the beautiful code

That doesn't sound viby to me, though. You expect people to actually code? /s

And that's what happens when you spend a trillion dollars on an autocomplete: amazing at making things look like whatever it's imitating, but with zero understanding of why the original looked that way.

Well I've got the name for my autobiography now.

You definitely could use AI to code, the catch is you need to know how to code first.

I use AI to write code for mundane tasks all the time. I also review and integrate the code myself.

The ideal code is no code at all

All programs can be written with on less line of code. All programs have at least one bug.

The humble "Hello world" would like a word.

I’ve never thought of it that way. I’m going to add copy writer to my resume.

No the spell just fizzled. In my experience it happens far less often if you start with an Abra kabara and end it with an Alakazam!

Conversely, code that works is also text

Code that works is also just text.

I asked ChatGPT with help about bare metal 32-bit ARM (For the Pi Zero W) C/ASM, emulated in QEMU for testing, and after the third iteration of "use printf for output" -> "there's no printf with bare metal as target" -> "use solution X" -> "doesn't work" -> "ude printf for output" ... I had enough.

It's pretty random in terms of what is or isn't doable.

For me it's a big performance booster because I genuinely suck at coding and don't do too much complex stuff. As a "clean up my syntax" and a "what am I missing here" tool it helps, or at least helps in figuring out what I'm doing wrong so I can look in the right place for the correct answer on something that seemed inscrutable at a glance. I certainly can do some things with a local LLM I couldn't do without one (or at least without getting berated by some online dick who doesn't think he has time to give you an answer but sure has time to set you on a path towards self-discovery).

How much of a benefit it's for a professional I couldn't tell. I mean, definitely not a replacement. Maybe helping read something old or poorly commented fast? Redundant tasks on very commonplace mainstream languages and tasks?

I don't think it's useless, but if you ask it to do something by itself you can't trust that it'll work without singificant additional effort.

I wouldn't say it's accurate that this was a "mechanical" upgrade, having done it a few times. They even have a migration tool which you'd think could fully do the upgrade but out of the probably 4-5 projects I've upgraded, the migration tool always produced a config that errored and needed several obscure manual changes to get working. All that to say it seems like a particularly bad candidate for llms

You managed to get an ai to do 200 lines of code and it actually compiled?

I am on you with this one. It is also very helpful in argument heavy libraries like plotly. If I ask a simple question like "in plotly how do I do this and that to the xaxis" etc it generally gives correct answers, saving me having to do internet research for 5-10 minutes or read documentations for functions with 1000 inputs. I even managed to get it to render a simple scene of cloud of points with some interactivity in 3js after about 30 minutes of back and forth. Not knowing much javascript, that would take me at least a couple hours. So yeah it can be useful as an assistant to someone who already knows coding (so the person can vet and debug the code).

Though if you weigh pros and cons of how LLMs are used (tons of fake internet garbage, tons of energy used, very convincing disinformation bots), I am not convinced benefits are worth the damages.

Practically all LLMs aren't good for any logic. Try to play ASCII tic tac toe against it. All GPT models lost against my four year old niece and I wouldn't trust her writing production code 🤣

Once a single model (doesn't have to be a LLM) can beat Stockfish in chess, AlphaGo in Go, my niece in tic tac toe and can one-shot (on the surface, scratch-pad allowed) a Rust program that compiles and works, than we can start thinking about replacing engineers.

Just take a look at the dotnet runtime source code where Microsoft employees currently try to work with copilot, which writes PRs with errors like forgetting to add files to projects. Write code that doesn't compile, fix symptoms instead of underlying problems, etc. (just take a look yourself).

I don't say that AI (especially AGI) can't replace humans. It definitely can and will, it's just a matter of time, but state of the Art LLMs are basically just extremely good "search engines" or interactive versions of "stack overflow" but not good enough to do real "thinking tasks".

Perhaps 5 LOC. Maybe 3. And even then I'll analyze every single character in wrote. And then I will in fact find bugs. Most often it hallucinates some functions that would be fantastic to use - if they existed.

It will have consumed the GigaWattHours capacity of a few suns and all the moisture in our solar system, but by Jeeves, we'll get there!

...but it won't be that impressive once we remember concepts like "monkey, typing, Shakespeare" were already embedded in the training data.

It confidently gave me one

IMO, that's one of the biggest "sins" of the current LLMs, they're trained to generate words that make them sound confident.

My uncle. Very smart very neuronal. He knows the entire Internet, can you imagine? the entire internet. Like the mails of Crooked Hillary Clinton, that crook. You know what stands in that Mails? my uncle knows. He makes the best code. The most beautiful code. No one has ever seen code like it, but for him, he's a genius, like i am, i have inherited all his genius genes. It is very easy. He makes the best code. Sometimes he calls me and asks me: you are even smarter than i am. Can you look at my code?

llms are systems that output human-readable natural language answers, not true answers

It generates an answer that looks correct. Actual correctness is accidental. That's how you wind up with documents with references that don't exist, it just knows what references look like.

So its 50% better than my code?

Did the generated code get merged? I'd be curious to see the PRs

For the most part "Rename symbol" in VSCode will work well. But it's limited by scope.

I use pycharm for this and in general it does a great job. At work we've got some massive repos and it'll handle it fine.

The "find" tab shows where it'll make changes and you can click "don't change anything in this directory"

Find and Replace?

The cursed Will Smith eating spaghetti wasn't the best video AI model available at the time, just what was available for consumers to run on their own hardware at the time. So while the rate of improvement in AI image/video generation is incredible, it's not quite as incredible as that viral video would suggest

someone drank the koolaid.

LLMs will never code for two reasons.

one, because they only regurgitate facsimiles of code. this is because the models are trained to ingest content and provide an interpretation of the collection of their content.

software development is more than that and requires strategic thought and conceptualization, both of which are decades away from AI at best.

two, because the prevalence of LLM generated code is destroying the training data used to build models. think of it like making a copy of a copy of a copy, et cetera.

the more popular it becomes the worse the training data becomes. the worse the training data becomes the weaker the model. the weaker the model, the less likely it will see any real use.

so yeah. we're about 100 years from the whole "it can't draw its hands" stage because it doesn't even know what hands are.