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The AI Investment Boom

(www.apricitas.io)
271 points m-hodges | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 14:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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apwell23 ◴[20 Oct 24 16:04 UTC] No.41896263[source]▶
> AI products are used ubiquitously to generate code, text, and images, analyze data, automate tasks, enhance online platforms, and much, much, much more—with usage expected only to increase going forward.

Why does every hype article start with this. Personally my copilot usage has gone down while coding. I tried and tried but it always gets lost and starts spitting out subtle bugs that takes me more time to debug than if i had written it myself.

I always have this feeling of 'this might fail in production in unknown ways' because i might have missed checking the code throughly . I know i am not the only one, my coworkers and friends have expressed similar feelings.

I even tried the new 'chain of thought' model, which for some reason seems to be even worse.

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bongodongobob ◴[20 Oct 24 16:07 UTC] No.41896295[source]▶
Well I have the exact opposite experience. I don't know why people struggle to get good results with llms.
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amonith ◴[20 Oct 24 16:29 UTC] No.41896492[source]▶
Seriously though, what are you doing? Every single example everywhere throughout the internet that tries to show how good AI is at programming shows so mindbogglingly simplistic examples that it's getting annoying. It sure is a great learning tool when you're trying to do something experimental in a new stack or completely new project, I'll give you that, but once you reach the skill level where someone would hire you to be an X developer (which most developers disagreeing with you are, mid+ developers of some stack X) the thing becomes a barely useful autocomplete. Maybe that's the problem? It's just not a tool for professional developers?
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1. Viliam1234 ◴[20 Oct 24 17:36 UTC] No.41897047[source]▶
I am happy with the LLMs, but I only tried them on small projects done at my free time.

As a back end developer I am not familiar with the latest trends in JavaScript and CSS, and frankly I do not want to spend my time studying these. A LLM can generate an interactive web game based on my description. I review the code, it is usually okay, sometimes I suggest an improvement. I could have done all of that -- but it would take me a week, and the LLM does it in seconds. So it is a difference between a hobby project done or not done.

I also tried a LLM at work, not to code, but to explain some complex topics that were new to me. Once it provided a great high-level description that was very useful. And once it provided a great explanation... which was a total lie, as I found out when I tried to do a hello-world example. I still think the 50% success rate is great, as long as you can quickly verify it.

Shortly, we need to know the strengths and the weaknesses, and use the LLMs accordingly. Too much trust will get you burned. But properly used, they can save a lot of time.