Ask HN: Are there videos of people using AI for non-trivial coding?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41023152

by 07212024 • 2 years ago

2 1 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I read wild claims about how people boost their coding productivity with ChatGPT/Claude and even write significant portions of their codebases with them. I don’t know if these people are 0.1x coders and AI boosts them to 1x or their codebase consists of slapping together a bunch of libraries and APIs.

Are there any videos/streams of people writing non-trivial features for a non-trivial project (e.g. a more compact serialization format for Redis, a keybinding manager for Emacs, etc.) with significant output from ChatGPT/Claude? Nothing I could found on Youtube fits my non-triviality criteria so far. I want to know if I’m missing out by not using these AI tools properly.

welkinSL• 2 years ago

I wish to be proved wrong too. The current situation of "LLM" and "GPT" are very much like a hype. I cannot see how they can be used beyond problems that does NOT require accuracy and precision.

IMO the problem lies on "magical thinking" that we can just say a spell and have the computer presenting the best solution ever without even knowing what we specifically want at the first space. Kind of like asking the AI for the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything - "forty-two" (from <<A Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy>>)

Personally, when I use them a lot of time I realised I am basically typing the whole detailed requirement specification out. First, it will be much more efficient for me to just do it myself. Second, in such cases existing technologies like formal methods seem more suitable as we can verify our specification's soundness too. And most modern approach to formal methods can do code generation too.

Latest research (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125v1) on image-text and text-to-image models shows that these pre-trained few-shots learners exhibit a log-linear relationship with "concept frequencies" and their performance on tasks. Hopefully this does not translate to LLMs but my bet is that they do.