convince people this isn’t just a search engine assistant.
It’s almost as if the LLMs that got hyped to the moon and back are just word calculators doing stochastic calculations one word at a time… Oh wait…
No, seriously: all they are good for is making things sound fancy.
No, seriously: all they are good for is making things sound fancy.
This is the danger though.
If “boomers” are making the mistake of thinking that AI is capable of great things, “zoomers” are making the mistake of thinking society is built on anything more than some very simple beliefs in a lot of stupid people, and all it takes to make society collapse is to convince a few of these stupid people that their ideas are any good.
I disagree with the last part. Society and it’s many systems is pretty hard to collapse even if you managed to drug a huge portion of the population, gave them guns and fed them propaganda. Now imagine throwing heaps of people into jail like in Czech, still standing just more useless. Just look at portions of the middle east. The majority of people just get good at being lazy and defer accountability to the most violent assholes who then become dictators, the rest of society then selectively breeds the “dictators”.
If this sounds dystopic consider that what you said lead to what this comment is, which is dumb. Now which is dumber?
A little reductive.
We use CoPilot at work and whilst it isn’t doing my job for me, it’s saving me a lot of time. Think of it like Intellisense, but better.
If my senior engineer, who I seem like a toddler when compared to can find it useful and foot the bill for it, then it certainly has value.
It’s not reductive. It’s absolutely how those LLMs work. The fact that it’s good at guessing as long as your inputs follow a pattern only underlines that.
If it was only guessing, it would never be able to create a single functioning program. Which it has, numerously.
This isn’t some infinite monkeys on typewriter stuff.
It writes and can check itself if it is correct.
How is that guessing?
all they are good for is making things sound fancy.
Ehh, I use NovelAI, and it kind of turns writing into an interactive CYOA game. If I get stuck in a scene and I dunno what to put next, I’ll have a character say or do something, and let the AI go “yeah! And—” like a good improv partner in my voice.
But it’s not a “discussion” or instruct model, so it’s slightly less stupid. Except when it gets written facts wrong that are active in the lorebook and memory, and it ignores them.
Can we stop calling this shit AI? It has no intelligence
This is what AI actually is. Not the super-intelligent “AI” that you see in movies, those are fiction.
The NPC you see in video games with a few branches of if-else statements? Yeah that’s AI too.
No companies are only just now realizing how powerful it is and are throttling the shit out of its capabilities to sell it to you later :)
“we purposefully make it terrible, because we know it’s actually better” is near to conspiracy theory level thinking.
The internal models they are working on might be better, but they are definitely not making their actual product that’s publicly available right now shittier. It’s exactly the thing they released, and this is its current limitations.
This has always been the type of output it would give you, we even gave it a term really early on, hallucinations. The only thing that has changed is that the novelty has worn off so you are now paying a bit more attention to it, it’s not a shittier product, you’re just not enthralled by it anymore.
Exactly. It’s a language learning and text output machine. It doesn’t know anything, its only ability is to output realistic sounding sentences based on input, and will happily and confidently spout misinformation as if it is fact because it can’t know what is or isn’t correct.
Mass effects lore differences between virtual intelligence and artificial intelligence, the first one is programmed to do shit and say things nicely, the second one understands enough to be a menace to civilization… always wondered if this distinction was actually accepted outside the game.
*Terms could be mixed up cause I played in German (VI and KI)
There are many definitions of AI (eg. there is some mathematical model used), but machine learning (which is used in the large language models) is considered a part of the scientific field called AI. If someone says that something is AI, it usually means that some technique from the field AI has been applied there. Even though the term AI doesn’t have much to do with the term intelligence as most of the people perceive it, I think the usage here is correct. (And yes, the whole scientific field should have been called differently.)
But it isn’t artificial intelligence. It isn’t even an attempt to make artificial “intelligence”. It is artificial talking. Or artificial writing.
Lol, the AI effect in practice - the minute a computer can do it, it’s no longer intelligence.
A year ago if you had told me you had a computer program that could write greentexts compellingly, I would have told you that required “true” AI. But now, eh.
In any case, LLMs are clearly short of the “SuPeR BeInG” that the term “AI” seems to make some people think of and that you get all these Boomer stories about, and what we’ve got now definitely isn’t that.
The AI effect can’t be a real thing since true AI hasn’t been done yet. We’re getting closer, but we’re definitely not in the positronic brain stage yet.
“true AI”
AI is just “artificial intelligence”, there are no strict criterias defining what is “true” AI and not,
Do the LLM models show an ability to reason and problem solve? Yes
Are they perfect? No
So what?
Ironically your comment sounds like yet another example of the AI effect
We have truly distilled humanity’s confident stupidity into its most efficient form.
Nobody said AI would destroy humanity due to high competence.
In fact it’s probably it’s probably due to its low competence that will destroy humanity.
