Post AdVwIAFZqbtOXAPasa by neilk@xoxo.zone
(DIR) More posts by neilk@xoxo.zone
(DIR) Post #AdVv9oRSwjZucsQUoS by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T20:49:13Z
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Classic example of AI-assisted development encouraging me to build things I wouldn't have built without it... I just added tag cloud summaries to my blog's by-year archive pages, e.g. https://simonwillison.net/2007/I'd already implemented tag clouds as part of my Django SQL Dashboard project, and I had a JSON API that could return the data... so I pasted my old code into ChatGPT along with an example of the JSON and told it to rewrite it to fetch from the new API endpoint: https://chat.openai.com/share/5bbde5a8-0c5b-4bfa-93db-2f83a0bc8846
(DIR) Post #AdVvKJC3T540tbDsfo by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T20:50:08Z
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The whole project took 20 minutes from start to finish - and honestly, I don't value this obscure little feature (on a page of my blog that gets virtually no traffic) enough for it to be worth me spending any more time on than that https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/issues/391
(DIR) Post #AdVvrzXt1bBDnxUnaa by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T20:55:01Z
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At a rough guess it would have taken me ~30 minutes to do this without any AI assistance (since it was mainly adapting code I'd written in the past), but honestly in this case I think those 10 minutes made the difference between shipping this and deciding I should work on something else
(DIR) Post #AdVwIAFZqbtOXAPasa by neilk@xoxo.zone
2024-01-04T21:02:01Z
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@simon Friction is underrated. The difference between being a legendarily productive developer, and just an average one, is completing just a few more things per day.
(DIR) Post #AdVwU83Vph7pCcTR5c by davidfetter@kolektiva.social
2024-01-04T21:04:22Z
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@simon so you've been making stochastic parrots your public schtick for months, and you didn't actually try to do this without them, just compared the 20 minutes you spent to a 30 minutes you...estimated?Will you please try to listen to how credulous you're sounding about this barely revamped Clippy?
(DIR) Post #AdVwnnJydHbUggYIUa by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:07:58Z
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@davidfetter Calling me credulous is a bit rude there!I already know that working like this speeds me up, so I didn't feel any particular need to do a controlled experiment here
(DIR) Post #AdVx1wgebjqDmyuI64 by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:09:36Z
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@davidfetter The single biggest win here was actually the bit where I got it to show me how to put a link in an SVG document - this little snippet of code here:wordGroups.append("a") .attr("xlink:href", function(d) { return `/search/?tag=${encodeURIComponent(d.text)}&year={{ year }}` })Figuring that out is where I'd have lost the most time, because it would have required me both researching that xlink:href bit and figuring out some D3 idioms that I've forgotten since last time I used it
(DIR) Post #AdVxCqxiEV9bDe5SXQ by phiofx@hachyderm.io
2024-01-04T21:09:49Z
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@simon in the ten minutes saved using AI one can ponder the meaning of #wordclouds, whether they need to exist at all and in what sense they might be an improvement over a nicely ordered table of word frequencies :-)
(DIR) Post #AdVxRM9V47kk0XW4Dw by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:11:59Z
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@phiofx I have a table of word frequencies per year already (albeit not directly linked from that page): https://simonwillison.net/search/?year=2007 - the tags facet on the right
(DIR) Post #AdVxfX61AoFo0HeCKe by davidfetter@kolektiva.social
2024-01-04T21:15:15Z
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@simon calling you credulous is pretty strictly descriptive.Look, I get that there are fashions in this industry, and some of them even have something good to contribute. This industrialized plagiarism machinery, which is being weaponized to put wage- and employment pressure on workers in tech, is not among them.
(DIR) Post #AdVxrIpy0tATFtkgfA by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:15:24Z
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The single most useful thing GPT-4 did for me here was showing me how to turn a tag in a word cloud into a link - this bit of code here:Figuring that out myself would have required me to both research the xlink:href SVG attribute and revise some D3 idioms that I've forgotten since I originally wrote this code a few years ago
(DIR) Post #AdVy6jwRWPyrf78s7c by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:17:39Z
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@davidfetter I'm very aware of the many ethical problems here - I've called this stuff "money laundering for copyrighted data" on stage before: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/27/wordcamp-llms/#llm-work-for-you.074.jpegBut I'm also trying to help people who think this is entirely hot air understand why people like myself are using it so much - it's not because we're credulous, it's because it's genuinely really useful
(DIR) Post #AdVy7CXzAQeGNevFWi by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:20:34Z
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@davidfetter One of the things I like about this particular example is that I think it sits firmly at the more ethical end of the spectrum in terms of applications of these things - I used it to rewrite a snippet of code I had written myself a few years agoIt's still benefitting from vast troves of unlicensed training data, but it feels pretty different from generating an entire codebase from scratch
(DIR) Post #AdVzpVPMVJ0VZYZve4 by davidfetter@kolektiva.social
2024-01-04T21:41:49Z
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@simon so it's bad, and you know it's bad, and the fact that you've said so publicly is supposed to be a mitigating rather than aggravating circumstance? Really?
(DIR) Post #AdW05ssX0cR2zx23Wq by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:44:44Z
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@davidfetter Basically yes. Similar to how I'm not a vegan, even though I'm fully aware of the cruelty and environmental impact of the meat industryLLMs are the single most fascinating technological development I've come across in my entire career. They have SO MANY ethical deficits, and yet I cannot tear myself away from them
(DIR) Post #AdW0OVZJtmLgCpvWRE by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-04T21:48:00Z
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@davidfetter my ethical choice has been to invest significant work in helping other people understand them - how they work, what they can do, how to use them and the positive and negative consequences of doing soI figure they're not going to be un-invented, so best to make sure people can use them in the most positive ways possible
(DIR) Post #AdW0ekB1M0Fm95Ips0 by makergeek@hometech.social
2024-01-04T21:50:51Z
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@simon @davidfetter certainly in this use case it's a bit closer to just Google with a better natural language search interface. Probably such an example exists somewhere on stackoverflow, maybe it would have needed a little more interpreting to your use case etc. But I do find chatgpt useful for quickly looking up reference information for API usage etc.
(DIR) Post #AdW6aVzOlBVQi7EWSu by bckohan@fosstodon.org
2024-01-04T22:57:23Z
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@simon All these little things really add up!!
(DIR) Post #AdWNJXuY3nBUy7SWQa by jamiemccarthy@ruby.social
2024-01-05T02:03:37Z
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@simon @davidfetter Simon can I ask what IDE you have it hooked up to?
(DIR) Post #AdWkEbSviO8TUU9XYe by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-05T06:21:36Z
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@jamiemccarthy @davidfetter mainly copy and paste to be honest!I use Copilor in VS Code for auto completionI use my own LLM tool for some terminal access too https://llm.datasette.io
(DIR) Post #AdXAB9ZbYjIOvKI4xM by jamiemccarthy@ruby.social
2024-01-05T11:12:26Z
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@simon @davidfetter Interesting that you’re getting useful results from copy-paste.My assumption is that there’s some magic with the VS Code extension having my repo preloaded into a token window or something, to use my app as context for my questions. But I haven’t actually used that much and I don’t know if that’s true
(DIR) Post #AdXcxdivYrut39YktM by simon@fedi.simonwillison.net
2024-01-05T16:34:46Z
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@jamiemccarthy @davidfetter I've got really good at predicting exactly what information it will need to do something for me and then copying that information directly inCopilot does do some very clever tricks to automatically include the right examples, but it doesn't always get that right