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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

GPT is going to change everything, it’s not even a year in and most code is already written by AI. It save a lot of time but write a lot of local problem while ignoring the bigger picture. (for now) The only thing valuable is deep understanding of architecture and of the limitation of hardware. Know both end of the system, let the AI create all the glue in between.

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Whose code? I simply don't understand this. Are you writing code with GPT? I have simply been unable to get it to solve a technical problem in a production level application AT ALL. The only solutions that work for me are the type of solutions that might already have a stack overflow answer. Being generous, it MIGHT improve my productivity by a percentage point in a good day.

I go to ChatGPT sometimes when I'm really banging my head against a wall and Copilot fails to generate anything useful to even get me moving in the right direction, which is rare. I've hit it up probably let's guess 3-4 times in the last 2 or 3 months. Probably 2 of those times it was anti-useful, because the garbage it put out only wasted my time.

It's good to know I'm not the only one. Whenever I've had an occasion recently where I thought an LLM might be useful (either I didn't know the framework or I didn't quite understand the subject matter) and asked ChatGPT or Bard, they always just hallucinated crap that didn't work and couldn't be made to work. Just yesterday Bard hallucinated a method that was called `something_that_exists_somethingIAskedAbout()`, switching to camel case halfway through, that obviously didn't exist. For the same problem, ChatGPT came up with an existing method, but modified its parameter list to make it do things it didn't do.

I struggle to think of a single instance where it's been helpful for me, and I keep trying, because I don't enjoy doing useless grunt work any more than the next guy, and I want to at least try to learn to ask it the "right" questions.

I had to do a regex once in the past 3 months. It helped.

I find it mostly useful precisely for SO questions - where I know the answer exists, but I don’t want to try to find it via Google.

The other subject I give it high praise is shell one-liners. It can produce some hideously abstruse chains that, by and large, do precisely what I asked. It’s not as good with awk, I’ve noticed, but maybe that’s because awk is much more akin to an actual general purpose programming language than, say, sed.

I would be skeptical that "most" code is written by AI. Some code, certainly - but major enterprises are still terrified of the copyright outcome for existing non-local GPT implementations.

I noticed stable diffusion's CEO made a similarly fantastical claim, @13:33, "41 percent of all code on GitHub right now is AI generated" [0]

Some redditors put together where the claim came from, it's a bad interpretation of Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, should be "40% of code checked in by users of github co-pilot" [1][2]

[0] https://youtu.be/ciX_iFGyS0M

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/14qwhem/how_does_gi...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2023/Morg...

I mean, I was a GitHub copilot user - but I haven’t checked in such code. I use gpt-4, but I only commit my experimental code.

People I know that use ChatGPT for coding ask the occasional question to simplify boilerplate or similar to stack overflow. Sometimes they'll "see if it can do X" (e.g. build a crud app) and generally it's horribly painful.

I have seen no evidence of "most code [being] written by AI" and believe this to be completely false.

If most of your code is being written by AI, you need a more interesting/higher value job.

I wish AI could write more of my code but it really is much much faster if I just write it myself. The context and curiosity necessary to even know what questions to ask so you know what code to write is far beyond the scope of any AI I’ve seen.

I agree with your basic premise that AI is, at the moment, mostly only good for writing pretty simple code for pretty simple problems. The few things I've had it do for me, even though simple, still needed a bit of massaging (although I haven't been using GPT 4). But to your final point, that sort of seems like the way it's going to go in the mid-term. The human skill is going to be in figuring out what needs to be done/how to ask AI for it, and the AI will do the nitty gritty of writing it. Right now, for more complex tasks, the human skill is _both_ in recognizing what needs to be done _and_ in doing it. The second part is going to move to AI probably quite a ways before the first part.

> The human skill is going to be in figuring out what needs to be done/how to ask AI for it, and the AI will do the nitty gritty

This is great news if your job is to do the thinking. You will have more time for better thinking. Awful news if your job is hand-on-keyboard typing with others telling you what to do.

I have deployed LLM-based workflows into several production environments so far this year to great effect and worked extensively with engineering teams. There is no way it's true that "most code is already written by AI".

I work in aerospace. Most code here is most certainly not written by AI. My personal opinion is that this is not going to change any time soon.

>most code is already written by AI

It is not. 90% of the Job a SW dev is doing is impossible to do for ChatGPT. Writing 15 line snippets from a CS101 course is useful to reduce boring repeated tasks, but nothing more.

How good is AI at debugging?

It depends on the bugs. If you have an error message or a wrong behaviour you can explain, it’s pretty good at suggesting solutions and changes. It’s not always working from the first try but it helps.

Of course, by rubber ducking with it, you may well solve it on your own.

Really surprisingly good. Have you seen ChatGPT Code Interpreter debug its own code? I've seen it loop 4 or 5 times writing code, running it, getting an error message, tweaking the code and running it again - all without any input from me.

It's not even close to "most code". Most AI generated code isn't even correct and needs the human to give it some adjustments before it works as intended.

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