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1244 points adrianh | 7 comments | | HN request time: 1.025s | source | bottom
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kragen ◴[] No.44491713[source]
I've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works.

Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does. If it gets it wrong, that's a good sign my API is confusing, and how.

These are ways to harness what neural networks are best at: not providing accurate information but making shit up that is highly plausible, "hallucination". Creativity, not logic.

(The best thing about this is that I don't have to spend my time carefully tracking down the bugs GPT-4 has cunningly concealed in its code, which often takes longer than just writing the code the usual way.)

There are multiple ways that an interface can be bad, and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix. It could also be inherently inefficient or unreliable, for example, or lack composability. The AI won't help with those. But it can make sure your API is guessable and understandable, and that's very valuable.

Unfortunately, this only works with APIs that aren't already super popular.

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suzzer99 ◴[] No.44492212[source]
> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of.

IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.

I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.

But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.

The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

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1. croes ◴[] No.44493413[source]
And that’s how everything gets flattened to same style/voice/etc.

That’s like getting rid of all languages and accents and switch to the same language

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2. andrewljohnson ◴[] No.44493679[source]
The same could be said for books about writing, like Williams or Strunk and White. The trick is to not apply what you learn indiscriminately.
3. bryanlarsen ◴[] No.44493693[source]
Refusing 2/3rds of grammarly's suggestions flattens everything to the same style/voice?
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4. scubbo ◴[] No.44493780[source]
No - that was implicitly in response to the sentence:

> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.

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5. kragen ◴[] No.44493836{3}[source]
I suspect that the disastrous results being envisioned are somewhat more severe than not being able to tell who wrote which memo. I understood the author to be suggesting things more like bankruptcy, global warfare, and extermination camps. But it's admittedly ambiguous.
6. bryanlarsen ◴[] No.44494532{3}[source]
Criticisms are almost always read by the reader as criticisms of the OP's actions. If you're agreeing with somebody as you appear to be here, you should probably make that more explicit.
7. BeFlatXIII ◴[] No.44498546[source]
The Esperanto utopia we were denied.