<story><title>AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JimmyRuska</author><text>Having spent a lot of time with GPT-4 recently, it&amp;#x27;s possible the new generation will not have the same issues we did. For example they can write some code and say, &amp;quot;adjust for best practice&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Then &amp;quot;explain why &amp;lt;my code&amp;gt; needs to be &amp;lt;new code&amp;gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Oh this is called &amp;lt;new concept&amp;gt;, give me an example of it. Give me another example. Give me another example. Give me use cases where this would be better. Give me a short story where it was done my way but it lead to a mishap in production and the protagonist learned &amp;lt;new concept&amp;gt;. Explain it like I&amp;#x27;m 5. etc&lt;p&gt;Basically the new generation is the training neural network, and they can keep flashing context until they absorb the material. Sure, some people are lazy and will go as far as getting something barely working. But superpowers are available for those who fight for their place in the world</text></item><item><author>zamfi</author><text>@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code &lt;i&gt;from scratch&lt;/i&gt; for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT.&lt;p&gt;We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply &lt;i&gt;see&lt;/i&gt; basic syntax errors; we will be the ones who can point out simple but subtle errors immediately—because we’ve made them 10000 times; we will be the ones who can take a ChatGPT response and immediately identify how it’s lacking not just in outcome but in edge case handling. We came of age before stack overflow, and have matured to the point where we treat stack overflow answers as mere suggestions for a possible approach, not as code to be copied and adapted.&lt;p&gt;And then, when we are no more, there will be no one left who can wrangle the turtles that reach the bottommost depths of the full stack.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jsty</author><text>&amp;gt; Then &amp;quot;explain why &amp;lt;my code&amp;gt; needs to be &amp;lt;new code&amp;gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It would be nice, but until there&amp;#x27;s a breakthrough on having LLMs &amp;#x2F; other models generate, maintain and walk the user through a representation of their reasoning, these explanations are likely no more reliable than a random StackOverflow answer - except without the benefit of other users scoring &amp;#x2F; picking holes in the answer</text></comment>
<story><title>AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects</title><url>https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JimmyRuska</author><text>Having spent a lot of time with GPT-4 recently, it&amp;#x27;s possible the new generation will not have the same issues we did. For example they can write some code and say, &amp;quot;adjust for best practice&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Then &amp;quot;explain why &amp;lt;my code&amp;gt; needs to be &amp;lt;new code&amp;gt;&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Oh this is called &amp;lt;new concept&amp;gt;, give me an example of it. Give me another example. Give me another example. Give me use cases where this would be better. Give me a short story where it was done my way but it lead to a mishap in production and the protagonist learned &amp;lt;new concept&amp;gt;. Explain it like I&amp;#x27;m 5. etc&lt;p&gt;Basically the new generation is the training neural network, and they can keep flashing context until they absorb the material. Sure, some people are lazy and will go as far as getting something barely working. But superpowers are available for those who fight for their place in the world</text></item><item><author>zamfi</author><text>@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code &lt;i&gt;from scratch&lt;/i&gt; for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT.&lt;p&gt;We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply &lt;i&gt;see&lt;/i&gt; basic syntax errors; we will be the ones who can point out simple but subtle errors immediately—because we’ve made them 10000 times; we will be the ones who can take a ChatGPT response and immediately identify how it’s lacking not just in outcome but in edge case handling. We came of age before stack overflow, and have matured to the point where we treat stack overflow answers as mere suggestions for a possible approach, not as code to be copied and adapted.&lt;p&gt;And then, when we are no more, there will be no one left who can wrangle the turtles that reach the bottommost depths of the full stack.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lelanthran</author><text>&amp;gt; Having spent a lot of time with GPT-4 recently, it&amp;#x27;s possible the new generation will not have the same issues we did. For example they can write some code and say, &amp;quot;adjust for best practice&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Not iteratively forever, the only feedback it will (eventually) get is it&amp;#x27;s own feedback, because humans will be using the AI best practices, and what it deems as best practice is almost certainly going to be too opaque to us mere mortals.</text></comment>