Gregory's ServerThis meshes with my more optimistic take on AI-assisted programming from last year: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-development/
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 @hynek I thought that too, but the more work I get done with LLMs myself the less worried I am about that I have a Go project I wrote from scratch in production now, despite not being remotely fluent in Go. It has comprehensive test coverage and even implements continuous integration and continuous deployment, which is why I’m confident it’s not a spectacularly bad idea Would other people YOLO something like that to production without tests? Maybe, and that would definitely be a bad idea! @simon @hynek there’s IMHO still a significant difference between writing some code that passes happy path tests and operating a service in production when something goes wrong the first time. More projects falling apart when looking at them the wrong way and no one around understanding the tooling is IMHO not the solution. That being said it’s obviously easier with a few decades experience knowing what exactly to look for and which question to ask. But this extrapolates poorly to most devs. @simon Yeah but that’s exactly gonna happen once you work under economic constraints and middle managers pining for promotions. My point is exactly what you’re accidentally implying: they’re amazing for tinkering but a time bomb in prod envs. 🤷♂️ @hynek I certainly won’t deny that there are an incredible new array of footguns now available to anyone who wants them  @simon @hynek re: rate of adoption for new programming practices at the office It will be 22 years before there is widespread encouragement of AI aided coding. My current client bans AI through the entire org for all purposes. We're all talking about scifi futures for most people.  @simon @shauna @hynek - only frontier models routinely find bugs with unit tests. 3.5 wrote vacuous tests in comparison to 4 or 4o @simon @hynek Thus far Copilot has made me more likely to write tests -- I've always found them tedious (even though necessary!) and so have been lazy about it, but now it feels rewarding, and once the scaffolding is there, it's not too bad to add extra cases either by hand or with the LLM. I don't think I would have taken it seriously as an option without your posts Simon. |
@simon There’s kinda a difference between tinkering where ambition is good, and writing production software, no? What that articles predicts is a wave of janky, poorly-understood, and unidiomatic code that will eventually collapse under its own weight. I like LLMs as an assistant to learning, but man a world where people “learn” .NET in an afternoon and start churning out “production” code is positively dystopian to me