Hacker News Reader

Comment by sakopov | Hacker News Reader

I think my general perception is that AI is a great assistant for some occupations like software engineering, but due to its large room for error it's very impractical for majority of business applications that require accuracy. I'm seeing this trend at my company, which operates in the medical field and recently mandated that all engineers use CoPilot. At the same time it's a struggle to see where we can improve our business processes with AI - outside of basic things like transcriptions and spell checking - without getting ourselves into a massive lawsuit.

View on HN

I've been using (GitHub) Copilot and ChatGPT since they've been widely available. I started using ChatGPT for coding after 4 came out.

I was an early advocate for Copilot but, honestly, nowadays I really don't find it that useful, compared to GPT-4o via ChatGPT.

ChatGPT not being directly integrated into my editor turns out to be an advantage. The problem with Copilot is it gets in the way. It's too easy to unintentionally insert a line or block completion that isn't what you want, or is out and out garbage, and it's constantly shoving up suggestions as I type, which can be distracting. It's particularly irritating when I'm trying to read or understand a piece of code, or maybe do a refactor, and I leave my caret in one position for half a second too long, and suddenly it's ghost-inserted a block of code as a suggestion that's moved half of what I'm reading down the screen and now I have to find my place again.

Whereas, with ChatGPT being separate, it operates at a much less intrusive cadence, and only responds when I ask it too, which turns out to be much more useful and productive.

I'm seriously considering binning of my Copilot subscription as a result.

Have you tried using the shortcut for turning copilot on/off? I know what you mean and in those cases I just turn it off for a second and type freely, then turn it back on.

I canned my Copilot sub.

Even where microsoft includes it for free, like their automation tools, its always been jank. I found myself going to GPT4 for better answers which is bad when you spend any time thinking about it.

Copilot was surprisingly one of the worst AI products I’ve used. It keeps suggesting nonsense and the insertions it does in VSCode often mess up very basic things like it starts writing things in the wrong place (or adds a function inside another function) and the result doesn’t even compile. It also seems to have zero understanding of the codebase apart from maybe a few lines before and after. Incredible that this is being sold as a real product at this point

It's useful for analyzing data, but only if it can be verified. We use it (higher education) to glance at data trends that may need further exploration. So it's a fancy pivot table, I guess.

Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as hallucination free though. So that's terrifying.

>Most software vendors are selling their version of AI as hallucination free though.

It definitely has that Tesla Autopolit feel to it, where the marketing is ... enthusiastic, while the onus to "use the tool responsibly" is left up to the end user.

I'm building a persentation/teaching tool for teachers and trying to not sweep the halicination angle under the rug. My marketing angle is that the AI is a huge time saver, but the classroom teacher is the subject expert and they need to review the output. At the end of the day, it's still much more time efficient for an expert to review the content than it is to produce it from scratch which is a huge win.

Sadly, I think your sales pitch will fall flat. College and University admin aren't technology experts, but are VERY susceptible to flattery from tech sales people. They want to hear about the time and cost savings, regardless of reality.

Also, to be super presumptuous, if you need help with anything with your tool, hit me up. I love working with developers on building realistic use case and workflows.

>Sadly, I think your sales pitch will fall flat. College and University admin aren't technology experts

I'm building tools for K-12 (I've been a teacher for 20+ years). There's solid uptake of GPT among teachers and individually they're pretty enthusiastic about anything that will reduce their workload, so I'm hoping it resonates.

>Also, to be super presumptuous, if you need help with anything with your tool, hit me up. I love working with developers on building realistic use case and workflows.

Sure, my details are in my profile, happy to chat.

>I think my general perception is that AI is a great assistant for some occupations like software engineering

I think that's why I like to compare the current state of AI to the state of the CPU industry maybe around the 286-486 era going towards the Pentium.

How does that mandate work? Do they just check if it’s turned on? How many suggestions get accepted?

It's just a requirement that everyone has a license and did 1-hour introductory training. Whether you actually use it or not is up to you, but it's encouraged.

Software engineering doesn't require accuracy?

I was implying that AI can be useful in software engineering because hallucinations are expected and actively addressed by engineers. It's less of an issue in comparison to automating strategic business decisions by what is essentially a "black box" and not knowing if it hallucinated data in order to arrive at its decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com