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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Right on the money.

What I want is a copilot that finds errors ala spellcheck-esque. Did I miss an early return? For example in the code below

    def some_worker
        if disabled_via_feature_flag
             logger.info("skipping some_worker")
        some_potentially_hazardous_method_call()

Right after the logger call I missed a return. A copilot could easily catch this. Invert the relationship. I don't need some boilerplate generator, I need a nitpicker that's smarter than a linter. I'm the smart thinker with a biological brain that is inattentive at times. Why is the computer trying to code and leaving mistake catching to me? It's backwards.

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> I need a nitpicker that's smarter than a linter. I'm the smart thinker with a biological brain that is inattentive at times. Why is the computer trying to code and leaving mistake catching to me? It's backwards.

Hmmmm, that is actually a good observation.

Yes, that's a lot more interesting. Firing a "code review" bot at my code where it asks me questions would be potentially interesting. Even if it sometimes asked some blindingly stupid questions, if I was not obligated to respond to them, I'd be OK with that.

The main problem with that is, GPT-3 can't do that. Personally, while I sing the praises of GPT as a technology, and I do mean it, at the same time... it's actually not a very useful primitive to build further technology on. The question "if you were to continue this text, what would you continue it with?" is hard to build much more than what you see with Copilot. Without a concept of "why are you continuing it with that?" (which, in some sense, the neural net can answer, but the answer exists in a way that humans can not understand and there is no apparent practical way to convert that into something humans can understand).

So GPT-x may yet advance and is fascinating technology, but at the same time, in a lot of ways it's just not that useful.

It reminds me of the video game world, where we have just staggeringly unbelievable graphics technology, and everything else lags behind this spike. Being visual creatures, it causes us to badly overestimate what's actually going on in there. Similarly, it's great that AI has these talkerbots, but they've made a whole lot of progress on something that gives a good appearance, but doesn't necessarily represent the state of the art anywhere else. This AI branch of tech is a huge spike ahead of everything else. But it's not clear to me this technology is anything but a dead end, in the end, because it's just so hard to use it for anything truly useful.

Business is trying to commoditize software development, because it's slow and expensive. All they have ever wanted, is to get their automation with the blanks filled in correctly, more or less immediately.

No-code, visual programming, gherkin, even SQL are all prior attempts at reducing the expense of software development, and of sidestepping the expensive, excuse laden gatekeepers that are software developers.

Copilot is an MVP of a technology that will probably eventually succeed in doing this, and my guess is, it's going to make CRUD slinging obsolete very soon.

Copilot is not backwards, it's just that it's a convenience tool for the execution of business, not for software developers.

When version 2 of the tool can both code and error check, hopefully you're already promoted to architect by then...

Seeing the 10 dollar price tag has convinced me that you are right. This is a ploy to make a service that replaces developers not help them.

No way Microsoft made this investment for a measly 10 dollar subscription. There are not that many developers

After a few more leading attempts, I managed to give this prompt at https://beta.openai.com/playground:

     What problem does the following pseudocode have?

     def some_worker
             if disabled_via_feature_flag
                  logger.info("skipping some_worker")
             some_potentially_hazardous_method_call()

And receive this response:

     The problem with this pseudocode is that there is no "end" keyword to close off the "if" statement. This means that the code after " some_potentially_hazardous_method_call()" will always be executed, even if the "disabled_via_feature_flag" condition is true.

And that's with a GPT3 without any special fine tuning. Of course, the name `some_potentially_hazardous_method_call` is pretty leading in itself. I rewrote the prompt slightly more realistically, as:

     What problem does the following code have?

     def optionally_do_work():
             if disabling_flag:
                  logger.info("skipping the work due to flag")
             do_work()

and received:

     The problem is that the code will still try to do the work, even if the flag is set.

This does seem like a pretty trivial easier-than-fizzbuzz question to be asking, though, since it's so encapsulated.

Perhaps curly braces are useful after all.

Not that OP's problem is curly braces per se (they would make the error more obvious, but they wouldn't help with a missing return call), but since we're taling about them...

The insistence of a lot of smart people on using whitespace for logic purposes is THE most baffling thing in the IT space. And I mean that.

Why use some, oh I dont know, CHARACTER, to write down what you mean, why not instead use a NON CHARACTER. Now that's a great idea!

Let's use non characters, so a mix of tabs and spaces (which editors can implement AND display in a number of different ways, even depending on individual configuration!) fucks up shit. Using whitespace is also great because copy/paste is now an error-prone exercise in frustration, which is definitely what we want! Oh and also this will make sure that the peasants are not using our beautiful language IN NAUGHTY WAYS, e.g. you can't really write a deeply nested logic in a single function if it becomes a complete abomination of a mess just after like two or three indentations.

No, but seriously, Python's syntax in regards to whitespace, or any language that uses whitespace for control structures, is hot garbage. I understand that there are preferences, coding standard, etc. and I can tolerate a lot, but this, this is the one hill I'm willing to die on.

The insistence of a lot of smart (?) people on NOT using whitespace for logic purposes is THE most baffling thing in the IT space. And I mean that.

If you look at your typical C-like code, it is already whitespace-oriented, you just manually add the braces as line noise, to make it easier to write a compiler for the language (although even that may not be true). It is like using one character variable names, which - other than the trivial places - makes your code harder to read.

If you want to write deeply nested logic in a function: well, don't. But if you insist, I'm not sure how curly braces help you in this case.

You see I've seen this "argument" a million times and it's always the same: braces are somehow visual noise. And that's it. No more arguments, it's just this one. And it's a very weak one, one that is largely about preferences. On the other hand, I listed 3 examples of indentations actually being in the way of the programmer, ESPECIALLY when working with other people. (Another example: Indentations are notorious for not surviving basic text communications between people, imagine sending Python code over email or god forbid something like Skype. Good luck reconstructing the code on the other side. Because indentations have logic attached to them, you can't just copypaste and let your editor take care of the formatting - like you can in ANY OTHER NORMAL C-LIKE LANGUAGE.)

I would say it's good practice for code reviews =P

try PVS-Studio

You missed the `else` branch, not a `return`.

This is one of those arguments I can see both ways, but I ultimately side on the early return side of things over the else branch side of things.

In my opinion, if the function is done its job, it should return. That's what return is for. As the function grows, the else side of the branch gets longer and longer and it is error prone to leave the first branch of the if statement reliant on it.

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