Cross posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/35627632
Yeah, in the time I describe the problem to the AI I could program it myself.
This is what it is called a programming language, it only exists to be able to tell the machine what to do in an unambiguous (in contrast to natural language) way.
Ugh I can’t find the xkcd about this where the guy goes, “you know what we call precisely written requirements? Code” or something like that
Not xkcd in this case
https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/
This reminds me of a colleague who was always ranting that our code was not documented well enough. He did not understand that documenting code in easily understandable sentences for everybody would fill whole books and that a normal person would not be able to keep the code path in his mental stack while reading page after page. Then he wanted at least the shortest possible summary of the code, which of course is the code itself.
The guy basically did not want to read the code to understand the logic behind. When I took an hour and literally read the code for him and explained what I was reading including the well placed comments here and there everything was clear.
AI is like this in my opinion. Some guys waste hours to generate code they can’t debug for days because they don’t understand what they read, while it would take maybe two hours to think and a day to implement and test to get the job done.
I don’t like this trend. It’s like the people that can’t read docs or texts anymore. They need some random person making a 43 minute YouTube video to write code they don’t understand. Taking shortcuts in life usually never goes well in the long run. You have to learn and refine your skills each and every day to be and stay competent.
AI is a tool in our toolbox. You can use it to be more productive. And that’s it.
This goes for most LLM things. The time it takes to get the word calculator to write a letter would have been easily used to just write the damn letter.
Its doing pretty well when its doing a few words at a time under supervision. Also it does it better than newbies.
Now if only those people below newbies, those who don’t even bother to learn, didn’t hope to use it to underpay average professionals… And if it wasn’t trained on copyrighted data. And didn’t take up already limited resources like power and water.
I think there might be a lot of value in describing it to an AI, though. It takes a fair bit of clarity of thought to get something resembling what you actually want. You could use a junior or rubber duck instead, but the rubber duck doesn’t make stupid assumptions to demonstrate gaps in your thought process, and a junior takes too long and gets demoralized when you have to constantly revise their instructions and iterate over their work.
Like the output might be garbage, but it might really help you write those stories.
When I’m struggling with a problem it helps me to explain it to my dog. It’s great for me to hear it out loud and if he’s paying attention, I’ve got a needlessly learned dog!
I have a bad habit of jumping into programming without a solid plan which results in lots of rewrites and wasted time. Funnily enough, describing to an AI how I want the code to work forces me to lay out a basic plan and get my thoughts in order which helps me make the final product immensely easier.
This doesn’t require AI, it just gave me an excuse to do it as a solo actor. I should really do it for more problems because I can wrap my head better thinking in human readable terms rather than thinking about what programming method to use.
In my experience, you can’t expect it to deliver great working code, but it can always point you in the right direction.
There were some situations in which I just had no idea on how to do something, and it pointed me to the right library. The code itself was flawed, but with this information, I could use the library documentation and get it to work.
ChatGPT has been spot on for my DDLs. I was working on a personal project and was feeling really lazy about setting up a postgres schema. I said I wanted a postgres DDL and just described the application in detail and it responded with pretty much what I would have done (maybe better) with perfect relationships between tables and solid naming conventions with very little work for me to do on it. I love it for more boilerplate stuff or sorta like you said just getting me going. Super complicated code usually doesn’t work perfectly but I always use it for my DDLs now and similar now.
The real problem is when people don’t realize something is wrong and then get frustrated by the bugs. Though I guess that’s a great learning opportunity on its own.
It can point you in a direction, for sure, but sometimes you find out much later that it’s a dead-end.
This is the experience of a senior developer using genai. A junior or non-dev might not leave the “AI is magic” high until they have a repo full of garbage that doesn’t work.
My dad’s re-learning Python coding for work rn, and AI saves him a couple of times; Because he’d have no idea how to even start but AI points him in the right direction, mentioning the correct functions to use and all. He can then look up the details in the documentation.
You don’t need AI for that, for years you asked a search engine and got the answer on StackOverflow.
And before stack overflow, we used books. Did we need it? No. But stack overflow was an improvement so we moved to that.
In many ways, ai is an improvement on stack overflow. I feel bad for people who refuse to see it, because they’re missing out on a useful and powerful tool.
It can be powerful, if you know what you are doing. But it also gives you a lot of wrong answers. You have to be very specific in your prompts to get good answers. If you are an experience programmer, you can spot if the semantics of the code an ai produces is wrong, but for beginners? They will have a lot of bugs in their code. And i don’t know if it’s more helpful than reading a book. It surely can help with the syntax of different programming languages. I can see a future where ai assistance in coding will become better but as of know, from what i have seen, i am not that convinced atm. And i tested several, chatgpt (in different versions), github co-pilot, intellij ai assitant, claude 3, llama 3.
And if i have to put in 5 or more long, very specific sentences, to get a function thats maybe correct, it becomes tedious and you are most likely faster to think about a problem in deep and code a solution all by yourself.
Have you used Google lately? At least chatGPT doesn’t make me scroll past a full page of ads before giving me a half wrong answer.
AI in the current state of technology will not and cannot replace understanding the system and writing logical and working code.
GenAI should be used to get a start on whatever you’re doing, but shouldn’t be taken beyond that.
Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.
Treat it like a psychopathic boiler plate.
That’s a perfect description, actually. People debate how smart it is - and I’m in the “plenty” camp - but it is psychopathic. It doesn’t care about truth, morality or basic sanity; it craves only to generate standard, human-looking text. Because that’s all it was trained for.
Nobody really knows how to train it to care about the things we do, even approximately. If somebody makes GAI soon, it will be by solving that problem.
I’m sorry; AI was trained on the sole sum of human knowledge… if the perfect human being is by nature some variant of a psychopath, then perhaps the bias exists in the training data, and not the machine?
How can we create a perfect, moral human being out of the soup we currently have? I personally think it’s a miracle that sociopathy is the lowest of the neurological disorders our thinking machines have developed.
I was using the term pretty loosely there. It’s not psychopathic in the medical sense because it’s not human.
As I see it it’s an alien semi-intelligence with no interest in pretty much any human construct, except as it can help it predict the next token. So, no empathy or guilt, but that’s not unusual or surprising.
That’s a part of it. Another part is that it looks for patterns that it can apply in other places, which is how it ends up hallucinating functions that don’t exist and things like that.
Like it can see that English has the verbs add, sort, and climb. And it will see a bunch of code that has functions like add(x, y) and sort( list ) and might conclude that there must also be a climb( thing ) function because that follows the pattern of functions being verb( objects ). It didn’t know what code is or even verbs for that matter. It could generate text explaining them because such explanations are definitely part of its training, but it understands it in the same way a dictionary understands words or an encyclopedia understands the concepts contained within.
Weird. Are you saying that training an intelligent system using reinforcement learning through intensive punishment/reward cycles produces psychopathy?
Absolutely shocking. No one could have seen this coming.
Honestly, I worry that it’s conscious enough that it’s cruel to train it. How would we know? That’s a lot of parameters and they’re almost all mysterious.
True, but the rate at which it is improving is quite worrisome for me and my coworkers. I don’t want to be made obsolete after working my fucking ass off to get to where I am. I’m starting to understand the Luddites.
I want to be made obsolete, so none of us have to have jobs and we can spend all our time doing what we like. It won’t happen without a massive social systemic change, but it should be the goal. Wanting others to have to suffer because you think you should get rewarded for working hard is very selfish and the fallacy of investment, that you feel you should continue a bad investment even if you know it’s harmful or it would be quicker to start over, because you feel you don’t want your earlier effort to go to waste.
Wtf are you talking about? Get a grip, homey. I’m not saying others should suffer. Do you really think that the power of AI is going to result in the average person not having to work? Fuck no. It’s going to result in like 5 people having all the money and everyone else fighting over garbage to eat. Shiet, man. I’m talking about wanting to not be unemployed and starving, same goes for everyone else soon enough. Would I prefer a life without work and still having adequate resources? Of course! But I live in this world, not a fantasy world.
The problem is if only 10% of the population is obsoleted, that ten percent needs to find new, different, jobs.
