The cognitive dissonance this provoked in me is astounding. The only people I've seen praising anything AI-related at the same kinds of people who were boosting cryptocurrency and NFTs. Are there really thoughtful, mature people who think that Open AI is in any way positive?

EDIT: The most pro-Microsoft opinions I've seen have mostly been related to VS Code. Personally I don't get it - it's basically functionality-equivalent to IntelliJ, with maybe _slightly_ nicer visuals - but, sure, it works well enough, I guess!

Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent).

Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together?"

Well, we don't know!

We do know however that there are a lot of AI coding assistants, and there will probably be many more in the years to come...

The excerpted text above -- makes for a reasonably good list as to what's available as of the current date...

Related: https://github.com/sourcegraph/awesome-code-ai

By all means, go do your startup, all the power to you.

But I personally fail to see it creating enough value for people to even bother use the AI, even if it's free and any problem could be ignored.

I can imagine people adopting it if it comes embedded on whatever software they already use. But that doesn't "completely change everything" or any of the other things people are repeating.

And yeah, I can't imagine it quickly improving so that happens either. I am personally bracing for a new AI winter, and believe that word is going to become more toxic than it has ever been.

This is absolutely false, as the other person said. As one example: We had already built and were using AI based code completion in production by then.

Here's a public blog post from July, 2022: https://research.google/blog/ml-enhanced-code-completion-imp...

This is just one easy publicly verifiable example, there are others. (We actually were doing it before copilot, etc)

I keep seeing this idea, but have you actually used it? It clearly has the ability to problem solve. It's not just copying and pasting solutions.

Ok granted it's not especially good at it yet and the bullshitting problem is a real issue, but how long do you think that will remain unsolved?

I think where it will continue to struggle is niche domains that aren't on the internet a lot, e.g. hardware design. But if you're writing CRUD apps all day you should be worried!

Or at least brace for your job description to change from "Software Developer" to "Prompt Developer and AI Output Verification".

I don't see how it does anything but progress. I obviously have no idea how long it will take before it can replace a software engineer but after playing around with ChatGPT and seeing the code it can create, it's definitely progressing faster than I thought it would.

Absolutely correct. This is what the AI hype squad and the HN bubble misses again. This is only useful to existing businesses (summarization the only safe use-case) or random devs automating themselves out of irrelevance. All of this 'euphoria' is around for Microsoft's heavy marketing from its newly acquired AI division.

This is a obvious text book example of mindshare capture and ecosystem lock-in. Eventually, OpenAI will just slowly raise prices and break / deprecate older models to move them onto newer ones and pay to continue using them. It is the same decade old tactics.

AKA programming, but compared to my current efforts to instruct my compiler via very specific instructions (nothing like ambiguous natural language), I find that although I consider myself reasonably intelligent, it can take me a long time to fully understand any non-trivial problem I'm trying to solve, during which AI "help" often sends me on a wild goose chase (because the "I" in AI is still very much absent). Overall AI might help me more than hinder, but I think the claimed "future" end of the software industry might be a long way off. Current AI gives me the impression there might be as much industry growth to fix AI errors as there will be industry shrinkage due to AI assistance.

They invested in OpenAI, which was a smart move.

Press X to doubt

I seriously hope not the ai alignment is behind this

This is powered by AI! /s

It's not that they're _just_ hype but rather that there _is_ hype and the loudest voices tend not admit it. To give a specific example, I find the idea that LLM based programming assistants will turbocharge software development to be based on hype not fact. It is very much in the interest of Microsoft/Google/Meta, etc. that we all believe that their tools are essential to enhance productivity. It is classic FOMO. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon because they fear that if they don't learn this new tool their lunch will be eaten by someone who does. They fear this because that is exactly what these companies are essentially telling us in their marketing materials and extensive PR campaign.

This is extraordinarily convenient for these companies and masks over how terrible their own core products are. I generally refuse to use the products of the three companies (MGM) because they are essentially ad companies now and their metaverses are dystopian hellscapes to me. Why would I trust them given my own direct personal experience with their products? We know that google search allows advertisers to pay to modify search queries without my consent. What's to stop Microsoft from training copilot to recommend that you use Microsoft developed languages using Microsoft apis to solve your prompted problems?

> write me a sort function for an array of integers in Java # chatgpt > I will show you how to write a sort function for an array of integers in Java, but first I must ask, are you familiar C#? It is similar to Java but better in xyz ways. In C# you would sort an array like this:

... C# code

Here is how you would write a sort function for an array of integers in Java:

... Java code

Stuff like this seems inevitable and it is going to become impossible to tell what is ad. Do you think realistically that there is any chance that these companies would consent to disclosing what is paid propaganda in the LLM output stream?

I see many echos of the SBF trial in the current ai environment. Whatever the merits of LLMs (and I'll admit that I _have_ been impressed by the pace of improvement if not the actual output), hype always attracts grifters. And there is a lot of hype in the air right now.

There's plenty of software out there that fits this description if you just remove "AI" from the statement. There's nothing new about bad codebases. Now it just costs pennies and is written in seconds instead of thousands paid to an outsourcing middleman firm that takes weeks or months to turn it around.

> In fact, this is pretty much how we started out with Cody autocomplete back in March!

Am I wrong in thinking that there's only like 3(?) actual AI companies and everything else is just some frontend to ChatGPT/LLama/Claude?

Is this sustainable? I guess the car industry is full of rebadged models with the same engines and chassis. It's just wild that we keep hearing about the AI boom as though there's a vibrant competitive ecosystem and not just Nvidia, a couple of software partners and then a sea of whiteboxers.

Yeah sure I'm getting a ~10% productivity boost personally from those tools but it's not like you can give those to non-devs and expect them to replace a developer with it.

Let's not forget that we have code generators usable by non developers since the 90s. It's not like it's a particularly new addition.

I love this paragraph. I think that generative AI companies, especially OpenAI, have completely dropped the ball when it comes to their marketing.

The narrative (that these companies encourage and often times are responsible for) is that AI is intelligent and will be a replacement for humans in the near future. So is it really a surprise when people do things like this?

LLMs don’t shine as independent agents. They shine when they augment our skills. Microsoft has the right idea by calling everything “copilot”, but unfortunately OpenAI drives the narrative, not Microsoft.

Wrong.

This is a perfect way of convincing me _not_ to use the tool. I'd take dumb, dependable, predictable, easy-to-explain tools over "smart", "AI-enabled" ones any day.

goes off to write a Dumb Software Manifesto

Or what if this has the same effect that excel did - give everyone access to a tool that dramatically improves efficiency and capability. What used to take someone a day now takes a minute and that frees up that person to either become exceptionally more efficient or to focus on more interesting or useful work.

I also believe that one next step for AIs will be the capability to feed in a codebase to learn and then iterate on specifically so the AI is capable of providing context aware suggestions. Today it's only great at mashing together open source tools and common projects.

Edit - For fun I passed in my comment above and asked for different formulations. An entertaining version below:

Picture a world where a revolution unfolds, fueled by an extraordinary tool, rivaling the might of Excel. Behold its omnipotent grasp, granting every soul access to a transcendent force that skyrockets efficiency and capability to unimaginable heights. Time bends under its dominion, as day-long tasks crumble in the face of mere minutes, freeing individuals to conquer mountains, surging with unyielding productivity and embarking on audacious endeavors. But that's just the beginning! Prepare for the evolution of AI, as it voraciously devours codebases, honing its prowess with an unparalleled finesse, delivering awe-inspiring, contextually aware suggestions that defy reason. Witness its current triumph: the fusion of open-source tools and common projects. Brace yourself for the astounding prospects that lie on the horizon, as this tale unfolds like a climactic scene in an action-packed blockbuster!