Whenever there is a 'big new AI model' launch, I try to build one of my side projects fully with the new AI. So I do not touch anything myself, I only talk english to it. I do read the generated code and instructions so I can correct them in English; no code at all. It worked twice; with chatgpt4 and the sonnet launch. All the others did not manage without significant code or ops help.
It is a very annoying experience even if you know what you are doing; it is still much faster than what you would get done writing code but it is very frustrating getting the last 10% right; you spend a day on 80%, two days on 10 and a week on the last 10%. If I just jump in and fix the code myself, it is about 1 day for the same project, which is still amazing (and not imaginable before).
People complaining that it sucks and it cannot figure things out often are right, however, it is a lot better than what we had before, which was doing all this by hand (causing many people to procrastinate over even starting a side project while have 1000s in mind every day).
These types of services are important and I like this val.town idea. Well done and keep going.
Yup, absolutely. I've got a few side-projects that I'm doing for fun, which wouldn't have even gotten started if not for LLMs being good enough — but, like many customer-facing roles*, LLMs get a lot of slack from people who (appear to) expect perfection for free.
When the AI doesn't make mistakes, humans can't continue to get paid to do those jobs. So I'm hoping AI continues to be mediocre at writing code for at least another 2 years.
The other big GenAI things, I'm not sure how they're perceived. Music? I don't know well enough to tell. Images? The way people talk in public is a three-way mix of complaining they're (1) making bad art while (2) also taking away jobs, plus (3) the "this rips off the human creators" that is present for all GenAI models. Video? I'm only really seeing people mock it right now; even the praise is caveated "I can see the flaws but $something_positive".
* Was thinking this yesterday WRT the police getting flack both for not doing enough and also for being too proactive; but I could say this about almost anything — a former partner could have said the same about working in a call center, a few days ago on this site there was a discussion about doctors making terrible mistakes, and there's a few current examples I don't dare write about because I know I'll get flack from "both sides" (even on this site) for even daring to use the phrase "both sides".
It is a very annoying experience even if you know what you are doing; it is still much faster than what you would get done writing code but it is very frustrating getting the last 10% right; you spend a day on 80%, two days on 10 and a week on the last 10%. If I just jump in and fix the code myself, it is about 1 day for the same project, which is still amazing (and not imaginable before).
People complaining that it sucks and it cannot figure things out often are right, however, it is a lot better than what we had before, which was doing all this by hand (causing many people to procrastinate over even starting a side project while have 1000s in mind every day).
These types of services are important and I like this val.town idea. Well done and keep going.