[HN Gopher] The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals
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The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals
Author : mazzystar
Score : 472 points
Date : 2023-05-10 11:01 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mazzzystar.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mazzzystar.github.io)
| anotherpaulg wrote:
| I have also been using GPT as a force multiplier for my coding,
| especially in areas where I'm less comfortable like frontend.
|
| I put together a tool called `aider` for chatting with GPT-4
| about code, having it make changes and keeping track of it all in
| git. It's feeling like a very nice workflow.
|
| @mazzystar you might want to give it a try if you have GPT-4 api
| access:
|
| https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider
| jonahss wrote:
| LLMs are great for Rubber-ducking!
| zoogeny wrote:
| > Perhaps soon, documentation and APIs will become GPT-friendly
| first.
|
| I can imagine documentation becoming ChatGPT plugin aware. Like,
| the automatically generated stuff that comes out of Swagger and
| the like. Maybe a killer feature for a new API documentation
| startup?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| My dream is that we all adopt tools for detecting when docs
| have become stale. That risk is one of the big reasons for not
| writing extensive docs in the first place, so the whole dynamic
| could change.
| jxf wrote:
| This is an interesting view, but I reached a different conclusion
| than the author. If GPT-4 (and successors, presumably), are so
| empowering, then leveraging them as a collective could
| potentially be even more powerful. We shouldn't underestimate the
| power of highly enabled teams.
|
| As another commenter wrote: "if you want to go fast, go alone; if
| you need to go far, go together".
| Imnimo wrote:
| >Unless you work for OpenAI, your GPT leverage is likely wasted
| on trivial business code
|
| But trivial code is the only level of code GPT can really write.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I think the point is that the individual doesn't reap the full
| reward of trivial code written for an employer. Instead, the
| individual should leverage the new tool to scratch his own
| itch, build products for his own use or as part of a business
| which more directly benefits him.
| collaborative wrote:
| AI tools are absolutely useless once you get past any initial
| stage in a software development cycle
|
| They just can't comprehend what needs to be done even if all
| that's required are 2 lines of code
|
| However, we keep seeing posts from people who don't know html or
| how to create a chrome extension paternalizing on how we can be
| much more productive with AI tools. Last I heard a CEO was
| demanding dev increased productivity or firing some devs because
| he daw a Youtube video on how easy it is to create a website now
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _AI tools are absolutely useless once you get past any
| initial stage in a software development cycle_
|
| Not sure I agree. The initial stage will be the one where most
| of high-level, broad thinking happens. Once the cycle starts in
| the earnest, more and more time is spent on the usual software
| drudge work. I find GPT-4 excels at helping with this kind of
| coding.
|
| I'm reserving judgement on the higher-level / more abstract
| aspects of software engineering, as I haven't had a chance to
| try it. My _suspicion_ is that GPT-4 will excel at helping you
| think through an issue interactively, but may have trouble
| actually coming up with whole designs on its own, not unless
| you spend so much effort crafting a context for it ( "getting
| it up to speed" on your problem space) that you'll quickly find
| better designs in the process.
|
| > _Last I heard a CEO was demanding dev increased productivity
| or firing some devs because he daw a Youtube video on how easy
| it is to create a website now_
|
| With wix, squarespace and other brands I consciously try to
| forget about (in proportion to how much advertising spam from
| them I see, despite using adblockers everywhere I can), plenty
| of web devs are having a hard time justifying their salaries.
| At this point, AI tools aren't even competing with them -
| they're competing with _wix, squarespace, et al._!
|
| Still, I hope that CEOs replacing workers with ChatGPT are a
| myth. If not, that's IMO an _idiot thing to do_. Not because
| ChatGPT won 't manage to do the job - but because the only
| model in existence, that has capabilities required to
| effectively replace humans in some jobs, is owned by a single
| company, has been available for only two-three months so far,
| and that's in a limited beta. We don't _know_ yet what the
| limits of GPT-4 are, how to effectively use it, and at any
| point OpenAI can just take their access away. At this point, it
| 's a great tool to use while it's available, but it's not
| something you want to hinge your project/business on mid-to-
| long-term.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| how do i use gpt4? i've tried requesting the api with that model
| and get denied. nor do i see anywhere in the chatgpt ui to
| upgrade to gpt4.
| collaborative wrote:
| AI tools are absolutely useless once you get past any initial
| stage in a software development cycle
|
| They just can't comprehend what needs to be done even if all
| that's required are 2 lines of code
|
| However, we keep seeing posts from people who don't know html or
| how to create a chrome extension paternalizing about how we can
| be much more productive with AI tools. Last I heard a CEO was
| demanding dev increased productivity or firing some devs because
| he saw a Youtube video about how easy it is to create a website
| now
|
| The only usefulness I see is in AI replacing SO. Once SO dries
| we'll have neither
| d_sem wrote:
| This is why its important to reverse mentor executive
| leadership so they better understand best practice usage of
| LLMs.
|
| I obsoletely see benefits of tools like ChatGPT through the
| entire lifecycle of a product, however not as a replacement for
| things like good requirement elicitation, architecture, and
| product market fit.
|
| In the near future I expect companies to train models on their
| internal code base/documentation allowing developers to learn
| about available libraries, API usage etc.
| blibble wrote:
| > Last I heard a CEO was demanding dev increased productivity
| or firing some devs because he saw a Youtube video about how
| easy it is to create a website now
|
| reminds me of Donald Trump complaining about the health
| exchange website costing millions of dollars when he can build
| a website for $3
| gfodor wrote:
| I've been programming for two decades and you're just plain
| wrong here. It's useful throughout the dev process for many
| things, the worst part right now is just how slow GPT-4 is to
| run inference. You're probably not using it right, aren't using
| GPT-4, or something. It's a multiplier, for specific parts of
| development - the amount of annoying nonsense I no longer have
| to spend my limited time on earth thinking about makes me want
| to cry.
| collaborative wrote:
| Also got a couple decades, a ChatGPT Plus subscription on top
| of running my own local instance of Vicuna and access to
| Bard.
|
| Enjoy it while it lasts. The training set (Stack Overflow)
| will dry as people move away from it, resulting in model
| degradation, resulting in not having a useful AI AND not
| having a useful SO
|
| I admit to using AI, but only for what I was using SO before.
| Which is 0% of the work I actually get paid for (maintaining
| existing software that requires expert knowledge). For
| personal projects, sure, it's useful. Want to code something
| in a new language? Great. You'll still be a beginner, and
| will have contributed nothing to the body of knowledge that
| has trained the model you are using
| gfodor wrote:
| What? You're jumping to so many conclusions here, it's
| absurd. You're going to have to go into research for a few
| years if you want to get anywhere on proving that the
| capability of the current systems is somehow determined by
| the presence of StackOverflow. Sounds like you have a very
| tall tower of speculative assumptions about LLMs today,
| LLMs in the future, the evolution of the web corpus, and
| other big, dynamic, absolutely unknowable things.
| collaborative wrote:
| This is starting to sound like a debate, but I feel that
| the burden of proof lies more in that LLMs are anything
| more than a blurry representation of the data they have
| been trained on than otherwise. I personally don't feel
| like I've brought Frankenstein to life each time I load a
| LLM into memory..
| esafak wrote:
| I'll be really impressed the day models can generate code
| by just grokking the language spec and documentation.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It can do that now. Has an 8kb (or 32kb) context. You
| might need to do a bit of work preparing a concise
| description and language examples.
| esafak wrote:
| Does anyone have any blog posts that elaborate on this?
| ukuina wrote:
| You are expecting it to replace a senior+ dev; that is not yet
| reasonable.
| valine wrote:
| This sounds to me like you have no idea how to properly
| integrate LLMs into your workflow. Just because they're not
| useful for changing large code bases doesn't mean they can't be
| valuable. A few examples of things I've used LLMs for:
|
| Writing bash scripts to automate various parts my workflow
|
| Quickly interpreting complex regex
|
| Tutoring me on how to use poorly documented APIs
|
| Proof reading important emails
|
| Everything copilot, writing java docs, auto completing all the
| cases in a switch statement, etc.
| l33tman wrote:
| Could you? Do you have to? Would someone pay you to implement
| an FPGA design, given that you know nothing about it but have
| access to GPT-4? In practice, I've found that the advantage
| it might give you quickly ebbs out. It surely helps filling
| details and blanks though.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| >Tutoring me on how to use poorly documented APIs
|
| Can you elaborate on this? I would find it very useful.
| valine wrote:
| My current workflow is to copy a bunch of relevant code
| into GPT4 and then ask it questions about how to use the
| API. GPT4 is very good at inferring how to use an API, even
| from code snippets. The key is that you can paste large
| amounts of unstructured code and GPT4 will make sense of
| it.
| nice_byte wrote:
| > Tutoring me on how to use poorly documented APIs
|
| Good luck with that.
|
| GPT-4 is _incredibly_ bad at Metal (most under-documented GPU
| api I've ever worked with), but more importantly it's _even
| worse_ at Vulkan, which is complete opposite - it's
| meticulously documented.
|
| The stuff LLMs are good at is the stuff that a lot of people
| use and talk about all the time, in public.
|
| There's just not a lot of public discussion (with examples)
| about e.g. how to properly use Vulkan in a production
| application, and the LLM itself can't "reason" within the
| framework of the detailed specification, so most things it
| outputs is wrong.
|
| In the long run though, a very likely outcome is that tools
| that the LLMs have a poor "understanding" of just wither and
| die, or are relegated to being something only 3.5 people in
| the world use. I can see a future where literally all
| software is written in python just because that's the
| language that OpenAI's LLMs happens to know best.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It has an 8kb (or 32kb if you are lucky) context. Try
| giving it the relevant documentation examples before asking
| a question.
| nice_byte wrote:
| the point the grandparent was making was that GPT-4 can
| teach you how to use an under-documented API. that means
| the relevant docs are either sparse or non-existent,
| otherwise there wouldn't be a need to ask GPT-4 in the
| first place.
| valine wrote:
| No, that wasn't my point. You don't need docs, just feed
| in the raw source code. GPT4 can make sense of code
| without documentation.
| nice_byte wrote:
| feed it raw source code of what exactly?
| latexr wrote:
| > Writing bash scripts to automate various parts my workflow
|
| Would you share some of those? Bash is fraught with gotchas
| and intricacies and seldom have I read Bash code where I
| couldn't immediately spot flaws. There's often _something_
| which left unchecked may come back to bite you later.
|
| I'm skeptical the LLM code would be any better, since it's
| (presumably) trained on a corpus of subpar code. But I could
| be wrong.
| spudlyo wrote:
| Give the LLM access to `shellcheck` and have it iterate on
| the warnings. I think promising results have been shown
| when you allow LLMs to reflect on their answers and give
| them access to tools.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Shellcheck can't check everything though. I think using
| LLMs on difficult to verify code like shell scripts and
| complex regexes is a pretty bad idea.
|
| I've found them useful as a "smart search engine", e.g.
| if I don't even know the magic terms to search for.
|
| Most of the time it gives me answers that are completely
| wrong, but are close enough that I know where to look to
| find the right answer.
|
| E.g. "Using the rapidcheck C++ test framework, how do you
| test a function that takes two vectors, one of which must
| be exactly 8 times as long as the other."
|
| It gets it wrong but it still helped. I definitely
| wouldn't want to use its output unquestioningly though.
| valine wrote:
| Depends entirely on if the shell script is mission
| critical. I couldn't care less about the quality of my
| LLM shell scripts most of the time. My only success
| criteria is that is that it solves a problem. These are
| scripts I'm never going to touch again, things like batch
| converting files, or like one time I had it generate a
| script to titrate stable diffusion parameters. As long as
| I can skim the output and see that its correct I'm happy.
|
| You call it a bad idea, but it's saved me hours of work.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Semi-serious question: how do we help those too old to begin the
| training?
|
| When I went through profound burnout in 2019, the part of my
| brain that handles planning and execution shut down for about 6
| months. I could barely get out of bed, brush my teeth, etc. The
| grieving process was rough, as well as the struggle to relearn
| how to function in a culture that doesn't allow breaks. And it
| was physical, perhaps brought about by sleep apnea and digestive
| warning signs from stress that I ignored. I survived by
| separating the planning from the doing, by keeping todo lists and
| forming habits over weeks that began to rebuild the wounded parts
| of my psyche so that I could task and adult again.
|
| I've since regained my executive function, but the experience
| changed me. The stuff that used to be automatic became manual, so
| work takes an even higher toll than it did before, and may even
| even have all-consuming qualities. I feel, institutionalized,
| like Brooks in Shawshank Redemption.
|
| I know that AI offers a way to automate much of the doing, and
| within 5-10 years the planning as well. All I have to do is use
| it. But I'm just so tired physically, mentally and emotionally
| that the potential benefit feels like a burden. I struggle
| profoundly to make long-term plans or deal with the logistics
| around that. I will almost certainly miss this wave of
| innovation, just like I missed the VR, mobile and gaming bubbles
| before that. Living my most laborious life instead of my best
| life.
|
| What I'm feeling deep down is that this time is different. AI
| should not be about personal empowerment. It should be about
| lifting others who are too infirm after a lifetime of hard work
| to do it themselves, so that they can rejoin the human race and
| make the contributions in their hearts that fulfill the promise
| of their self-actualization. I just don't know where to go with
| that sentiment, or if my feelings are even relevant anymore.
| efields wrote:
| I feel your struggle. I can relate to it. I think I've gotten
| by in a way bc of the support systems around me, but I don't
| think any of them know just how much my relationship to work
| has changed since around 2020 or so.
|
| If you're able to think and type this profoundly, you,
| personally, are not too old to contribute to something that
| motivates you. I haven't found that yet, but I haven't given up
| hope yet either.
| ilaksh wrote:
| It _is_ a "dog-eat-dog" world and AI _should_ make it possible
| to "raise all boats". For that to be possible then we need new
| paradigms for society. It's very difficult but AI should also
| help us move in that direction.
|
| As far as your particular problems, I hope you find the help
| you need. It sounds like you may have depression and/or some
| other psychological issues, but I'm not a doctor. The way I see
| it is that these types of opportunities in VR or AI have not
| actually passed by.
| bulldog13 wrote:
| Anyone have any good examples or tutorials of specifically how to
| use ChatGPT for greenfield code development ?
| padolsey wrote:
| I usually ask it to write me a nextjs app and deploy it to
| vercel. It gives me a few commands and files to plop in the
| right directories. E.g. `npx create-next-app foo; cd foo; ...;
| vercel --prod;`. Often I only make a couple changes then 5 mins
| later it can be deployed for free on vercel. Eg, it took me a
| couple mins to create a lil app to enable a user to drag/drop
| words of your sentence. I asked chatgpt (gpt-4) the following:
| "Write me a nextjs app (and deploy to vercel) that shows the
| sentence 'Anyone have any good examples or tutorials of
| specifically how to use ChatGPT for greenfield code development
| ?' but each word is draggable and re-arrangeable such that a
| user can drag any word to anywhere in the sentence. Add a
| randomize button too."
|
| See the result here : ) https://dndexamplehn.vercel.app/
|
| It's incredibly empowering to be able to easily spin up little
| proofs-of-concepts or bootstrapping larger projects. I think
| all the naysayers have not experienced its power yet.
| julianeon wrote:
| I've thought it would be cool to see something like this:
|
| 1. Go on Twitter and find a famous account (for visibility).
| Maybe they say something like, "The data shows..."
|
| 2. Pop into ChatGPT and create a data viz.
|
| 3. Deploy to Vercel.
|
| 4. Go back to Twitter, post the link, enhance the convo,
| naturally gain followers in exchange for providing that
| value.
| andai wrote:
| I asked it to design and implement an entire software system. I
| just copy-pasted the output and it (almost) worked the first
| time.
|
| (It ran out of context window and started forgetting the
| design; if I'd started each message with the design and class
| layout it would have probably worked the first time!)
|
| Specifically I asked it for a design, then a main class, then
| for each of the other class files. (This process could probably
| be automated.)
| usrusr wrote:
| "48 hours of conversation with GPT-4"
|
| Heh, sounds like a novel form of torture. The author probably
| means 48 hours total over a (much) longer time, and it had all
| been an enjoyable ride of turbocharged learning and discovery,
| but that's not how it reads to my eyes.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| GPT-4 is still limited to 25 queries/3 hours and that is likely
| why it took longer.
| pugio wrote:
| Every _3_ hours. But also, if you have API access you can use
| the OpenAI playground to query GPT-4 as much as you want.
| Sure, you pay a cost (per token), but if you 're willing to
| front the bill you can move pretty quickly.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| Typo on phone, fixed it. Thanks!
| akiselev wrote:
| The API rate limit is 40k tokens per minute (I've hit it
| with a personal project).
| ukuina wrote:
| That's high enough for most users, I reckon.
| zoogeny wrote:
| 40k tokens per minute is enough for most users is the
| next "640K ought to be enough for anybody"
| tornato7 wrote:
| Indeed, if context lengths grow to millions of tokens,
| and prices are cheap enough, I could see users feeding
| their entire codebase in to ask a simple question about
| it - or feed in every email from their inbox to find
| something specific they're looking for, or use as
| style/content guides to write a response.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| the average person doesn't know the distinction between chatgpt
| and gpt4. it's all the same thing to them. keep that in mind
| anytime you're talking with a non-tech person about this.
| mrbgty wrote:
| >If you are an individual developer, the leverage it provides
| might be 10 times greater, but when you work for a company, that
| number might be only 2
|
| These numbers are arbitrary and if you're looking for leverage, a
| company with a lot of customers is a good way to find it.
| lyair1 wrote:
| I am happy that so many people get to experience the feeling me
| and other software engineers feel when we write code. OpenAI
| democratize some of this feeling and now people that never knew
| how to code can experience the rush of creating something new
| using code.
|
| In a world where a lot of AI Researchers that develop these
| amazing models are slowed down by their lack of "normal"
| engineering skills I think it's very apparent that software
| engineering goes well beyond writing a snippet of code.
|
| Like the internet, stackoverflow, forums and other advances in
| technology that opened new doors and opportunity and democratized
| the industry - this is another one, a big one! the smart ones
| will use this push as an entry point to the software development
| world rather than looking for an oracle function for software
| development (which does not exist yet)
| ipaddr wrote:
| You don't get that feeling around solving complex logic puzzles
| in your brain. You do get to copy and paste
| SamPatt wrote:
| I use GPT-4 for helping with my code all the time and I still
| get that feeling, because once the code base is sufficiently
| complex there's no avoiding the logic puzzles.
|
| Maybe one day it can look at your entire code base and just
| fix it / writea new feature, but it's definitely not there
| yet.
| klprt wrote:
| [flagged]
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| > the smart ones will use this push as an entry point to the
| software development world rather than looking for an oracle
| function for software development (which does not exist yet)
|
| Very much agree. I think mentorship becomes even more important
| now. I have a friends that's switching careers and starting to
| learn software engineering. Just for fun, I back-seated him
| while he tried to build a really simple app using GPT-4.
|
| Even with really fine-tuned prompts, some of which I helped
| with, the code that was generated was either barely readable,
| had performance issues, and/or in some cases was just
| completely broken. At the time, I made the quip that for
| junior/entry-level folks it's like getting cybernetic implants
| in your legs before you know how to walk or run.
| esafak wrote:
| The models AI researchers develop are cutting edge, and
| mathematically involved; the kind of thing I would expect an
| LLM to fare poorly at. And today's researchers are capable of
| implementing their models in pytorch and the like.
| the_doctah wrote:
| People who use ChatGPT to spit out code as a method of learning
| software engineering are going to be seriously deficient in
| fundamentals like performance.
|
| I've already worked with way too many engineers who copy/paste
| code without understanding what it does.
| stasmo wrote:
| The good news is that those copy/pasters are probably going
| to be copy/pasting higher quality code if they're using GPT4.
| hoorayimhelping wrote:
| I don't think this is good news, it's at best not-bad news.
| We're already inundated with _content_ , most of it
| copycatting other content, and it's replacing meaningful
| things, like archetypal stories and philosophy. Look at how
| people describe Marvel movies and Star Wars shows - it's
| content, not stories. Scaling the ability to just repeat
| things without an understanding of those things will at
| best just add more _content_. It will likely contribute to
| the further creation of complex systems people don 't
| understand and can't control.
|
| "Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power
| that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any
| discipline to attain it. Ya know, you read what others had
| done, and you, and you took took the next step. You didn't
| earn the knowledge for yourselves, _so you don 't take any
| responsibility for it._ You stood on the shoulders of
| geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you
| could..." (Emphasis mine).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PLvdmifDSk&t=61s
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| Just about any original scientific text or undertaking
| begins with a literature review.
| simonw wrote:
| I think this is currently an open question.
|
| It may turn out that ChatGPT results in a new generation of
| developers who produce terrible code, full of flaws, with no
| understanding of how it actually works.
|
| Or... it might be that ChatGPT helps newcomers get over that
| horrendous initial learning curve, start by writing bad
| code... and then get better at it.
|
| I'm currently cautiously optimistic that the latter scenario
| is going to win out.
| patapong wrote:
| I share your optimism.
|
| ChatGPT could also empower individuals who may not have
| considered learning programming to create practical
| programs that enhance their daily routines, similar to how
| VB6 significantly reduced the barrier to entry for
| developing various applications.
| ska wrote:
| In my experience newcomers and junior engineers don't get
| better by writing more bad code. They learn mostly by 3
| methods. 1) finding flaws in their code the hard way (slow)
| 2) getting careful feedback from more experienced people
| (has to be done well) and 3) reading better code for a
| problem they already understand.
|
| I'm not sure GPT helps with any of those yet, as it seems
| to be more likely to spit out incorrect-to-sortof-okayish
| so far.
| pulvinar wrote:
| It goes the other way too. I've had it generate code
| using better methods or features new to me, when I
| thought I knew the language well.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I'm the hallucinating LLM? And Other Such Crises it has
| given me.
| sha016 wrote:
| I don't think it will help people learn as much as having
| to write everything yourself. Sure it will get them
| productive 10x faster, as a shortcut. You can only get so
| good at riding a bicycle by watching others ride a bike.
| Remember that caching issue that cost you hours of
| debugging? You don't forget that. Maybe the generated code
| doesn't produce a bug this time, but the 5th or 6th time?
| It's hard enough to debug code you wrote yourself
| sometimes, let alone generated code.
| protosevn wrote:
| I'm on year two of my journey to become a game developer, i
| am focusing on programming and if i realize i don't want to
| work with games in the future at least i have solid
| knowledge on how to deal with a broad area of software
| problems.
|
| I don't rely on ChatGPT to write any code for me but i do
| use it whenever there's a concept i don't understand and if
| there's any problem blocking me from getting forward in my
| many programming books. Having a tireless teacher/mentor
| with extensive knowledge and who does not care however
| stupid question you ask is a very good tool for learning.
| giobox wrote:
| I've seen similar results with teams I work with. The
| strongest engineers who can spot the deficiencies or errors
| in LLM generated code generally get a huge productivity
| boost, as they can compare the "shape" of the output to what
| they would expect for a given problem.
|
| The junior devs, lacking the experience that provides the
| context or knowledge to analyze the "shape", let all manner
| of minor and major issues from the generated code slip past.
|
| I really notice this particularly with say less popular
| frameworks or code libraries, where many LLM code generators
| appear much more likely to hallucinate invalid code. I see
| similar issues with DSLs too, where the LLM starts to just
| guess at the DSL syntax. I really hate when an engineer new
| to a framework just goes to the LLM first, without at least
| spending a little time learning the framework for the task.
|
| All said, I suspect these code generation tools will get good
| enough that the rate of errors goes down enough it maybe
| won't matter in the longer term.
| nivenkos wrote:
| But the awesome part is that you can ask it to explain parts
| and it usually does pretty well.
|
| I was using it for debugging WINE - where I have no
| DirectDraw4 / DirectX6 experience, and it's much nicer than
| trying to trawl through ancient MS documentation myself.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| If performance is a concern, just re-prompt GPT if there are
| any performance concerns, and to propose fixes for them if
| there are.
|
| This is called reflexion and has been found to be an
| effective way to improve response accuracy and usefulness
| (also reduces hallucinations).
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366
| croes wrote:
| How good is GPT-4 in programming something new?
|
| This reminds of all these web programming courses that build a
| todo list or simple insta clone.
| davesque wrote:
| Feels like a pretty rosey take. It seems to me that corporations
| and other monied groups will still have the upper hand. But who
| knows what's coming really.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Has anyone been able to use it to effectively build more than a
| green field poc? It's absolutely great for that, but it's been a
| little clunky when trying to iterate when the context gets too
| large or when trying to add stuff to am existing system.
| jonfw wrote:
| I've been able to get it to write functions for me which I can
| then plug into a larger system.
|
| As an example- I have data representing a cylinder defined like
| so- {radius: x, depth: y}, give me a function which takes this
| object and calculates the volume of the cylinder.
|
| It is unable to understand the context to deliver a feature end
| to end, but if you can give it the fingerprint of a function
| you'd like it can implement it for you (sometimes)
| pohl wrote:
| The beauty of abstraction, though, is that it liberates a
| person from needing to worry about lower-level complexities.
| The same should be true for LLMs. It shouldn't need to know
| your entire system. Start a new thread with judiciously
| restricted context when you move on to the next task.
| btbuildem wrote:
| Yup. We're back to the real problems that matter in sdev --
| thinking about the problem, breaking it down, scoping things.
| Let an LLM do the grunt-work of writing the code, sure.
| chaxor wrote:
| This is dangerous! How do you know it's correct!? What if
| you need different memory management!? What if it writes
| the wrong thing?!
|
| Program only in Assembly, because otherwise you risk some
| real dangers of not knowing what's going on with the code!
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I agree, but I'm worried about where that leaves junior
| devs - what are the entry level jobs for coders in a post-
| LLM future?
| ghaff wrote:
| Assuming it actually happens, how different is it from a
| ton of other things? Hpw many rote sysadmin or paralegal
| tasks of 20 years ago still need basically a warm body to
| do them?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Fewer, I'd assume? What I'm curious about is whether
| anyone has advice for people getting into programming
| now.
| ghaff wrote:
| I doubt anyone has a clear enough crystal ball to give
| confident, actionable advice. Obviously AI, among many
| other things, erodes the value of most easy to acquire
| knowledge skills at the low end. But that kind of thing
| is constantly being eroded all the time and while
| uplevel/upskill is generally good advise, it's hardly
| unique to AI. Nor is there evidence yet that computer
| programming/software engineering is going to be uniquely
| impacted by these new technologies.
|
| Content farms and other low-end writing almost certainly
| will be impacted significantly. But that was mostly not a
| good place to be anyway. Writing generally isn't a good
| bet unless it's effectively in support of something else
| that pays the bills or you get very lucky.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If the future proponents envision actually comes to pass,
| there won't be much need for new coders anyway.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They'll be the ones begging and cajoling LLMs to write
| the code.
|
| Notice that even these days, senior devs aren't supposed
| to code much - they're supposed to train up junior devs,
| up to the point said juniors become competent, at which
| point the juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to
| teach fresh junior hires.
|
| I.e. increasingly, juniors are the only people actually
| coding anything, and LLMs will only reinforce this trend.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > they're supposed to train up junior devs, up to the
| point said juniors become competent, at which point the
| juniors join the rank of seniors and begin to teach fresh
| junior hires.
|
| Some of the shittiest code comes out of developers with
| this level of experience, but they're senior now and
| teach fresh junior hires?
| [deleted]
| bostonsre wrote:
| I'm sure you could get code that would work going this route,
| but I'm worried about the code base growing to have lots of
| duplication and it generally just growing into a mess without
| any standard patterns and it would become a nightmare to
| maintain if that's the case.
| pohl wrote:
| That will always be an issue and, moreover, always has been
| an issue -- not only with code one obtains from other
| humans through forums, stack overflow, and blog posts --
| but also with code written entirely by oneself.
|
| Code we get from an LLM, or someone else's fallible
| wetware, or our own fallible wetware, all need thoughtful
| consideration prior to committing.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| I imagine you could ask general architectural questions and it
| would give you general architectural answers. And then you ask
| more and more specific questions and get more and more specific
| answers.
| stevev wrote:
| Domain knowledge of projects becomes effective when apps gets
| complex. Asking the right questions to ChatGPT will warrant you
| answers to help you tread unknown territory. To ask the right
| questions is to first understand how your app is structured,
| know it's major components, what's potentially missing. It gets
| technical.
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's nice for guidance when you start a project but you quickly
| run into problems if you want to rely on it entirely. I tried
| to use it to build a small library which implements an
| established algorithm from scratch where I can guide it and
| give it feedback but I'm not writing any code, only copying and
| pasting and relaying any errors back to it so it can correct
| itself - it doesn't do great, it loses track of its own
| implementation of things and suggests inconsistent code.
|
| Still useful for many other use cases, just not for "write my
| entire project for me and I'll only copy and paste" yet
| idnc wrote:
| I'm trying to (as a hobby-programmer / itsec(compliance :|) /
| admin / devops guy) https://github.com/idncsk/canvas (early
| early alpha stage)
|
| The biggest benefit for me is I can ask it design and
| programming-pattern questions for my particular use-case(given
| A, should I split some methods of A into a separate module,
| should I implement B as a facade of C or maybe implement some
| observer pattern instead etc)
|
| One strange thing I noticed is the degradation of "quality" of
| the answers some time after a new version gets released, but
| that may as well be just my internal drift for expectations
| yaur wrote:
| Yes. You need to really focus on decomposing your problem and
| use like "there is" "it is" and "it has" to describe the
| overall system instead of relying on it remembering everything.
| Which honestly makes code more organized and easier to read.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Has anyone been able to use it to effectively build more than
| a green field poc? It's absolutely great for that, but it's
| been a little clunky when trying to iterate when the context
| gets too large or when trying to add stuff to am existing
| system.
|
| I'd like to see that too. Just this morning I got it to
| generate a whole lot of boilerplate. Then it appeared to get
| dementia: forgot which language the boilerplate was for, when I
| reminded it it then started creating type aliases for no
| reason, when I reminded it that the previous snippet (which was
| the first part of a single long snippet) didn't need those
| types, it switched languages again.
|
| Very difficult once you get a long enough conversation going
| (something like 5 prompts in and it starts going haywire in
| random places).
| gexla wrote:
| And of course, each project will eventually no longer be green
| field.
|
| While it can help you understand code blocks, I'm not sure that
| it can help you understand an application as a whole.
|
| I don't know that it can help discover edge-case types of bugs
| and suggest fixes. For example, the types of problems which
| crop up when system meets reality.
|
| The can see this leading to a lot of spaghetti coded projects.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| I use AI to help my productivity while coding a lot. I handle
| the big system, it spits out code for me where i know what i
| want but don't know the libraries/syntax.
| biql wrote:
| I see limited context and the lack of sandbox dev environment
| is the main obstacle on way to have more sophisticated usage
| and faster feedback loop. The value would be greater if it
| could know everything about the code base, business
| requirements, related documentation, and, it could even avoid a
| lot mistakes by simple running type checks and the tests and
| correct itself before giving the answer.
| ozfive wrote:
| Could this be done with a vector database?
| cableshaft wrote:
| I've used ChatGPT-4 to create new components in a larger game
| of mine. I provided an example class that does something
| similar and an interface and it flawlessly created a new
| component the way that I would have with the new functionality,
| in like 10 seconds.
|
| I've also used it to create new functionality in the game, but
| those were mostly isolated features. Like I implemented
| controller rumble support yesterday in about 10 minutes thanks
| to its help. Probably would have taken me several hours on my
| own.
|
| I don't know to what extent I can integrate it directly into
| the game, but I think the main limiting factor is the token
| limit and my desire to manually copy+paste enough context, not
| limitations in its actual abilities (which it does have some,
| I'm debugging along with it an issue in a 3D graph class I had
| it create last night).
|
| The code it created worked fine when it was just drawing thin
| lines, but I had it convert the drawing to 3D rects so it could
| have different widths (technically it recommended that solution
| when I asked for line widths) and there's been some glitches,
| namely only one team is showing and the rest of it is now only
| visible when I set the draw mode to not cull anything.
|
| Hoping to get past that tonight or tomorrow. It at least is
| giving me some good ideas for approaching debugging it, I'd be
| pretty much at a loss if it was just me, as I've always
| struggled to debug 3D graphics issues when the graphics just
| don't show up on the screen.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Oo.. interface driven design, good idea.
| cableshaft wrote:
| BTW, turns out changing to CullClockwise for the
| RasterizerState made the graph show up again, so the order of
| the vertices were in the opposite order, which it also noted
| and provided the corrected code for it (basically just
| reversing the order of vertices), so I could set it back to
| the default of CounterClockwise again.
|
| Now on to curved corners!
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| I really liked this article overall, but was very confused by
| this section -
|
| > If you are an individual developer, the leverage it provides
| might be 10 times greater, but when you work for a company, that
| number might be only 2.
|
| Where do these numbers come from? Did ChatGPT hallucinate them? I
| don't understand why both can't be true. Why can't I have 10x
| leverage in my job and use that productive to unlock more time
| and then further leverage myself as a personal developer? Very
| strange sentiment here and also a baseless claim IMO.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This post reminded me that I'm still somewhat surprised ChatGPT-
| like systems did not arise out of China first due to their
| massive investment funds for AI and their base of stem talent.
|
| Once they catch-up their censors will have a super power and
| people will have their writings censored before they hit submit.
|
| Will be an interesting decade.
| rerx wrote:
| US export controls certainly must slow down China somewhat.
| They can't import Nvidia's fastest GPUs, but are stuck with
| buying hobbled variations. Getting a domestic industry on par
| is hard.
| prepend wrote:
| > somewhat surprised ChatGPT-like systems did not arise out of
| China first due to their massive investment funds for AI and
| their base of stem talent.
|
| Does China innovate in this way? I think software is not a
| linear function of money in, value out. Inventing new programs
| and techniques is interesting as I'm sure what the spark is,
| and it certainly takes money, but that's not the most important
| part.
|
| I remember reading in Masters of Doom about how John Carmack
| came up with some of the innovations id software used and was
| amazed that he, alone, came up with stuff that large, well-
| funded teams could not.
|
| I expect that China could have invested its entire GDP into
| stem and AI for the past 10 years and would not have came up
| with LLMs and ChatGPT. Or perhaps they did, but kept it secret
| and would never release it as a product to the public.
|
| But I believe the former based on the few software companies
| and few software innovations coming out of China in the past 20
| years.
| shanebellone wrote:
| IMO China is a "long-term country". LLM does not lead to
| General Intelligence. While the former is profitable
| (financially and socially), the latter is the holy grail.
|
| Time will name the winner.
| chaxor wrote:
| It heavily depends upon the definition of general
| intelligence, because we haven't really settled on a
| definition as of yet. In some circles (of course the ones
| from Microsoft) the list of requirements is very close to
| being met by some of the more sophisticated multimodal models
| (GPT-4 et al). General intelligence is a strange question
| because it's more about the data/environment than the
| architecture, (obviously if it were about theoretical
| capabilities of architecture, AGI was found ages ago).
|
| Much of the LLM capabilities have to do with the generality
| baked into language. Pairing that with the well known proof
| that GNNs are dynamic programmers, you can get some very nice
| properties directly from the setup.
| tiedieconderoga wrote:
| The censors are one of the main reasons why China is so far
| behind on AI R&D.
|
| No unfiltered training data, and severe penalties if the AI
| hallucinates something that is against the party line.
| zackproser wrote:
| What all are you using as your primary interface for ChatGPT et
| al LLMs? I've had some success with OpenAI's default UI but
| mostly I've been trying out various community Neovim plugins.
|
| I feel strongly that I want an in-IDE pair-programming assistant,
| but so far I've had at least one or more blocking issues with
| many of the currently available open source options.
|
| NeoAI is great - for example - I've had it working well on
| multiple machines before - but today after a Neovim / Astronvim
| update I'm getting errors about my quotas (which are fine) back
| from the plugin - and I don't really have time to debug that
| because I need to get some work done :/
| gejose wrote:
| I've been really liking Raycast on my mac with the ChatGPT
| plugin
|
| - https://www.raycast.com/ -
| https://www.raycast.com/abielzulio/chatgpt
|
| I have it set up to open on CMD + Space
| tornato7 wrote:
| I have heard good things about the Genie AI VS Code plugin. (I
| personally decided against installing it because it's closed
| source)
| RobinL wrote:
| I would be grateful for an example prompt for the following
| quote:
|
| >>> Copying and pasting documentation and APIs to GPT-4, asking
| it to write interfaces based on them.
|
| Sounds very interesting but I cant quite work out how to phrase
| the prompt
| gfodor wrote:
| GPT-4 got me through porting a near SoTA image segmenter to the
| browser and building a prototype UX that uses the webcam to grab
| decals from the real world in a few hours that prob would have
| taken me at least 5x longer.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I'm genuinely excited about integrating AI into our IDEs and
| metrics gathering and pipelines because I think it'll pay off
| dividends in tracking down bugs and preventing shipping
| regressions.
|
| But I am having existential dread over my pay decreasing by a
| large margin over the next decade. Not sure what I'll do next.
| Maybe general contracting.
| gmt2027 wrote:
| There's a lot of focus on AI taking away jobs. I believe it will
| constitute an existential threat to a lot of companies. Highly
| productive solo individuals and very small teams will outcompete
| large companies by leveraging AI. When capital requirements,
| transaction and information costs drop dramatically, the optimal
| size of a firm will change. I believe they will become
| dramatically smaller.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > When capital requirements, transaction and information costs
| drop dramatically, the optimal size of a firm will change. I
| believe they will become dramatically smaller.
|
| I hope so. Oh how I hope so.
| [deleted]
| msoad wrote:
| I started using GPT-4 for writing ESLint rules whenever I do a
| code review and I feel it can be an ESLint rule. Simply give it
| the instance of "bad" and "good" code and let GPT-4 write both
| the ESLint rule and the unit tests for you. Initially I did a
| little touch up on the code before submitting. Like using
| `array.at(-1)` instead of `array[array.length - 1]` but now I do
| that with GPT-4 too. I say "try using the latest JS features like
| Array.prototype.at" and it finds other nice things to do too!
| dsign wrote:
| I was watching yesterday the 2006 movie "The prestige", with
| incredibly atmospheric locales that feel so alien. And yet, that
| world is but one hundred years away. It wasn't until 1934 that
| the Public Utility Holding Company Act recognized electricity as
| a utility.
|
| Less than one hundred years after that, we have managed to juice
| out a general digital intellect from humanity's joint efforts.
| Let's see if we survive the next one hundred years, but boy, way
| to go!
| jfk13 wrote:
| > a general digital intellect
|
| That's a pretty bold claim.
| anonu wrote:
| Corporations serve a purpose - to organize human labor to fulfill
| a greater task that usually cannot be completed by an individual.
| So while I don't disagree that GPT-4 in the hands of a layperson
| programmer may suddenly turn them into a 10x developer, I don't
| know if that fact alone allows that individual to create great
| things.
|
| In addition, there will be a great crowding out effect. If
| websites and apps are so easy to create now, there will be a
| deluge of junk to come. Every mediocre idea will be put forth.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| > In addition, there will be a great crowding out effect. If
| websites and apps are so easy to create now, there will be a
| deluge of junk to come. Every mediocre idea will be put forth.
|
| Perhaps it will be the opposite. There's a lot of domain
| experts out there that might be able to turn their idea into
| reality.
| tmountain wrote:
| This is already the case. See the Apple App Store as an
| example.
| designium wrote:
| I actually feel in the same way of how GPT-4 has increased my
| capabilities as an individual than for company. It's insane how
| fast the idea iterations can be and you can actually execute it
| pretty fast.
| andai wrote:
| > I even think that joining any team is a kind of slowdown. Only
| by sailing alone in a small boat can one maintain agility.
|
| I'm reminded of this proverb:
|
| If you need to go fast, go alone.
|
| If you need to go far, to together.
| mazzystar wrote:
| I think it depends on whether you want to go wider or go deeper
| HPsquared wrote:
| Deep-diving submersibles can only hold a small number of
| crew. They often require a lot of support personnel, though.
| Same with going deep on a research/development effort.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > If you need to go far, have an AI carry you.
|
| Modernizing that proverb.
| eloisant wrote:
| This has been true for any new tool, you can do more alone
| using those tools. And you can now do alone things that could
| only be done with a small team of people.
|
| But still, using those tools you can achieve more with a team
| than alone.
| senko wrote:
| > Current documentation is written for human reading, with a mix
| of text and code blocks that makes copying a poor experience.
| Perhaps soon, documentation and APIs will become GPT-friendly
| first.
|
| Yes.
|
| I have recently annotated my Pydantic models and fields with the
| explicit intention to use the resulting JSONSchema to inform GPT
| how to structure some information (in effect, writing a one-off
| client for an internal API I'm creating).
|
| As a happy side effect, this is now better document (information
| about semantics of the data structure elements is closer to the
| definition of the structure itself, not in some external Markdown
| text file or in some walled-off wiki).
| croes wrote:
| I thought the point of GPT is to be human like and not that
| humans adapt to GPT.
| esafak wrote:
| Humans are limited in their language too, so that's still
| human :) It's just that you're surrounded by humans who speak
| _your_ language.
| croes wrote:
| I wonder if this is really a benefit for learning something.
|
| A teacher who tells you the right answers doesn't sound like a
| good teacher.
|
| In hindsight I learned the most from my mistakes and the errors
| I'm to fix over longer period of time. Sometimes these failures
| were of use in later projects.
|
| I missing all this from GPT. It doesn't really sound like
| learning more like cheating.
| esafak wrote:
| You don't need to understand every problem you encounter. Some
| things are just an obstacle to be overcome any way possible.
| Pick your battles.
| alimov wrote:
| I think that depends on how you use the tool. For example
| asking for answers vs asking probing questions while working
| something out. So it's probably up to you as an individual. If
| you're missing out on "all this" you might just be asking for
| answers.
| croes wrote:
| If people built pages or software in one day, they seem to
| ask for answer too.
|
| These means they are the less useful part in the development
| process and can easily be replaced.
|
| That's why I don't see the big leverage for individuals in
| that kind of development. They will be one of millions with
| exactly the same skill set and lost without GPT. It sounds
| like those boot camp courses: Build ten projects in ten days
| to become an genius programmer.
|
| Doesn't work, and I think people will overestimate their
| skill because GPT helped them to do a clone of something that
| already exists thousandfold.
| Karunamon wrote:
| The confusion in terms called out here (and even demonstrated) is
| probably not to OpenAI's benefit and I am surprised they haven't
| spent more effort in trying to correct that.
|
| ChatGPT is a website that lets you do chat completion [1] against
| LLM models, and it exposes some extra functions like plug-ins if
| you are lucky enough to be white listed for them.
|
| GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 are the actual models.
|
| Someone telling you that they did something cool with ChatGPT
| probably means GPT 3.5
|
| [1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/chat
| jstx1 wrote:
| ChatGPT is more than an interface, the models it uses have gone
| through additional training and modifications.
|
| > Someone telling you that they did something cool with ChatGPT
| probably means GPT 3.
|
| This seems like an incorrect assumption. 3 is very old at this
| point, 3.5 is free and the best demos are based on 4 which is a
| huge improvement compared to the previous versions.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Have they? Querying 3.5 through the completion API does not
| return meaningfully different results than doing it through
| the website. Aside from the extra functions like plug-ins
| that most of us can't use yet, the main difference appears to
| be everything on the website is forced through the moderation
| API as well.
|
| Typo fixed.
| jzig wrote:
| Similarily, reminds me of "bitcoin" the currency and "Bitcoin"
| the protocol.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Someone telling you that they did something cool with
| ChatGPT probably means GPT 3._
|
| The confusion is that ChatGPT is using GPT-3.5 by default, but
| if you pay the $20/month subscription price, you can switch it
| over to GPT-4 (with query limits). Usually, when someone is
| telling you they did something _really cool_ with ChatGPT, they
| 're actually using GPT-4.
|
| An extra layer of confusion is the API access: GPT-3.5-turbo
| and GPT-4 models are both optimized to be used in chat, which
| is somewhat different than earlier text completion models.
| Because of it, people using GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 via API access
| (possibly with one of the "alternative ChatGPT frontends"),
| will often also say they're using "ChatGPT". This is almost,
| but not completely accurate - the actual ChatGPT contains a
| bunch of hidden "features" (hidden prompt, extra moderation),
| that are mostly detrimental to the output/experience you get.
| jmiskovic wrote:
| Correcting the correction of a correction: The chat interface
| is no longer using GPT-3.5, since May 3rd. What is the
| default model called? I have no idea. The release notes page
| [1] calls it ChatGPT model, the bottom of chat interface
| calls it "ChatGPT May 3 version".
|
| Also people usually call out when they use GPT-4, but in the
| end you can only assume and be wrong 50% of time.
|
| [1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-
| release-...
| Karunamon wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, playing with the model selector
| gives you a parameter in the URL.
|
| The default model is "text-davinci-002-render-sha"
|
| The legacy one is "text-davinci-002-render-paid"
|
| GPT-4 is just "GPT-4"
|
| One other useful tell if someone is showing you a
| screenshot of chatGPT is that GPT-4 uses a black logo
| avatar, where 3.5 uses a green one.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Wait, isn't the default model of ChatGPT called
| "gpt-3.5-turbo"? IIRC "text-davinci-002" is the old one.
| Ethan_Mick wrote:
| > More importantly, it gives me the courage to dream and attempt
| things beyond my current abilities.
|
| This is one of the small things that GPT has pushed me to do. I'm
| an experienced programmer and grew up playing video games, but I
| am _not_ a game developer. I 've dabbled over the years but can't
| build anything outside of a tutorial.
|
| The other day, using GPT I went through and made a Pixel Dungeon
| clone using Phaser (JavaScript game engine). It was such a
| delight. Together we got the game to a working state before I
| started to change some of the fundamental design, and then GPT
| started hallucinating pretty badly. When that happened, I stopped
| for the night, and then just started new focused conversations to
| add or change a feature, putting in the relevant code. It's turn-
| based, with simple AI, enemy monsters, fog of war, line of sight,
| and a victory/losing condition.
|
| Being able to build this in a couple of days is an absolute game-
| changer, pun intended. I can only imagine the riches of
| experiences we will have as people are unblocked on skills and
| can pursue an idea.
| tamiral wrote:
| release it !
| babuloseo wrote:
| I like how everyone has been using ChatGPT to code in
| Javascript, as I have done something as well.
| waboremo wrote:
| ChatGPT benefits from how abundant languages like Javascript
| and Python are. When you start diving into the lesser used
| languages, the struggle becomes real. Even worse if there
| have been substantial breaking changes in the past ~2 years.
| Ethan_Mick wrote:
| TypeScript happens to be my current strongest language. I
| picked Phaser since I wanted to learn the ins and outs of
| building the game and not need to worry about the language I
| was writing in. This was also helpful because GPT-4 would
| still get small things wrong with the TypeScript, but I was
| able to easily fix those without needing to ask it.
|
| If I had tried this in Unity and C# (which I don't know at
| all), I'd still be figuring out the standard library.
|
| I generally recommend learning one new thing at a time when
| building something new.
| sha016 wrote:
| I'm thinking about doing this without any game dev experience
| as well. All I need is access to GPT4 now...
| rpastuszak wrote:
| If you don't want to pay for ChatGPT Plus, you can use an
| alternative client (e.g. https://www.chatbotui.com) with an
| API key fairly cheaply.
| polskibus wrote:
| I though phind runs with gpt4?
| prionassembly wrote:
| Wait. I have an API key. Is GPT-4 available already?
| marpstar wrote:
| Only if you've gotten through the waitlist. I signed up
| at least a month ago, no word. There was a comment thread
| the other day about getting around the wait by selecting
| the option that you're looking to build plugins, which
| apparently gets you expedited.
|
| I haven't tried it. As always, YMMV.
| slig wrote:
| You have to request the access for the GPT-4 API.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I'm trying to visual the process you're using for this, and
| it's just not coming to me. Can you give me a run-down on it,
| or point me somewhere that has one?
| Ethan_Mick wrote:
| Yep! I answered on another comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35891575
|
| I might expand on this in a blog post.
| martinflack wrote:
| Given the token count limits on input and output, I've been
| wondering how folks work on these long-running projects? Is it
| just not a problem, or are there some tactics? I find in trying
| to build up lengthy outputs that it starts truncating or
| leaving out things from way before.
| Ethan_Mick wrote:
| I think this is a good question. Screenshots are hard on HN,
| but I could write up a blog post about it all once I have a
| demo of the game.
|
| I've been using ChatGPT and GPT-4 since they came out, so I'm
| pretty aware of their limitations. You can't build an entire
| project in a single project. GPT loses the context at one
| point.
|
| With that in mind, break down the project into chunks and
| make each one a conversation. For me, that was:
|
| 1. Initial Setup
|
| 2. Add a randomly generated tilemap
|
| 3. Character Creation and Placement
|
| 4. Movement
|
| 5. Turn-based execution
|
| 6. Fog of War
|
| 7. Enemy Monsters
|
| Each one of these is a separate thread. They start with:
|
| > You are an expert game developer using Phaser 3 and
| TypeScript. You are going to help me create a game similar to
| Pixel Dungeon using those technologies.
|
| I then copy in relevant code and design decisions we already
| made so it has the context. If it gets the answer totally
| wrong, I'll stop the generation and rephrase the question to
| keep things clean.
|
| Lastly, I'll frequently ask it to talk about _design_ first
| saying something like:
|
| > We are going to start with the world map and dungeon
| generation to start. We'll add a character sprite and
| movement next. What's the best way to do tilemap generation
| and store the data? Don't write any code, just give me high
| level suggestions and your recommendation.
|
| This lets me explore the problem space first, decide on an
| approach, and then execute it. I'll also ask for library
| suggestions to help with approaches, and I'm generally
| surprised by the suggestions. Like all software, once you
| know the design, the pattern, the goal, and have good tools
| to help you achieve it... the coding isn't all that hard.
| ekanes wrote:
| Super useful, thanks for writing this up. I bet a short
| blog post with screenshots would go over great.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| You have to input just the pieces you want help with. It
| can't do a whole project, but you can tell it the tech stack,
| and maybe give it a few of your classes, and it can then
| write a new class for you.
| hansvm wrote:
| I use the API and have a generic prompt prefix for each
| programming language and type of task to try to get as much
| bang for my buck with as small of a token count as possible,
| and then tossing in a single query with a bit of project-
| specific code fleshes out the rest of what I'm asking it.
| Prompt tokens are usually around 300-1000, leaving over 3000
| for the response (which it rarely fully uses).
|
| It's garbage at pulling in things from all over the codebase,
| so as a sort of co-evolution I write code that mostly only
| needs local context and only ask it questions that only need
| local context. That works great at home but doesn't suffice
| on the existing code at $WORK.
|
| It's still helpful here and there at work (e.g., given this
| example string please output the appropriate python datetime
| formatting codes), but only because it's a wee bit faster
| than synthesizing the relevant docs and not because it's able
| to consistently do anything super meaningful.
| deathmonger5000 wrote:
| Shameless plug: I created promptr to help with this.
|
| https://github.com/ferrislucas/promptr
|
| Edit: this PR has some examples of what's possible
| https://github.com/ferrislucas/promptr/pull/38
| traeregan wrote:
| Heck yeah, cool! Similar experience here too. In only a few
| hours I got a basic working custom JavaScript space shooter
| going, and I've since started a Whac-a-Mole style game.
|
| GPT explaining it along the way and allowing me to have a
| reasonable conversation with it when something isn't working
| as-expected has been a rewarding and fun learning experience.
| a_brawling_boo wrote:
| I am software engineer and I have certainly attempted use GPT
| for coding with mixed results.
|
| But what I am really impressed using it for writing. I am
| writing the story of my abusive upbringing with a mental ill
| mother. I am not a writer, but this thing is awesome because I
| can ask it to give me prompts and it is jogging my memory more
| and more then I can give it rough outlines and thoughts and it
| will organize it into more of a literary style, then I can go
| through and update most of the wording to my own liking or
| leave as is as I see fit. I am easily able to produce much more
| and a better quality than without it.
| courseofaction wrote:
| I use GPT-4 for coding and technical tasks every day, its
| abilities to make ideas a reality which would otherwise take
| me days or weeks is astonishing.
|
| I wanted to try to make real-world terrain in Unity - GPT-4
| guided me to the USGS's LiDAR data, took me step-by-step
| through creating a mesh from a point cloud, and created
| several scripts to edit and filter the mesh programmatically.
|
| There are some caveats and many dead-end conversation
| branches - GPT-4 seems to know 'about' more libraries than it
| actually knows how to use, so certain library choices tend to
| produce erroneous code.
|
| GPT-4 sometimes picks a poor method, for example conflicting
| methods of moving an object in a single script, but can
| usually resolve the issue when notified.
|
| Dozens of hours fiddling with technical details saved.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I taught myself to code just to build a prototype of an app I
| wanted to create. My plan was to launch the prototype, get some
| market feedback, and then find a technical cofounder or hire
| someone.
|
| It took me 8-10 months of learning to build a prototype. But
| then GPT-4 came along and I could suddenly ask it questions
| about features I wanted to add. I then realized that there were
| so many features I could build on my own.
|
| It has made me far more ambitious as a noob programmer.
| nr2x wrote:
| I've been using it a lot for programming, but I also have a
| security background and it will often generate insecure code.
| I'll point it out and tell it to fix and it will.
|
| So be careful if you don't want AI-generated sql intentions!
| blissfulresup wrote:
| As if injections weren't bad enough, they're now done with
| intent.
| nr2x wrote:
| Intent worries me less! It's the PHP days all over again -
| lots of new coders (good thing!), copying insecure code
| (VERY bad thing!), and it won't end well.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Yes... The last time this happened we got Facebook and
| the world is still recovering from that
| nr2x wrote:
| Honestly one thing that worries me the most is the
| biggest applications of AI at scale so far are to
| manipulate humans to click on things (ads).
|
| Google has been using this stuff for years, OpenAI has
| done the world a great service by opening it up.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _So be careful if you don't want AI-generated sql
| intentions!_
|
| Maybe we should try including something like this in the
| system prompt:
|
| "Remember that SQL is language with a grammar, not an
| unstructured string. Don't do stupid things. Obey the LangSec
| principles. Never ever glue code in strings together.
| Plaintext code is not code, it's a serialization format for
| code. Use appropriate parsed representation for all
| operations. Never work in plaintext space, when you should be
| working in AST-space."
|
| Replace "SQL" with any other sub-language that's interacting
| with user input.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Different people write code of different quality, and we'd
| expect LLMs to imitate the _median_ quality of code. So it 's
| clear that if you have a background in something then it will
| generate worse code than you would - however, if you'd
| compare this code with something written by a new junior
| hire, how would it compare? IMHO there are many people who
| are objectively below median, and for them I'd expect that a
| LLM can generate _more_ secure code than they would write
| themselves.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| The power of LLMs atm is that they allow a person to be
| "median" in a very wide range of topics. This is extremely
| powerful, even to folks that can attain an above average
| mastery. It also does this quickly.
|
| There was a recent article on Slashdot titled something how
| metaverse may increase the gdp by like 2 or 3 percent. It
| was obviously laughed at. It's actually LLMs that will do
| this, and easily.
| intelVISA wrote:
| It's also a solid rubber duck, it'll test you by giving
| you misinfo and you have to tease it back from the brink.
| eichin wrote:
| Yeah, a coworker tried an exercise like this, and it was
| basically (even with as-an-expert prompts) like trying to
| mentor a high school intern that's trolling you (except
| that it won't actually get better at anything in the
| process.)
| orangesite wrote:
| I think it's really cool that folk are using this as an
| opportunity to explore beyond the boundaries of what they think
| they're capable of.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| The post says there's a huge difference between GPT-4 and
| ChatGPT? But which version of ChatGPT?
| julianeon wrote:
| I disagree w him about that. For a podcast search app I think
| ChatGPT could do every easy part of that just as well, and
| without any rate limit. I'd use ChatGPT for the most part
| unless you need to switch.
| M4v3R wrote:
| They mention the 25 messages per 3 hours limit, so I assume
| they're talking about the difference between GPT 3.5-turbo and
| GPT-4 that's available when you pay for ChatGPT Pro.
| mazzystar wrote:
| ChatGPT March Version, I think.
| cosgrove wrote:
| But if you're a paid subscriber you can access GPT4 through
| ChatGPT's interface. Are you saying there's a difference
| between using the GPT4 model alone vs. the GPT4 model in the
| ChatGPT interface? If so, could you please clarify with an
| example?
| mazzystar wrote:
| That's right. I just went to look and it looks like ChatGPT
| has been updated to the May version. But in terms of
| previous experience: ChatGPT's code is almost unusable, it
| always ignores the most basic logic, and I only use it to
| write short scripts. But GPT-4, even if it contains
| multiple files referencing each other, it gives code that I
| don't even need to do Code review.
| arielweisberg wrote:
| I have had the opposite experience. Many domains where it
| can't produce correct code (counting BitSet, WatchOS
| apps), or doesn't even begin to understand (distributed
| consensus).
|
| When it works it is great. When it doesn't gap can be
| large.
|
| When you ask it to correct itself it will make new
| mistakes and keep alternating between different mistakes
| and omissions.
|
| I haven't tried it yet on a real codebase like say a
| database. Is it even possible to give it that context?
| simonw wrote:
| My understanding is that the author was talking about using
| GPT-4 via the ChatGPT interface. That's where the 25
| messages every 3 hours limit comes from.
|
| When they compare it to regular ChatGPT they are comparing
| GPT-4 to GPT-3.5 turbo.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| ChatGPT has been useful to me for learning/looking-up a lot of
| things, although it sometimes drives me crazy. Often I'll want to
| use libraries which are rapidly developing, and the training data
| ending at 2021 kills the accuracy. A webcrawler + chatGPT would
| be incredibly useful. So far I've only found tools designed for
| the web admin (finetune on your support docs + make a chatbot for
| users) rather than something designed for the end user.
| rerx wrote:
| Have you tried https://www.phind.com ?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I have had success just pasting the relevant documentation for
| using the library into the chat and telling chatGPT to
| reference that.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| I'm talking about stuff like Bevy where the docs are
| scattered across multiple web pages. ChatGPT can still be
| helpful but typically copying/pasting a whole doc, asking a
| question, reading the answer, is slower than just reading the
| page myself. And if it's the wrong page, then chatGPT won't
| help.
| iamjackg wrote:
| Take a look at https://phind.com
|
| Being able to search the web allows it to deal with recent
| information: you can ask it to limit its search to the API
| documentation for the library you're working with.
| awinter-py wrote:
| The podfind example in the article is a tailwind page fronting
| itunes search API.
|
| The big question here feels like: how should AI do retrieval?
| 'Generate an interface to hit existing DB' is probably one of the
| answers, I suspect this use case will grow.
|
| Separate question, should it take a few hundred lines of html +
| js to provide this? Can low-boilerplate DSLs make humans _and_
| LLM codegen better at delivering on these asks
| jarenmf wrote:
| LLMs provide nonlinear leverage for experts. So far, I see them
| increasing the divide between developers or tech-oriented people
| and end users.
| seu wrote:
| > Within 5 months, I single-handedly launched 5 iOS apps.
|
| > Staying in any company right now is a negative return; you are
| wasting personal leverage.
|
| Isn't it obvious that this doesn't work if _everyone_ does it?
|
| Also, if the bar we use to measure how useful a tool is for
| society, is that it allows an individual to release 1 app per
| month, then we're doomed whether before AIs take over or not.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| > Isn't it obvious that this doesn't work if _everyone_ does
| it?
|
| Why not? We could have 1000 small businesses instead of one
| business with 1000 employees.
| geek_at wrote:
| Learning something with GTP-4 is so much more fun than using
| google/Stack Overflow.
|
| It's like having a tutor that knows your code and gives you hints
| and solutions based on your actual project. It's a real game
| changer for learning
| camwest wrote:
| I think fun is the key difference as well! Even when it takes
| longer it's a lot more engaging.
| gexla wrote:
| And this is what you might say while you're learning. As you
| gain more experience, you realize that there's a wide range of
| solutions with some spectrum of a fit to your situation. A
| given solution may fall down in certain cases. What I love you
| Stack Overflow, is the context which comes with it. You get
| replies on a given proposed solution which point out where the
| solution may fail.
| zoogeny wrote:
| Step 1: Microsoft buys Stack Overflow
|
| Step 2: They implement GPT-4 responses to questions
|
| Step 3: The community + context provide the same feedback
|
| Step 4: GPT-5/6/7 gets progressively better
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If they train GPT-4 to post wrong answers on the internet,
| and then learn from the responses, we'll have the
| singularity in a month.
| d_sem wrote:
| The silver lining of LLMs impact on Stack Overflow may be
| that the platform focuses on facilitating the deeper type of
| problem solving you describe. My experience with Stack
| Overflow over the years has been mixed. Frequently users
| misunderstand the question, threads take weeks or months to
| resolve, users are called incompetent by frustrated experts,
| answers are indecipherable to a non expert, and sometimes
| toxic. ChatGPT frequently outperforms these weakpoints.
|
| If they embrace a chatGPT interface as a first line of
| defense for users questions, it may improve the quality of
| real questions, reduce repetition, and filter through
| actually good and compelling questions. LLMs still need
| systems that encourage high quality data generation from
| humans to improve its model. I would like to imagine a world
| where there is a win-win for AI and the website we've relied
| on so much over the years.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| The worst is the large amount of questions that solve an
| unrelated problem that's specific to the single asker's use
| case. Question, how do you do x? Response, oh, you can y
| instead and avoid x. Sorry, I want to know how to x, change
| the question
| drbawb wrote:
| >you realize that there's a wide range of solutions with some
| spectrum of a fit to your situation
|
| I ran into this the other day and it's made me very leery
| about using chatGPT for learning things I don't already know.
| I moved on from toy examples and tried getting it to write a
| program in a domain I was already intimately familiar with: I
| immediately realized that this thing is going to help people
| churn out all sorts of code that is a poor fit for the
| surrounding system or ecosystem.
|
| Basically I had it write a program in Elixir as a GenServer.
| After that was done I asked it how I could integrate that
| solution into a Phoenix web application. I had to hold
| chatGPT's hand, so to speak, as we evolved the solution from:
|
| (1) Spawning (and linking!) the GenServer to a controller
| i.e. in response to a web request.
|
| (2) Spawning and linking the GenServer to the application
| _but outside the supervision tree._
|
| (3) Spawning the GenServer inside a supervision tree.
|
| Now technically the application could have worked, more or
| less, if you ran it at any one of those intermediate steps.
| However only the last solution is the robust and idiomatic
| one. It felt almost like a constraint solver to me: we
| iteratively arrived at the right answer by adding more and
| more constraints to the solution. The problem, as it relates
| to a novice, is that they don't have a list of constraints
| rattling around in their head. (Language idioms, best
| practices, framework knowledge, system architecture
| knowledge, etc.)
|
| The insidious thing here is that 1 or 2 are syntactically
| valid programs. If you try to beat 1 and 2 into submission
| you're going to have a subtly broken system, one that makes a
| lot of Elixir programmers very sad.
|
| ---
|
| I'll be watching the Khan Academy guys pretty closely,
| because they seem to have put a lot of thought into how
| students could use these systems safely and effectively.[1] I
| think the answer is going to be we need AIs that are aimed at
| professionals, and AIs that are aimed at education. The hard
| part will be that somehow we need to direct people to use one
| appropriate to their skill level.
|
| [1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not
| _des...
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| GPT4 absolutely does the same thing if you ask it to. Tell it
| to suggest approaches and discuss pros and cons and future
| pitfalls and it does, which makes sense because it is in part
| stack overflow.
| SamPatt wrote:
| This is partially down to good promoting though.
|
| It has seen those Stack Overflow responses and if you ask it
| to give you more context about a certain approach, it will.
|
| I've learned when asking GPT-4 for help to push past the
| first answer, or ask it to offer more solutions. Also to ask
| why it choose a certain approach.
|
| Quite often it will give me a response that doesn't fit well
| with my code, and I'll say "I don't want to do it this way,
| please give me another option, keeping in mind that [some
| important aspect of the code base]."
|
| It then spits it out and it's usually way closer. Iterate on
| this and it's often quite good.
|
| I think you're completely right if a person were copy pasting
| the first response every time, but that person is simply
| using it wrong in my opinion.
| smeagull wrote:
| Yeah, but how do you get access to 4?
| simonw wrote:
| Bing is free, and runs on 4.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Yeah, but it is weaker and provides different, more search
| focused, results than ChatGPT4.
| jstx1 wrote:
| You need to pay for ChatGPT Plus, or sign up for their API
| (there's a waitlist).
| Semaphor wrote:
| FWIW, I got API access quite quickly. Applied March 20, got
| access March 27. My application was only some 2 line
| bullshit, their example for "why do you want access"
| rewritten.
| modestygrime wrote:
| Strange. I applied April 6th and still don't have access
| chpatrick wrote:
| I applied March 16 and I'm still waiting.
| Veen wrote:
| I got API access to GPT-4 almost immediately too, but I
| know people who have been waiting weeks. On the other
| hand, I don't have plugin access on ChatGPT yet, even
| though I applied for that as soon as it came out. There's
| probably quite a lot of luck involved.
| Tostino wrote:
| I'm almost at 2 months of waiting at this point.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Huh, that's weird. I thought it was simply generally
| quick. Did you already have a paid account?
| sha016 wrote:
| I've been waiting for over a month.
| input_sh wrote:
| By paying $20/month with no trial.
|
| Decide for yourself whether that's worth it based on other
| people's experiences. Personally, I'll pass.
| metta2uall wrote:
| There is also https://nat.dev - $5 with no expiry
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Login or signup as only options, w/ zero context? Seems
| sketchy.
| Stagnant wrote:
| The site is made by Nat Friedman, Github's former CEO.
| blatant303 wrote:
| https://github.com/nat/openplayground
| [deleted]
| kasrsf wrote:
| I've been trying to do it to some extent but I can't say it's
| been enjoyable (granted most of it has been GPT-3). It's more
| like a tutor that never calls out your mistakes and gaps.
| Anything you ask, it comes up with an affirmative answer, I try
| the answer and it ends up being a hallucination.
|
| At this point, i am in a place where GPT gives me good
| solutions that might not work vs having to go through all the
| noise Googling stuff to find a working solution.
|
| But it is great just to learn different concepts at a high
| level. Helps me clear my mind when coming up with designs
| [deleted]
| stonekyx wrote:
| I understand the excitement feeling of using something like
| this to greatly reduce the learning effort. Before GPT/ChatGPT,
| it was definitely frustrating to "bootstrap" your knowledge in
| any new area where you don't have prior experience.
|
| But still, I treasure the old ways I learned how to program. It
| was such a fulfilling experience by making newbie mistakes and
| getting corrected in hard ways, and you really only get the
| authentic insight by going through that process, and by reading
| all those important books chapter by chapter. It's probably not
| as "fun" as using GPT-4 though.
| plondon514 wrote:
| I'm leveraging this to build https://codeamigo.dev. Basically
| it's learn to code, but with an AI assistant. The main reason
| people drop off of coding tutorials or stop learning is when
| they see their first error message. I'm already seeing people
| get un-stuck by using the AI as an assistant, this tech (GPT)
| is going to completely revolutionize learning.
| nico wrote:
| Check out the new StarChat model by hugging face, might be
| useful for your project
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| Your website looks nice, but I don't like this statement:
| "Today's developers didn't learn C before learning Python
| [...]" Makes me feel like I am a "yesterday's developer" and
| that it is bad thing.
| plondon514 wrote:
| How about binary before Python?
| pugio wrote:
| Looks very cool. I am also working heavily in this space
| (using AI to help learning).
|
| One minor point: In your demo, you state that "Today, almost
| 50% of code is written by AI, so why shouldn't you learn how
| to code with AI?"
|
| Citation? I thought this _might_ be true of developers using
| Copilot (based on their recent publications), but even that
| seems a bit of a stretch. I guess you could claim this
| because it 's so easy to generate LOTS of code with an AI
| model. How much of that code is used, though? Really 50% of
| ALL code written now?
| plondon514 wrote:
| Thanks for checking it out!
|
| "Today, GitHub Copilot is behind an average of 46 percent
| of a developers' code across all programming languages --
| and in Java, that number jumps to 61 percent." - https://vi
| sualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2023/02/15/copilot...
| twic wrote:
| That post just cites an original [1] from someone at
| GitHub which says:
|
| > Case in point: When we first launched GitHub Copilot
| for Individuals in June 2022, more than 27% of
| developers' code files on average were generated by
| GitHub Copilot. Today, GitHub Copilot is behind an
| average of 46% of a developers' code across all
| programming languages--and in Java, that number jumps to
| 61%.
|
| I'm not sure what this means. GitHub does not have the
| ability to measure Copilot usage across all code written
| anywhere in the world, so surely it can't be that. Do
| they mean code generated by Copilot as a fraction of code
| produced by someone using an IDE with the Copilot plug-
| in? That number still seems high to me.
|
| [1] https://github.blog/2023-02-14-github-copilot-now-
| has-a-bett...
| swores wrote:
| Even if they were somehow measuring all code created in
| the world, considering it's even easier than copy &
| pasting general code to ask AI for shitloads of code
| without even bothering to review it, so code created
| would be quite a poor metric compared to code put into
| production at least once.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I guess it depends on how they calculate the percent. I
| assume it's by character count.
|
| So it wouldn't surprise me. For repetitive code it's
| pretty good. And even with non repetitive code, once you
| start typing a bit it is good at finishing it.
|
| Especially in a verbose language like Java. How much of
| copilot use is something that autocomplete would have
| handled anyways?
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| This tracks since 90% of all Java code is boilerplate.
| cyrialize wrote:
| I've used ChatGPT for personal project planning. I like to use
| Trello for personal organization. I just prompt ChatGPT with
| things I'd like to work on.
|
| For example, I've given a prompt akin to: "Can you create for me
| a plan for organizing my email? It should be a list of tasks to
| be completed in 15-30 minutes. It should follow the S.M.A.R.T.
| format."
|
| Then I gave it prompts to split all the tasks into single line
| sentences with a new line in between.
|
| You can copy paste this into a card and Trello will ask if you'd
| like to split it up into multiple cards!
| lynx23 wrote:
| I feel we have been given a very valuable tool. I think the most
| sublte aspect for personal use is the freedom from having to ask
| seemingly stupid questions. It turns out there are a lot of
| interesting things on this earth. While a good education can
| prepare you for a lot, nobody knows everything. Asking seemingly
| stupid questions can be an issue for some. I have tried to
| cultivate this ability during my lifetime, and have practiced it
| with people I know are knowledgable in a specific field. But even
| with that, I catch myself feeling liberated to be able to
| "privately" ask questions that come to my mind in a more specific
| way then just firing up a Google search. A search is always more
| involved. True, I have to be on a different sort of guard when
| asking an LLM for an explanation for something, but it feels like
| very useful and time-saving for the quick introduction to
| something you just happened to think about.
| bguberfain wrote:
| > freedom from having to ask seemingly stupid questions With
| almost no risk of receiving a rude answer
| nico wrote:
| Small teams are the future
|
| AI is the new Linux
|
| No single entity can own it or control it
|
| This will impact everything in tech
| vemv wrote:
| There's a long gap from: I built a podcast search
| website
|
| to: Staying in any company right now is a
| negative return.
|
| We humans are too easily impressed by tricks, and are too willing
| to extrapolate them to fantasy land.
|
| GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small
| tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power
| tomorrow's world is uncharted territory.
|
| Can you build something meaningful, substantial, robust out of
| statistical knowledge, without real reasoning behind?
|
| If you believe it's possible, where's everyone's array of
| profitable, newly-founded ventures? Or at least have you
| automated your job away yet?
| Thrymr wrote:
| Indeed, it is far from clear that, even if an individual can
| leverage the productivity gains, that individual can generate
| revenue from what they're doing.
| samstave wrote:
| > _GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small
| tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power
| tomorrow 's world is uncharted territory._
|
| There is an _INCREDIBLE_ amount of opaque BI that can be
| unlocked with GPT /AI etc.
|
| I have already used it to get some extremely quick market infor
| about certain things.
|
| AI is going to make a lot of people smarter, much faster and
| cheaper than current institutions.
|
| classes are going to get more refined, and honestly, certain
| industries need to be utterly destroyed by AI (legal being my
| primary target, as they have too much fraud)
| pulvinar wrote:
| And yet another use for it:
|
| GPT4: _In the context provided, 'BI' likely stands for
| 'Business Intelligence'._
| boh wrote:
| Despite the novelty and excitement, the profit potential for AI
| generated applications and content isn't particularly strong.
| If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else. You
| work at a company to make money. Using AI doesn't magically
| allow you to do that. If you have the ability to make a
| profitable company, AI may help, but it's not a business plan.
| throwuwu wrote:
| As always, you still have to bring your own ideas and hustle
| to the table. The difference is that GPT flattens the
| learning curve on a lot of things that would previously
| prevent you from executing on your ideas and it helps keep
| the momentum up when you hit the hard part of the grind.
| [deleted]
| throwaway290 wrote:
| And it does so for everyone else. The landscape is as flat
| as ever, the winning party is whoever you pay for running
| GPT.
| nr2x wrote:
| It's amazing for prototypes and writing utility functions,
| but for fully scalable and supportable architecture it's a
| long ways off.
|
| Likewise, it often generates very complex and confusing
| code - specifically regex in my experience where I can get
| the job done in a much more readable way.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I use it all day as a little coding
| helper, but while it can say, advise you on how to set up a
| distributed system, it's not rolling out VMs and DB
| clusters.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Yeah people haven't used GPT enough if they think it can
| do all these things. Same with AutoGPT - it's a total
| joke that got hyped up to high heavens. Go try to make it
| actually do anything of value and watch it struggle to
| parse Google results and get stuck in an infinite loop
| every time. LangChain has the right idea because you must
| break down the task to small parts and program the thing
| to do the correct thing after each step
| nr2x wrote:
| It's a really good intern.
| throwuwu wrote:
| Being amazing at prototypes is exactly what a one dev
| operation needs. You can worry about scaling after you
| know whether people will pay for it or not.
| nr2x wrote:
| 100% agree and that's what I use it for. My point is more
| it's a time saver, but not a replacement for higher order
| operations. Yet.
| tmzt wrote:
| What's the fundamental difference between generating
| Terraform to a spec and "rolling out VMs and DB
| clusters"?
| rounakdatta wrote:
| > If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else
|
| The idea / creativity is hence the key. Novel ideas don't
| occur to everyone.
| ska wrote:
| Not really. Ideas have always been cheap. They occur to
| everyone. Most of them aren't great, let alone good.
|
| But good ideas, even great ones, rarely mean much on their
| own. It's always been execution.
| mistermann wrote:
| Technically, you are necessarily speculating....an idea
| that does not occur to many people during real time
| cognition.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well you need both, a great idea and great execution. I
| agree with your sentiment though that execution (and
| timing) are the differentiation.
| naet wrote:
| If it's trivial to implement someone else can just take
| your idea and easily spin up a competitor, devaluing your
| idea.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This is the ultimate fate of any interesting or useful
| idea. What matters - if you're doing it for fame or
| profit - is the delay between you and your competitors
| executing on the idea.
|
| (The delay may sometimes be negative. I'm reminded of a
| few cases where someone made a successful Kickstarter,
| only to discover mid-way through fundraising that
| factories in China are already busy manufacturing their
| product for someone else.)
| georgehotelling wrote:
| It's worth noting that the podcast search website makes request
| to Apple's podcast search API, then formats the results.
|
| I would be interested if OP could glean enough from GPT to
| build the search index as well, a much more complicated
| project.
| drvdevd wrote:
| While I agree that is a bit of an extreme statement (many
| companies are also adopting LLMs from what I've been reading
| here on HN), this part just below that does seem insightful:
|
| > Unless you work for OpenAI, your GPT leverage is likely
| wasted on trivial business code, and even more likely that due
| to the overwhelming amount of poor code, GPT with its 4/8k
| context window is unable to optimize, further weakening the
| leverage.
|
| If you are sitting at a company in this situation it is of
| course arguable that you were already experiencing a negative
| return pre GPT-4, but certainly that productivity feeling from
| GPT-4 probably makes it seem even worse.
| dabei wrote:
| I read it as an experiment and hypothesis. The author is on a
| quest to prove their hypotheses. I appreciate the insight into
| the work in progress and the potential outcomes. It's more
| beneficial for me than waiting several months to see it fully
| proven.
| chaxor wrote:
| Totally agreed.
|
| Punch cards are such an arduous technology to use, they're
| effectively useless. Therefore it's pretty clear to me
| computation is not really going anywhere as a technology and I
| highly doubt much more progress can be made.
|
| (Sentiment of some, years ago)
| nielsole wrote:
| > If you believe it's possible, where's everyone's array of
| profitable, newly-founded ventures? Or at least have you
| automated your job away yet?
|
| Come on now. GPT 4 is not even out for two months. API access
| is not yet widely available. Legal questions are preventing
| many conservative players from adoption. How fast do you think
| progress propagates?
| throwuwu wrote:
| The OP better buy some ketchup cause they'll be eating those
| words in a few months.
| nr2x wrote:
| On top of no generally available API, GPT-4 in ChatGPT is
| really damn slow right now.
|
| Unless you have a special deal (Microsoft) the only
| performant option is 3.5-turbo. In my experience for coding
| and text summarization it's totally fine with a limited
| benefit from GPT-4, which is more impressive at higher order
| reasoning and planning.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Interestingly (or not), Perplexity's GPT-4 chatbot is
| noticeably faster than ChatGPT-4 for me. I don't find its
| implementation quite as helpful, though, which is weird I
| think?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| a lot of good software doesn't take off today because selling
| it is a slog. AI could help there too, but probably not much
| (especially for getting the first 10 to 100 customers).
|
| e.g. say you used GPT-4 to clone something like Fivetran but
| with your own unique features. It could even be way better
| across some dimensions, but you still need to convince users
| to try it and I don't see AI helping with that (at least not
| yet!).
| renjimen wrote:
| > Staying in any company right now is a negative return; you are
| wasting personal leverage.
|
| I think it's a bit sad that the only benefit someone can see in
| their workplace is their salary.
|
| Also, I get the feeling this person has never done anything
| outside of consumer app development with minimal stakeholder
| interaction.
|
| Overall I think it's great we can supercharge our learning and
| coding capabilities, but it would be naive to think knowledge and
| coding can let you do anything you want.
| mazzystar wrote:
| As the author of the article, I would say it has nothing to do
| with money. It has to do with your definition of living your
| life in a more meaningful way. By return I don't mean money,
| but your energy, time and potential.
|
| Also, I admire the group that optimized OS, but I'm just not
| used to teamwork. In my previous job, once I had come up with
| an idea of having a virtual pet, and they thought it was
| awesome, but when I said that you could define having any
| content, including a ball of lightning or even a nebula, no one
| seemed to know what I was talking about.
| renjimen wrote:
| Thanks for replying! Also, great username, great band.
|
| I totally agree there are different strokes for different
| folks, and some sectors are really well suited to solo work.
| I personally enjoy the security of working for a company and
| having a large set of diverse colleagues. I know many here on
| HN are more of the startup mindset, like yourself.
| mazzystar wrote:
| Yes, so I believe the target audience for this article is
| people who want to create and make a small difference in
| the world using only their own hands.
| nr2x wrote:
| A) awesome username, b) I love my work and hired somebody who
| also loves the work. I told them explicitly up front this is
| a relationship based on the capitalist structure we live in
| and to keep an eye out for better pay but to give me a chance
| to make a counter.
|
| Nobody should be exploited and in my experience the easiest
| people to rip off are the passionate ones - which is why my
| advice to such people is always to get paid because somebody
| up the stack is siphoning off what should be yours.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think it's a bit sad that the only benefit someone can see
| in their workplace is their salary.
|
| It's not the only benefit, but it's the only one that you can't
| get in some other way. I suspect that very few people -- even
| people who love their jobs -- would continue working in them if
| they weren't getting paid.
| renjimen wrote:
| Well yeah, but we're unlikely to ever live in a world where
| there aren't paid jobs. Personally, I enjoy working with
| people. I may not make as much money as going solo but
| holistically my work life is improved by having colleagues. I
| think the same is true for most people. No person is an
| island.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| There are plenty of ways of collaborating that don't
| involve a Paid job.
|
| "No person is an island". I hate quotes like this, things
| that have the veneer of truth without any actual
| corroborating data. I am a textbook introvert, I get no
| greater joy and contentment when spending a Saturday
| morning pursuing a personal project solo style.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think the same is true for most people.
|
| Sure, the same is true for me. But that's also a need that
| can be filled without working for someone.
| theonething wrote:
| Hard agree on this.
|
| I think what we're talking about here is having a sense
| of community or at least human to human interaction. I
| can think of so many ways to get that without the
| obligations that come from having a job.
|
| I generally enjoy my job but that is far from the main
| reason I do it. If money was not an issue, there are so
| many other things in life I would enjoy doing far more
| not to mention enjoying the general freedom that comes
| from not needing to work.
| justsocrateasin wrote:
| Well, obviously - you need to make money. So if you're not
| getting paid at your current job, many people can't _afford_
| to stay at their current job. If I had UBI or some kind of
| trust fund, I might stay at my current job. I really do enjoy
| it and think I 'm better off with the structure it provides
| me.
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