We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature and the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI.

The problem is, that code would require a massive amount of cleanup. I took a brief look and some code was in the wrong place. There were coding style issues, etc.

In my experience, the easy part is getting something that works for 99%. The hard part is getting the architecture right, all of the interfaces and making sure there are no corner cases that get the wrong results.

I'm sure AI can easily get to the 99%, but does it help with the rest?

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dent9 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm sure AI can easily get to the 99%, but does it help with the rest?

Yes the AI can help with 100% is it. But the operator of the AI needs to be able to articulate this to the AI .

I've been in this position, where I had no choice but to use AI to write code to fix bugs in another party's codebase, then PR the changes back to the codebase owners. In this case it was vendor software that we rely on which the vendor hadn't fixed critical bugs in yet. And exactly as you described, my PR ultimately got rejected because even though it fixed the bugs in the immediate sense, it presented other issues due to not integrating with the external frameworks the vendor used for their dev processes. At which point it was just easier for the vendor to fix the software their way instead of accept my PR. But the point is that I could have made the PR correct in the first place, if I as the AI operator had the knowledge needed to articulate these more detailed and nuanced requirements to the AI. Since I didn't have this information then the AI generated code that worked but didn't meet the vendors spec. This type of situation is incredibly easy to fall into and is a good example of why you still need a human at the wheel on projects to set the guidance but you don't necessarily need the human to be writing every line of code.

I don't like the situation much but this is the reality of it. We're basically just code reviewers for AI now

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pianopatrick 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think we will find out that certain languages, frameworks and libraries are easier for AI to get all the way correct. We may even have to design new languages, frameworks and libraries to realize the full promise of AI. But as the ecosystem around AI evolves I think these issues will be solved.

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embedding-shape 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, so what I'm mostly doing, and advocate for others to do, is basically the pure opposite of that.

Focus on architecture, interfaces, corner-cases, edge-cases and tradeoffs first, and then the details within that won't matter so much anymore. The design/architecture is the hard part, so focus on that first and foremost, and review + throw away bad ideas mercilessly.

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simonw 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes it does... but only in the hands of an expert who knows what they are doing.

I'd treat PRs like that as proof of concepts that the thing that can be done, but I'd be surprised if they often produced code that should be directly landed.

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teeeew 14 hours ago | parent [-]

In the hands of an expert… right. So is it not incredibly irresponsible to release these tools into the wild, and expose it those who are not experts? They will actually become incredibly worse off. Ironically this does not ‘democratise’ intelligence at all - the gap widens between experts and the rest.

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simonw 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if OpenAI had built GPT3 and then GPT-4 and NOT released them to the world, on the basis that they were too dangerous for regular people to use.

That nearly happened - it's why OpenAI didn't release open weight models past GPT2, and it's why Google didn't release anything useful built on Transformers despite having invented the architecture.

If we lived in the world today, LLMs would be available only to a small, elite and impossibly well funded class of people. Google and OpenAI would solely get to decide who could explore this new world with them.

I think that would suck.

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teeeew 13 hours ago | parent [-]

So… what?

With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this.

Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest.

In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions.

So broadly where is the net benefit here?

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simonw 13 hours ago | parent [-]

You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs?

I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.

And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.

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teeeew 13 hours ago | parent [-]

“I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.”

Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint.

Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!

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bathtub365 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The average person already automates a lot of things in their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs probably automate the wrong thing for the average person (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold the laundry after) but automation has saved the average person a lot of time

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zeroonetwothree 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For example, my friend doesn’t know programming but his job involves some tedious spreadsheet operations. He was able to use an LLM to generate a Python script to automate part of this work. Saving about 30 min/day. He didn’t review the code at all, but he did review the output to the spreadsheet and that’s all that matters.

His workplace has no one with programming skills, this is automation that would never have happened. Of course it’s not exactly replacing a human or anything. I suppose he could have hired someone to write the script but he never really thought to do that.

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zahlman 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What sorts of things will the average, non-technical person think of automating on a computer that are actually quality-of-life-improving?

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simonw 5 hours ago | parent [-]

My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of years ago I was attending a training session at a fire station and the fire chief happened to mention that he had spent the past two days manually migrating contact details from one CRM to another.

I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!

	▲	gjadi 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't want my doctor to vibe script some conversion only to realize weeks or months later it made a subtle error in my prescription. I want both of them to have enough fund to hire someone to do it properly. But wanting is not enough unfortunately...

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simonw 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!

One of my life goals is to help bring as many people into my "technology can automate things for you" bubble as I possibly can.

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phicoh 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm curious about the economic aspects of this. If only experts can use such tools effectively, how big will the total market be and does that warrant the investments?

For companies, if these tools make experts even more special, then experts may get more power certainly when it comes to salary.

So the productively benefits of AI have to be pretty high to overcome this. Does AI make an expert twice as productive?

	▲	paodealho 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have been thinking about this in the last few weeks. First time I see someone commenting about it here. - If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, how big of a price increase companies like Anthropic would need to be profitable? - If you are a manager, you now have a much higher bus factor to deal with. One person leaving means a greater blow on the team's knowledge. - If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, the need for managers and middle managers will also decline, no? Hmm...

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closewith 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can apply the same logic to all technologies, including programming languages, HTTP, cryptography, cameras, etc. Who should decide what's a responsible use?

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bitwize 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature and the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI.

"Oh, and check it out: I'm a bloody genius now! Estás usando este software de traducción in forma incorrecta. Por favor, consulta el manual. I don't even know what I just said, but I can find out!"